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Paulina
Trad climber
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The original inspiration were the Russian mountaineering songs from the 70s. Painted a very romantic picture of beauty and struggle and camaraderie and a higher (geddit?) purpose.
As a kid, I listened and wanted to go backpacking but my mother said a heavy pack would break my back... She still tries to tell me that...
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Crimpergirl
Social climber
St. Looney
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I had finished grad school in Houston TX (aka flatlands, swampland). And like many before me, I was really depressed having managed to survive the Ph.D.
While in grad school, a fellow grad student had been bugging me to go climbing saying I had a climber's body (whatever that is). I always said no. In hindsight, I'm not exactly sure why.
Anyway, after finishing, I was bummed enough to pick up the phone and call him and say "take me climbing." He did and instantly, I had something to look forward to. No more looking back second-guessing everything I'd done, sacrificed, lost, etc. Instead, I was looking forward to going to the gym (it's Houston!), to solving that boulder problem, to a trip to Austin on real rock, and even a trip the Holy Grail of Hueco.
I was hooked instantly. Something to live for!
Thank goodness for that moment. And thank goodness for him, even if he is a cephlopodic twerp. Haha - you reading this Gummy Bear, JuJu Bead, Silly Putty or whatever it is you post here as?!?!?!
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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My grandfather had a huge lot with some Sycamore trees that seemed of infinite height to a 7 year old.
When we were over for a family gathering the uncles would urge us boys on in a contest to see who would climb up the highest.
the crux was the bear hug and footwork on the massive trunk to get to the first limbs. once there it was only a matter of how small a branch you were willing to continue up on.
The highest branches swayed with the weight of a small child and the wind.
It seemed like you could see forever from up there swaying gently in the wind, an incredibly peacefull place.
It would go on till the protestations of the mothers won out, scolding the men and ordering us down.
I almost always won.
And,
never wanted to come back down.
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ty-s
climber
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I swam for seventeen years without a break, and after college I found that I was a out of my element when I had nothing physically challenging to do. I went from working out around 35 hours per week to doing nothing, and got a little bit depressed, because I had nothing to push for - school was done, I wasn't killing myself for the sake of tenths of seconds in the pool, and I hated work.
I needed something to push myself with, after a long career in the pool. My brother is a climber, and asked me to come climb with him. I was hooked. I live a long way from any real rock, but on my first trip outdoors, two months after I started gym climbing, I broke my leg on my first lead fall. I liked the sport enough to get back on the wall the first day I got my cast off, and I've been at it since.
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Buggs
Trad climber
Eagle River, Alaska
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Started climbing unroped at Veedawoo when I was 8 or 9 years old, not knowing or fearing the dangers involved. Just seemed natural to go "up" and get as high as you could. Was it the quest for the view? I don't know.
Learned roped techniques in the US Air Force as a Survival Instructor in the early 80's. Bruce Birchell was one of my instructors, then he became the best friend I have ever had, teaching me to climb and showing me the ropes. I was hooked.
Met some awesome people through him in Bend, at Smith, and in the Valley. Met Mel Johnston and Keith(Royster)Stevens, climbed in the Yo, Mt Watkins 1992, and the four of us have met on and off over the years for climbing and debauchery in awesome places.
Inspiration comes from these three especially, yet others have inspired me as well,
Jim Bridwell
Ron Kauk
Mugs Stump (PBUH)
Mark Twight
Dean Potter
Arno Ilgner
Todd Skinner (PBUH)
Doug Macdonald
Ken Embree
Stan Justice
Keith Ecklemeyer
Don Whillans (PBUH)
Joe Brown (PBUH)
Tom Patey (PBUH)
Warren Harding (PBUH)
John Middendorf
YEAH!! The movie "Solo" in Jr High! Hell yeah!!
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mark miller
Social climber
Reno
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I've always loved hills and rooftops. In 4th grade a few feet of fresh snow had dumped and a friend an I decided to climb C Hill ( Carson City C). It was the most rewarding and suffering experience I've ever had. K Mart style Sorel boots on , cotton long under wear and 'Tough Skins" but we managed to crawl our way up that Snow covered sage brush, bit by bit and I haven't stopped since. Fortunately before we killed ourselves we stumbled into RR basic rockcraft, etc.... Specific individuals that have inspired me are the one's that have gotten my ass out of bed and headed towards the stone. Everything else is hardwired deep inside....Maybe there's a pill for this?
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Domingo
Trad climber
El Portal, CA
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Feb 10, 2008 - 12:37am PT
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I've always been pretty outdoorsy... I can swim for miles and I like hiking around in the woods. As far as climbing goes, I climbed buildings a lot when I was little... it used to scare the hell out of my parents. Then we moved out of Detroit and I found some trees to climb, and at my grandparents' farms, I'd climb silos and barns too.
Ten years later, I started screwing a climber and the transition to climbing outdoor rock just made sense.
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Varied locales along the time and space continuum
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Feb 10, 2008 - 12:57am PT
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I was always fascinated by The Vertical World of Yosemite for many years going back to my childhood, but it didn't make me want to climb. Instead, I'd moved to SF in the late 80's and began fulfilling a lifelong dream of backpacking into wild and untrailed places in the Sierra. My inspiration came from the writings of Colin Fletcher.
On these trips I'd often encounter terrain with exposure and perceived high sphincter factors: I was just too scared to feel comfortable on it, especially since I was going solo much of the time. I worked with a guy who wanted to try rock climbing in Yosemite and I thought this would be a good way to learn some skills and know-how that would allow me to be a better judge of those exposed places that I felt drawn toward.
We came up on cool weekend in late April. Rain was threatening. On Saturday we took the beginner class with some other friendly Griswolds. Our instructor was Doug Nidever and there was something magical in the way he spoke about climbing. It immediately went right under my skin. He showed us basic footwork on a boulder near Swan Slab. This boulder looked as smooth as glass to me that day, but he assured us that there were myriad "nubbins" for the feet and hands that we could use. And of course we discovered that they worked surprisingly well with our odd feeling shoes.
It rained that night with snow down to about a 1,000 feet above the valley floor. My pal and I were stoked for day two of instruction. This time, we were the only ones who showed up at the YMS. Dave Bengston was to be our instructor. He told us that climbers do not like wet rock... not good for climbing. But he saw the disappointment in our eyes and sensed our enthusiasm. He told us to come back around lunch, maybe things would dry out a bit.
It was good enough for us to go when we returned. Dave had as much magic as Doug. That day ended with a short two pitch climb up oak tree flake. At the first belay, I looked around and realized that this was something most of the millions who passed through Yosemite each year would never get to experience. It was ethereal and sublime. I was hooked from then on. What great teachers.
To make up for our foreshortened day, Dave offered to give us a discount of some kind on a guided climb later on. I returned that fall and he took the noob up the east buttress of middle Cathedral. There was no turning back now.
Fletch
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Varied locales along the time and space continuum
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Feb 10, 2008 - 01:02am PT
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Hey Bonin':
I had been stuck in an engineering school with a 4:1 male:female ratio for 4 years. Moreover, it was in a post-industrial wasteland of a New England town with no culture and no life.
First isn't that ratio the definition of an engineering school? :-)
Also, would that school have happened to be WPI in Worcester, MA? I grew up there and in the area. My high school pals and I used to call it the gray city. It wasn't all bad, but still, for me, the west beckoned.
Fletch
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Maysho
climber
Truckee, CA
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Feb 10, 2008 - 08:58am PT
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Like another post above, I was a very small kid with a lot of athletic energy, always picked last for the team sports. My adopted parents were totally sedentary, but very supportive and when I was 6 they hooked me up with some friends of theirs who were into skiing. Three years later the ski club I was excelling in sent us a brochure for a summer backpack trip program that took off out of Alpine Meadows. One of the days we spent climbing on some crags in the canyon between Alpine and Squaw, up above 5 lakes. I remember being really scared but loving it. A year later I went to Yosemite with the YMCA, and one of the councilors climbed, I told him I had learned how to belay and we went off and did the first pitch of Monday Morning Slab. The next year my dad moved to Berkeley and I went with him. His house was two blocks straight above Pinnacle rock, and I quickly fell in with the Sierra Club RCS, a great group of people who would drive me to the Valley and let me lead! I also started hanging around Indian Rock every day after school. I had the best of both worlds, learned ropecraft from some old Sierra Club masters, and was coached on technique by people like Chris Vandiver, Mike and Amy Loughman, and Fred Cook. With the athletic confidence gained on the stone, I became a pretty good soccer player, still small but no longer picked last!
Peter
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survival
Big Wall climber
arlington, va
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Feb 10, 2008 - 10:05am PT
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My Dad was a pilot in WWII, flew everything from fighters to bombers, checked out on 15 different planes. After the war he finished an agriculture degree and a teaching degree. In the 1950's he moved his family to the Alaska bush. Pilot, teacher, gardener, the perfect combination for the govt. back in those days.
Anyway, he would take us kids on flights with him in small planes. I can remember looking down on such fantastic mountain ranges and wondering what they were like, but mostly I remember him flying me around these giant cloud formations and imagining what it would be like to climb up these huge fluffy "peaks"!
I had the good fortune to live up on the c. divide in NMex where there were fantastic cliffs and mesas and indian ruins to climb to. Then I had the better fortune to end up in Jr. High in Bend OR. By then I was sneak-reading the old Himalaya conquest books in the library when I was supposed to be doing school work. There are pretty much endless piles of rocks to play on around Bend, not even counting Smith Rocks. I would explore and get into exciting, dangerous spots. This was mid 70's pre-climbing explosion so nobody did this stuff (that I knew of) I got to be a real pioneer! I finally met Mark Wodtli-photographer, poet, visionary, wanna-be-climber, dope fiend and I was off. He introduced me to Scott Davis, a guy who had just moved from Portland who had some real equipment. (goldline, carabiners, slings, a few pins and nuts..) My first "real" partner. We happily climbed, pounded, dogged our way up many an undeveloped crag around Bend with the help of Robbins books.
Started our adventures at Smith Rocks and met Jeff Thomas, Jim Anglin, Mike Smeltzer, Jeff McGowan and many other "real" hardmen of the day. As a 15 yr old I met and climbed with Scott Davis, Keith Royster, Rob Lesher, Mel Johnston and Bryan Schult. Those were golden days, let me tell you. It wasn't long before we hatched our first trip to Yosemite. I stood under El Capitan and knew it was well and truly over for me......
Been a junky ever since...32 years..Thanks.
Bruce
Thanks Buggs for helping to keep it fresh for all of us lo these many years!
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Double D
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2008 - 02:33pm PT
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Hey Peter (Maysho),
It's funny in all the years we hung together, I didn't realize you started out skiing! We share a similar start for the love of the mountains.
"With the athletic confidence gained on the stone, I became a pretty good soccer player, still small but no longer picked last!"...I tell you what, you would've been first round pick in my book! I can still remember when you first started leading the hard stuff. Your boldness blew me away. As far as I know, you were the first to onsite lead many of the routes on Snowshed wall. I also remember on more than one occasion some small manky peice popping out exposing you 15-20' off the boulder-strewn deck, and you calmly put the next piece in or confidently down climbed. You got my respect...that's for sure!
Dave
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Maysho
climber
Truckee, CA
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Feb 10, 2008 - 06:05pm PT
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Thanks my friend for the props from the old days, but to set the record straight... I was supposedly the first one to lead Manic without top rope rehearsal, but it took me two tries, fell off, lowered off, and sent it the next day. I lead that thing pretty often these days, when wired it is a cornerstone of the "office crack" training circuit.
And dude, I was good with the gear, so it was only once, on Babylon, you me and Victor, and was a rare but really stupid move, downclimbing from the crux, removing the directional cam, cause we did not have full racks of them back then - only a few, and in the micro-chance that I could fire the thing I would have wanted that up in the top handcrack, then going back up...Remembering that moment when the two "better" RP's lifted out right below me as I started to move up the short but really hard crux section, leaving me with the bad one, is making my hands drip sweat into my keyboard!
I will try to remember some old story to embarass you with! :)
Peter
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Double D
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2008 - 08:54pm PT
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Hey hey...respect your elders!
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Trusty Rusty
Social climber
Tahoe area
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Feb 10, 2008 - 11:31pm PT
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While doing some "recreational" time in J/Hall at 15, my Dad gave me Gaston Rebuffat's on Ice Snow & Rock. Read it twice. When I got out he turned me on to a class that Jim Wilson was teaching in the Bay Area Hills. I think that was 78. Read every book I could, bailed on my friends, bought a gold line and some alloy, and been trying to quit climbing ever since.
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Ferretlegger
Trad climber
san Jose, CA
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Feb 11, 2008 - 12:31am PT
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In 1964, when I was about 14, I ran across an article in National Geographic about mountain climbing in Colorado. I can still clearly remember "the picture". It was a shot of someone ascending a knife edge ridge on some peak with miles of exposure all around. I was literally terrified by this image. I distinctly remember thinking "My god, that is ONE thing I will never do!!!". But the seed had been planted.
Several years ago, doing some therapy after my mother's death, I learned that I am, in the parlance of the Enneagram, a personality classification system, a "Type 6, counterphobic". This is a personality type that is hyper-aware of danger but compelled to master the things it fears. Thus it was that in the summer of 1968, a gullible friend and I sat in Tuolomne meadows with a topo map looking for rock climbs. Completely oblivious to the vast climbing rising directly above our heads or the early guidebooks, we gleefully noted closely spaced contour lines on the North Face of Ragged Peak and saddled up to go dancing. Armed with a detailed study of "Freedom of the Hills", a 3/8" Goldline rope, a 1" Swami belt each, 3 pitons, 6 carabiners, a knotted sling, my mom's claw hammer, and my guitar, we sallied forth to become real rock climbers. We blasted up the trail to the Young lakes, and spotted our line- an obvious "directissima" ascending the north face. Although we had never BEEN rock climbing, nor had we ever MET a real rock climber, we had eagerly consumed the stories of Walter Bonatti, Ghastly Rabbitfat, and the like, and lusted for a "first ascent". So off we went, "jamming", and "liebacking", and "chimneying" away as if our lives depended on it, which in retrospect, they probably did, as our belaying technique was less than ideal. The crux came when we found ourselves marooned on a crumbling chockstone in a rotten chimney. With no anchors, and no obvious way to free climb out, we were delighted to conclude that we would have to use "AID!!!". I pounded in a 3/4" angle, clipped in our sling, and stepped into it. I was immediately 3 feet above the chockstone! This was GREAT!! REAL CLIMBING as Salathe would have said. I pounded in another piton, clipped in the rope and my partner held me as I switched the sling to the upper pin. A few desperate pulls on dubious flakes and I had surmounted the "Chimney of Death" (we were still greatly enamored of the French style "romance of climbing" ethic at that time...). My partner soon followed, but I was aghast to see that he was chimneying, with my precious guitar in a soft case strapped on his back. I can still hear the dreadful scraping and thumping noises as the rough rock wore through the case and into the wood. Stifling my desire to strangle him, I learned a lesson that undoubtedly countless other climbers have learned- namely that a dependable, gullible partner who you can trust with your life is worth swallowing many indignities, insults, and the occasional bizarre outbreak for. Anyway, the climb at this point realized that it had been "conquered" (more French doctrine here...) and the difficulties eased to mere scrambling. In minutes we were perched on the summit rocks, and I played my guitar for my partner, who had INSISTED that we bring it in the first place. It sounded fine, in spite of the hole in the side, later repaired with fiberglass and epoxy. We then prepared for an epic descent, but were horribly disappointed to find that we could walk off the summit and down a low angle snow gully directly to our packs at the base. None-the-less, for a first climb it was a hugely satisfying experience. Not only had we lived through it, but it was the first shot across the bow for me as I declared war on the fear that that National Geographic article had spawned in me, a process that has continued unabated to this day. So, to close the loop and respond to the original thread question, what inspired me to climb was my fear.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Feb 11, 2008 - 12:36am PT
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FL, that's a great story. I wonder if you are the first person ever to have carried a guitar up a technical climb?
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Ferretlegger
Trad climber
san Jose, CA
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Feb 11, 2008 - 01:06am PT
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MH,
Well technically it was my partner Dave who carried it. He was absolutely ADAMANT that we take it. Nothing I could say would dissuade him, so I finally realized it was either take the guitar and play for him on the summit or forgo the glory of the ascent. Over the years I came to realize that he was an incurable romantic. I could talk him into anything, no matter how hare-brained. A year or so later we had progressed to real climbing in the Valley, and I was leading a new variation of the El Cap tree route. It was some sort of A3-A4 roof to the right, and I was moving VERY slowly. I had been up there for hours, and Dave got tired and decided to take a nap. I was dangling from the roof about 50 feet over his head, so in spite of my protests, he simply wrapped the rope 3 times around his waist, lay down, and dozed off. When I finally got a placement in and needed slack to move up, I would yell at him and yank on the rope. He would roll over once or twice, rolling out a few feet of rope and rolling in the same amount in the other direction, all without even breaking his snoring.
Dave and I had many splendid adventures, such as the time we rappelled off a single rurp when the ledge we were on started to fall off the face when we pounded some anchor pitons into the crack behind it. It was a really GOOD RURP, though. Eventually school and other interests led him in other directions. I have been climbing with my current partner for 37 years. It sure has been fun.
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pleinair
climber
frontrange
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Feb 11, 2008 - 02:47pm PT
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My father loved the CO outdoors, he later lived in Alaska. Our family went to the mountains most weekends. We had a four wheel drive, camping trailer, fishing poles and hiking boots. I didn’t think anything then of sleeping outdoors when it was below freezing, even in a cotton army bag that frosted up with condensed breath.
Dad fished while my siblings and I picked peaks to ascend. Once, we had a guide book but didn’t make much sense of it. We looked at the guide and its featured routes; thinking, that gully doesn’t look like 5.4 ‘miles’ (we supplied the word ‘miles’!). We probably scrambled a bit of fifth class here and there, but the best part was unstructured roaming.
Then I went to college in LA. Going to college in LA was a culture/environment shock after a wild childhood in CO. When a sparkly-eyed classmate talked about climbing at Taqhitz, J.T., and Yosemite, I wanted to go along to get out of town. Thanks Charles Cole 3 for introducing me to those places, and I still love Scrabble too!
Thank you Jon Frericks for a classic trad summer in Toulumne, Alison Sheets for a long climbing friendship, and Mark Timms for letting me lead in England.
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hobo_dan
Social climber
Minnesota
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Feb 11, 2008 - 03:51pm PT
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Detective Murphy at work here. The coolest photo ever of rockclimbing was DoubleD leading Seperate Reality in Yosemite Climber.
The best expression and the reach for the dangling biner is priceless. How great. That photo inspired me to get to it.
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