Inspiration

This week the Reel Rock Film Tour rolled through the Old Pueblo. It happened that the tour hit town the same day as Jamie's birthday so Team Tuesday made it a two-fer punch and went for a sushi-stravaganza at Yoshimatsu washed down with sake and Sapphoro followed by more inspirational fare at The Loft. The place crawled with climbers. Every seat in the house had an ass in it and the air hung thick with the quintessential climber-musk-- chalk, body odor, and beer.

Sitting in the very front row I twisted in my chair and surveyed the theater filled with climbing-bums both familiar and unfamiliar. Joe, tanned and fresh back from road-tripping grinned. Nods were exchanged around the room and we all settled in, hands filled with beer, for an act of dirtbag communion.

It is a beautiful thing to see a climbing film on the big screen. A six-story IMAX screen would have been even better, but would have suffered the risk of causing massive brain hemorrhaging
in the audience. Six stories of watching Alex Honnold (in the Tour's first sequence) freaking out on a ledge two-thousand feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley without a rope might be too much. Only the cameraman breaking the illusion of Honnold's solitude up there brought me back from the edge of my own hysteria in the rather average-sized Loft Theater.

The moment with Honnold on the ledge sets the bar pretty high for the rest of the films in the tour. None of the other clips bring down quite the same pucker-factor, but the action moves along with lots of hard climbing, commitment, big falls, and wiry-thin climbing goons trying to elucidate upon what makes this sport so addicting. In this case, as with most climbing films, the images radiate this un-sayable aspect so perfectly that the words explaining them feel tedious and must be tolerated only for the progression of the narrative.

Yesterday, still jazzing from all the amazing climbing I'd seen on Wednesday, I took a crew to the Peanut Boulders a group of fine, highly textured granite blobs on Mount Lemmon just below Windy Point. Excitement from the Reel Rock Tour still pumped through all of our veins and we threw ourselves hard at everything we met. We all bled, at least a little bit, and our skin and blood will be out there soaking into the stone so that the next time we go there they will remember us. Personally, I took several cheese-grater belly-slides of the rounded tops of the blocks when my beached-whale routine didn't work for pulling over the last, slopey moves twelve feet off the deck. Putting my shirt on at the end of the day I looked down to see fifty or sixty little pinpricks of red welling up through the cotton. If I keep this up, I'll be leaving a whole damn nipple out there, one day.

A Team Tuesday video from the Peanut Boulders, Rose Canyon, and Hairpin Boulders will be coming soon, but until then, in the spirit of the Reel Rock Tour check out bouldering in Jordan, courtesy of Urban Climber TV.