After nearly a month of paddling, David and Michael Hanson have reached the Gulf of Mexico for our documentary project, Who Owns Water. Check out this cool ass Flickr interactive map of our travels:

On the Warpath

Rolling a cigarette a little smaller than a banana, Dave Graham opens his laptop to show us some of his latest video work. His voice rising over relentless French electrosex beats, he points at the screen and raves about each edit point. The footage oscillates between incomprehensible and shockingly original.  I get a twinge of jealousy. It’s the kind of free-flowing creativity that I’m not feeling at the moment.

We’re in Dave’s cabin at a bed and breakfast near Almo, a small town in Southeastern Idaho, where my friend Josh Fowler and I were working on our own climbing film. So far this is the only footage we have: video of us watching Dave’s footage. We came to Idaho to shoot climbing porn – just pure unadulterated bouldering action, along with any other hardcore sending that would probably go down. But it’s turning out to be a little more B-rated. Yesterday, in perfectly dry, cold conditions, Daniel Woods climbed his project, the prize footage we sought. At the time Josh and I were just landing in Salt Lake, a day’s drive away. When we rolled up to Idaho that afternoon, the weather turned from perfect to shit. We arrived at the boulders with tons of gear just as everyone was heading back in a snowstorm. That was yesterday. Today was a lost cause with more horrible weather, so we gathered in Dave’s room to watch skate videos and “recover”.

I try to record the scene with my video camera but it’s no use. My audio levels are all over the place. I look impatiently at Josh. He’s trying to take in the multiple streams of consciousness pouring from Dave and his Macbook, and I know we are both thinking the same thing: Turn off the laptop, tell everyone to shut-the- fuck-up, and mic up Dave: “Hey can you say that again? What you just said about bouldering and video editing and French cinema and…”

It was never going to happen. I just keep rolling. “See!” yells Dave, “Climbing Style! It mirrors personality and physical appearance!” He describes the styles of half a dozen climbers, finally coming to James Litz. “Recluse. Unknown. It’s hard to say… I’d have to research it more.” He trails off, his eyes fixed on his screen.

Our collective trip to Idaho is in fact a research project on the elusive James Litz, a kid from Tennessee who has become a climber of mythic proportions, even to the best in the world. While Litz ropes up on occasion (in one summer in 2009 he ticked off eight 5.14′s in Wyoming alone including General Litzenheimer 5.14c/d and Master of the Universe 5.14d. Seven of those were first ascents), he is more known for his freakish crimp strength and nailing the worlds sickest boulder problems: Freaks of the Industry, The Insurgency, and Dreamtime, all V14s. At one point, Litz was rated among the top three climbers in the world on 8a.nu for combined route and bouldering accomplishments.

Yet there is something about Litz that isolates him from the crowd in the high-end rock climbing game. Litz Problems seem to be rarely repeated. They are too remote, the holds are too small, or maybe he doesn’t hype them enough for people to take notice. Follow the trail of a couple homemade videos and a note in Hot Flashes and you’ll likely find an “Unrepeated Litz Problem” that those in the know have at the top of their tick list. One such benchmark line is Litz’s 2007 creation in a remote corner of Idaho at Castle Rocks State Park, just up the road from our cabin. Litz started on the extreme lower-right of the Taco Cave, and followed a spiraling arc of Twix Bar-sized holds, climbing horizontally to the leftmost lip of the cave, to exit on a low-percentage V10 lip encounter called Out of Africa. Litz called that particular geometry Warpath. It was one of the hardest unrepeated lines in the country at the time, a possible V15. A grainy video of the climb appeared online, but other than that, Litz didn’t have much to say about it. He usually left it to the rest of us to decipher his lines.

There are only a couple dozen climbers in the country who could seriously consider repeating Warpath, and three of them had come here to gang-bang the thing for a week. Daniel Woods, Dave Graham and Jimmy Webb had driven here from Colorado hoping for a good weather window, Webb visiting from Tennessee. Two more strong boulderers, Chad Greedy and Diego Montull rounded out the road-tripping bouldering posse. The film that Josh and I were working on was based around the second ascent of Warpath and everything seemed lined up for it.

Except Daniel just did the second ascent, and we missed it.

Still rolling on Dave, I turn to Josh, “Shit I don’t know, man. Warpath went down already. Stark’s gonna be pissed.” Josh looks over at Daniel who is running through the send footage on Dave’s DSLR. “They got footage,” he says. “Maybe we should take a look at it. We could probably use it, then shoot our own version. Jimmy hasn’t done it yet. Anyway I’m sure Daniel would be willing to climb it again.”

Repeating the big send for the camera is common practice. You can stitch together different camera angles and get a better sense for the climb on film. Even if we had been there for the second ascent, we’d probably re-shoot it anyway. I stare past them at the blizzard outside the window. The ice-rimed granite domes of Castle Rock in the distance might as well be on Mars. I had my doubts. We were here to do a job; to get shit done in a professional way, but climbing isn’t like that, at least not the way I remember it.

The first time I met Daniel Woods was at Horse Pens 40, a boulderfield attached to an Alabama mountaintop ranch of the same name. I was photographing the annual Triple Crown Competition, bird-dogging climbers around the boulderfield all day.

I was in mid-swig, leaning against a tree next to some dank mushroom of granite, when a hand shot out from the cave, gripping like crazy. The hand was followed by a sandy-haired kid making quick work of a long, burly V10 called Slider Sit. Maybe it was how the ground sloped away, but the he seemed half my size at most; a tiny kid, slaying rock giants. “Can I get a picture?” I asked, already snapping away. He eyed me warily. I think I signed his scorecard. That year Daniel won that leg of the Triple Crown, at age 16. His first V10? Two years before that.

The next day brings more bad weather but Daniel is planning to leave (as in, leave the country), so we head up to Warpath one last time, with him alone and a couple pads. It’s freezing and windy, but he’s patient with us and our outsized video setup. After a V10 warmup, he separately fires off the first and second half of Warpath, over and over. Josh and I are slack-jawed. Among the swirling snow in a deep cave, Daniel slays the giant. He tries his linkup project a few times, making enough progress to want to come back and work it another day. The snow builds and we retreat, Daniel indulging us while we shoot some scenic and timelapse shots. Back in the cabin we get an interview with him that goes perfectly but I can tell his mind is already on the epic drive back to Colorado in full weather. He’s probably glad to get the hell out of here and climb some new rock in better weather. He sent his project before we even got here to shoot it, and now I understand why. He probably feels the same impatience that I do, except on the other side of the camera. A real professional at 21, he’s old enough to know the game has to be played, but still young enough that he can play it by his own rules. I think of Litz, and I wonder what Dave’s research suggests about Daniel’s climbing style.

“Maybe we can get some more footage in Colorado,” I suggest. He eyes me warily. Then he smiles, genuinely psyched, “Sounds good!” He grabs his bag and heads out into the sleet, to Colorado and then to Europe to slay more giants.

The rest of us spend the the afternoon exploring a nearby town with amazing roadside tacos and little else. By now everything has shut down, and the closest food is over an hour away. Even our little steakhouse is closed. We find a gas station with a freezer section and head back with bags full of frozen pizzas, only to realize we don’t have an oven in the cabin. Do not microwave those things. Trust me.

I’ve read that sitting increases the your chance of dying within 15 years by 40%. If so, we climbers are doomed to live a short life on our asses, punctuated by rare moments of ecstasy and terror high off the deck.

After sleeping in the next morning we poke at Warpath for a couple hours, but the weather just won’t let up. Scrambling around the backcountry, we clean up some amazing new projects (which will later dead-end at “only 8a”) and stare at blank rock that is just beyond 9a.

We spent a week in Idaho with group of some of the best boulderers in the world. We shot extreme close-ups of a split tip, slow-mo snow and Daniel lapping cruxes on Warpath. We shot Dave pioneering the Hat Move and we timelapsed storms marching across the high desert. We captured late night streams of consciousness and videos of us watching Dave’s videos and Jimmy standing in a blizzard, and we saw some of the finest untouched granite boulders in the country. Those are the future giants to slay, but for now we’ll rest, and we’ll remember what a great feeling it is to do absolutely nothing.

Below is a video excerpt from the Idaho part of the film, A Fine Line. You can get it on DVD or download HERE.

A FINE LINE: The Vision of Dave Graham from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.

 

Asheville, NC-based indie-folk band River Whyless recently jumped off a US tour with Little Tybee.

Their debut album “A Stone, A Leaf, an Unfound Door” is a beautiful piece of work that they recorded in the winter of 2011 on Martha’s Vineyard. They spent three weeks in an old cottage in Ocean Park, surrounded by ocean on three sides. I reviewed the album here. Still one of my favorites.

By the second week a haunting track had come together called “Widows Walk”.

Recently the band got to AudioTree Live in Chicago to film a live recording of Widows Walk. Check it out:

A couple tracks from the album will also be featured in an upcoming short film I produced for prAna and the Triple Crown Bouldering Series. More on that soon.