El Portrero Chico in Hidalgo, Mexico, is where we go to rock climb. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were there to escape the Colorado cold. The limestone walls soar into the heavens; tilt your head back to see vertical walls full of vegetation, walls where even palm trees grow out of the rock. We…
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My favorite thing about climbing is that if you try hard enough you can always be a champion. It doesn’t matter if you are the best, it matters how it feels. [story by Luke Mehall] The Birthday Challenge is a concept passed from climber-to-climber, and I was first introduced to it by my good friend…
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Reluctantly, this past summer, I returned to the world of washing dishes in Crested Butte, Colorado. I thought I’d retired after a solid fifteen years in the profession, one that was my first job, carried me through college and some experimental years after college, when all I wanted to do was rock climb and live…
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The new Petzl NAO hints at the headlamp of the future, but the cost will have to go down before most climbers will want to buy one. I was first introduced to the NAO (Retail: $175.00) at the Winter 2012 Outdoor Retailer show, and it seemed intriguing enough to field test for a review. Its “Reactive…
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So you wanna start climbing trad- awesome, here are five tips to help you out along the way. 1. Hexes– Don’t get them. You may be tempted – they are cheap (like real cheap, you can get a whole used rack for the price of one new cam) – but they are not worth it. Nothing…
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Last night I watched Magic Trip, a film documenting Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ trip across the United States in a psychedelic-painted school bus. The film brought back some good memories of my hippie days, and reminded me again of the lineage that exists, starting with the beatniks, to the hippies, and into the dirtbag…
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The clean smell of wet granite brings me to my senses like nothing else does. (Except maybe coffee…yeah, let’s all say it: thank god for coffee). Lately, it seems I’ve been basing my whole lifestyle around chasing that scent. I dream about it, in my nights, in my foggy mornings, in my information-choked days, during…
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spray: 1. Climbing talk. 2. A climbing conversation in which the unconscious ego enters, steering the chatter towards graceless self-aggrandizement. Sometimes in writing you write something, completely forget about it, and then scramble to find the piece. This happened the other day, I remembered writing The Spray Dictionary for Climbing magazine. I didn’t have a copy of the file…
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