Determined little gal and her love of climbing shows. Very cool post! Will be amazing what we see her and some of the other young ones do in the future. It already is!
my 10 y.o. son just out bouldered me today @ the gym. Gee I'm outta shape. That's gotta be it. Or maybe he's just going to be my personal rope gun when he gets a little older?
I played for the Solons, named for the our hometown PCL team, and our opponents were likewise named for other PCL clubs, as we were the second-tier talent, the Coast League. The better players got taken for the Giants and the Dodgers and the Braves, etc., and played in the Major League.
I spent three summers doing this before moving south to Merced, where I continued to chatter till junior year in HS.
I had begun to read about the Himalayas and learned about Alaska from a sixth grade teacher who used to live there. I had a rock collection, too.
edit: I confess to having bouts of CRS (can't remember shit)--I forgot about having climbed partway up Pyramid Peak with the Boy Scouts out of Camp Harvey West in 1960. It was a side trip to a long day hike, leaving not quite enough time to summit, so we high-tailed it down to Echo Lakes.
At age 11 I was living in Washington, D.C. We formed a neighborhood gang to protect ourselves from bullies and thieves from other neighborhoods. We fought hand-to-hand with rocks and clubs. I was part of the team who ventured into hostile territory to recover stolen bicycles.
At 11 I had a horse; an American Saddlebred named Buddy Rich, who was taller at the whithers than I was.
Once at a local horseshow, we were registered in a 12 and Under Showmanship class and when it was my turn to have the judge review how I handle my animal, she automatically used the same phrase she'd done for the several before...."Trot your pony." She called. a 16 hand pony? Now that's a pony!
At 11, I was a gymnast-I'd go to the gym 3 times a week for 3hrs, and once on saturday-it was my obsession... So the thread, Surfing & Climbing-complimentary pursuits... I sort of feel like gymnastics & climbing are complimentary... or let's put it this way, if you were a gymnast in your youth, climbing is a great endeavor when your older and your body can't take the extremes of gymnastics anymore... the mental and physical challenge seems similar...
Having not been born and raised in Boulder with 2 World Champion climbing parents, I was in Texas playing in the dirt with a stick. Because that's what you did back then.
I found a picture on the internet of the tower we used to play on when we were kids. It was erected and occasionally used for simulated parachute jumps. It doesn’t show, but it was more like a crane with a steel cable. So the jumper with a chute was lowered from the cable. My mother actually made this jump. Anyway, there was a stairway going around to the platform on the top. We ( kids between 10-15 years old) played catch me if you can on that tower! You would run up the stairs, and at the top you would walk an 8” beam to the middle of the tower to a pipe that you would slide down to the bottom. Crazy? Maybe, but for a few years I lived over there nobody got hurt. Our parents new that we were playing on the tower and they asked us not to do it but of course nobody listened. They put a lock at the bottom but it was easy to climb around.
Interestingly this picture was dated 1965. I was then 11 years old!
I was living in a small country New England town looking for stimulation, both intellectual and physical. I found some stuff to satisfy those needs...
During this time, I first picked up Colin Fletcher's The Man Who Walked Through Time and The Complete Walker. His writing fertilized the seeds of inspiration that have lead me toward a life-long appreciation of the outdoors and the myriad elements that go with such experiences.
In tandem, I was also in the Boy Scouts (another long story unworthy of this thread). But, part of experience was earning these metal "skill awards" that would slide onto your uniform's flat webbing belt. One had to do with physical fitness. Running was something you could to to earn the award. A suggestion to get started was to walk 49 steps then run one. Then the next day, walk 48 then run two. And so on, until you could go without stopping and run a half mile. I measured our big backyard and and half mile was five laps around.
So I diligently worked at this, got up to running the whole way and earned the badge. Our next door neighbor's son was in the Marines and when home, he *ran*, yes *ran* on the roads around a lake in our town for FIVE MILES including a couple of ginormous hills! Of course, I thought he was not human, this being the mid-seventies. But he (I still remember his name, Gary) inspired me and eventually, my regular running expanded to the lake too. Later, when I began training for marathons, I ran the lake route three times in a row. Had to deal with harassment from townies who thought I was some kind of freak. Maybe I was! Freak Power!
And, those two experiences, my friends, are at the root of why I'm here, part of this strange, beautiful Taco Stand today.
Let us know!