Nor’Easter; Burlington, VT

Great shot of the scene & stage

The 2011 Nor’Easter powered by Eastern Mountain Sports was just another step forward for NE2C, Eastern Mountain Sports, The North Face, all the incredible sponsors and most of all, our industry. It’s events like these that bring the power of competitive rock climbing to the main stage and sets a precedent for climbing as an Olympic sport. While the Olympics may not feature crazy disco lights and heart-pumping techno tracks, those crazy boys at NE2C have designed a format for our sport that can no longer move backward, but only forward.

Vasya Crushing

During the 3 days of sports, music and conservation, the festival in Burlington, Vermont featured 22 bands (including headliners RJD2 and G. Love & Special Sauce), both competitive and open rock climbing, a costumed funrun raising over $7000 for the Hurricane Irene Vermont Relief Fund, cyclocross, paddle boarding, kayaking, countless gear demos, a conservation village, clinics with pro athletes, incredible food and some of the most powerful and most fun people in our industry. This entire event taking place against the majestic backdrop of Lake Champlain.

While the weather caused mild turmoil, we did recognize we might have jinxed ourselves by naming it the “Nor’Easter” in the first place. Despite the humidity and sporadic showers, the energy never ceased and as the weekend went on, more and more people joined in the party and by Sunday it had become some sort of big, muddy New England jamboree.

The venue change this year really provided all attendees with an interactive perspective with multiple venues, incredible scenery, and the “Pearl Street of New England”, Church Street in downtown Burlington where an additional side stage featured bands throughout the weekend for free.

While I really enjoyed all the activities, performances and “things to do” while I was there, above all, my favorite part of this event was catching up with my far away friends over Thelma’s Fried Dough and a little Special Sauce.

Catch my behind the scenes video blogs and Louder Than Eleven’s sick highlight videos at http://vimeo.com/user924683

Until next year, this is guest Granit correspondent Aimee signing off. Keep it proper and we’ll see you in 2012.

Thanks for all the photos from Sebastian Carisio

The past two days have brought hot, humid weather…even though it’s September and our mind set is that summer is over, the temps definitely don’t think so.  When it’s so sticky out and the rock is anything but we think it’s a perfect time to go check out some new shiz.  No expectations, just chillin’ with friends in the woods, looking for potential projects…trying to squeeze the life out of any hold we can sort of hang on to.

On Friday, Danimal was psyched to show us a couple of little satellite areas around where he lives.  Ling & I met AB at his place and took off to Western Mass.  The area was just outside of Great Barrington, super short hike in; which I’m a big fan of, the cluster of boulders was small.  I’m sure there’s more potential for first ascents but we weren’t out to explore too much.  Here’s a couple of shots of the first boulder you come to on the trail.

Ling crushing the V4/5 warm-up

My turn

After zone one, we trecked to another area that Dan was super jazzed about showing us.  We were ready, head lamps, lanterns and bug spray.  Little did we know that we were going over the river & through the woods….we were not ready for sweating, swamps, rail road tracks, and over an hour of bushwacking….in the dark!  We had to double back a couple of times to find our way out…I was exhausted and crashed hard when I finally got home at 11pm!

Thank God for family day!  So, as tired as I was, I wanted to check out the new boulder that AB had been talkin’ up for a couple of weeks now.  It’s a pretty good size boulder with lots of fun problems on it.  The rock-type is the same that you’d find at Bradley.  I was quite surprised at how good the friction was despite the humidity, which only got worse as the day progressed.  And what eventually ran us out of there was the lack of skin and ferocious mosquitos! All in all though, it was a great day & I’m psyched to return.

Enter at your own risk

On Saturday, everyone on the East Coast was battening down the hatches, buying up all the bread, water and eggs they could find, anticipating the arrival of Hurricane Irene.  According to the weathermen and news casters all around…it was going to pummel us…even NYC shut down all public transportation, buses, trains etc.

Well, what do we decide?  Basement session!! At the home of Aron and Tara Back awaits “The Asylum”…a super steep, 55 degree wall into a horizontal roof.  “If you don’t know how to toe hook, you won’t be able to do the problem”…sound familiar?  It’s true, though, the warm-up is probably a V5 and the problems just get harder from there, toe hooking is a major necessity.  Needless to say, we survived a different kind of pummeling that day.

After we all pretty much exhausted ourselves and started to make up some new stuff, I made the boys put on some of the new GranitLife shirts.  Enjoy the new threads…soon coming to our glife website for purchase.

This doesn't seem so bad!

AB, always makes it look easy

Strugglin'!

In a close knit climbing community, it’s not very often that someone gets hurt…bad!  You know, the finger tweak, a bum knee, some shoulder twangs and of course the lovely elbow tendonitis…nothing that a little rest and some rehab exercises will get you healed up fairly quickly.  Not this time, though, our good friend, John Kuphul, suffered a bad fall the other night.  At this point, we don’t have all the details and I’d rather not make any kind of proclamations.  It’s his story to tell…at GranitLife, we want to wish Koots and his family much love and support…and hope for a speedy recovery.  The man is built of steel, I’m sure he’ll be out there crushing in no time.

My friend, Tim Keenan, is into a whole lot more than climbing.  Whenever I see him it seems our conversations drift easily towards fashion, music, art.  In essence, all the things that we’re both passionate about outside of climbing.

Last fall, GranitLife decided to feature a design from outside the partners.  After a few different names were thrown around it made sense to approach Tim.  It was an obvious choice.

Check out Tim’s new design, the “Cross G” on granitlife.com

Chillin' before the mayhem at the UBC Pro Comp NYC!!

The weekend before last was the UBC Pro Tour Stop #2 in Central Park, NYC.  It has been a dream of Jason Danforth’s to host an event of this magnitude in the greatest city on earth.  Before the NE2C was even born, Jason had a vision…he HAD to make this happen.  He had to make climbing a more mainstream sport.  This amazing competition, with the incredible walls built by Vertical Solutions and the athletes ready to show their stuff has done just that!  We at GranitLife were super psyched to witness such a crazy event in our beloved city…NYC!!!

Blissful temps outside! Just perfect, that a jacket and hat made it comfortable and with just a t-shirt makes sending possible, at least that was the case on Saturday’s session in Lost City.

Jason Silverstein a friend of Granit Life enjoyed a send of Rabbid Wolverine. A beauty, that has double toe hooks that leave you laying horizontal inches away from a deathly chasm fall!

Its a perfect short but sweet 6-move problem combining powerful moves on decent holds to a delicate foot tic-tac-ing across the face.

It’s been a brutally hot past few months here in Utah…we’re talking 100+ degrees every day. Needless to say, temps like these rank my interest in climbing somewhere up there between having teeth pulled and kidney stones. Regardless, it’s difficult to sit back and watch your calluses fall off and your hard-earned Hueco shoulders and lats dwindle until you look more like Paul Jung or Tim Keenan than, say…… I don’t know….John Kuphal or Jose Rodriguez? In light of this my wife Mary and I have taken to the underground….A cooler-than-outside, yet incredibly unfriendly place where the masochistic thrive and swole happens. A dusty torture chamber 6 feet under…. We call it “The Beastment”.

This past weekend I made what has become an annual foray to New Mexico to climb on Dakota sandstone with my old climbing partner Tom Ellis, along with his friends William Penner and Masumi Shibata. The area is loosely labeled Roy, as that’s the closest “town” to the climbing. It is comprised of the Canadian river valley and its myriad side valleys and washes. Most of the quality bouldering is generated by the top capstone breaking off and depositing boulders down the steep slopes to the bottom’s of washes. We call the super bullet brownish purple stone, merlot-stone, and this is what we look for when hiking in search of new rocks.

Tom has been continually hammering me all winter about new walls, boulders, and side valleys full of bullet stone. Stories of water polished slopers in the washes, and super bad high ball walls finally incited enough jealous rage in me that I purchased a ticket to Albuquerque. I flew out on Saturday morning, and after a 3 hr drive, we were parked at the campsite, jumping out onto the grasslands, ready to dip into one of the newly found valleys. The camping is at an elevation of about 5900 ft, on the wispy plains above the boulders. A maze of barely visible two-tracks leads across the grasslands to the hidden drop offs.

For the next three days we climbed all styles of rock including cool warmups, giant steep walls, 30 ft roofs, and sick vertical problems. Notable FA’s were Masumi’s addition to a giant roof, which involves progressively harder climbing out a 25 ft deep roof to a stout finish sequence on perfect incuts. William also managed to burn off the rest of us on “beautiful pig”, the center line up a majestic black boulder culminating in a mono pinch crux move to a big runnel pinch.

FA’s were the norm, although the area boasts almost 600 established problems, there are still obvious dope projects at the main areas. Most of the harder lines have yet to be repeated, and are typically sandbagged with Tom’s grading system. Everything is either V2 or V9. Tom, William, and Masumi all have the sandstone climbing style dialed in, and made many impressive ascents over the weekend while I struggled with flaring elbow tendonitis from all of the compression climbing.

The highball wall in the pictures is called the world wide wall, WWW, and it is a BEAST of a wall. There are several amazing hard lines on it that top out, and several others that have yet to have their top outs scrubbed and sussed. The WWW is definitely the highlight of the valley we climbed in, though there are also several amazing roofs and freestanding boulders everywhere in the same area. Tom, William, and Masumi have put months of work into “nipping” the scrub oaks with clippers to create trails, and have cleaned up countless problems on tr or with the dreaded stick brush. I had an awesome time with the New Mexi dood’s, and can’t wait to go back this fall or next spring. After perusing the valleys with a binoculars, I realized Tom is right; there truly is a lifetime’s worth of sandstone in Roy.