Skip to main content
Tag

Hunter’s Rocks

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering … Slowness

By Climbing, Trip Journal6 Comments

The long awaited RV Project Episode 9 has finally arrived! It chronicles our mishaps and slip-ups between leaving the Red River Gorge and arriving in Colorado. After dropping off the trailer in Indiana for repairs, we went to the east coast to watch my little brother Eliot and cousin Alec graduate college. In between it all, we tried to climb but, predictably, it was always either too hot or raining. We made the most of it anyway, meeting friendly locals and sleeping in Bert. Summer doesn’t make for very good climbing in New England, and we only shot a few decent climbs. We are also novice with the camera, so the amount of quality footage is even more diminished by that fact. We decided to spice it up the only way we could think of: with stop-motion animation and poetic narration. I wish we had production footage for this film. It would be cool for our previous episodes too, and I think of the boom on top of boulders in Horse Pens, or setting up timelapses on top of the old trailer. But for this, we went through many steps to create, cut out, and manipulate the paper cutouts, then learn how to add them in to the video. We spent hours watching tutorials. Then we laughed ourselves silly while writing the narration. We struggled through the basics of After Effects and Premiere Pro, but after three months we finally finished it, and had fun doing it too. Frankly, you might not…

Read More

A Bit of Catch-Up

By Trip JournalNo Comments

I started this post on Sunday. It was Spenser’s birthday and we were both catatonic from stress, unable to celebrate as we should be. Birthdays are difficult, I find you often end up doing what everyone else wants to do rather than what you want to do. Yes, it’s your birthday and you can cry if you want to, but you are essentially bringing everyone down with you when you do. So, forget it. Spenser had tweaked his neck bouldering last week and was not in the mood to celebrate. Neither of us were in the mood to start dealing with all the nagging pieces we still have left over from the original RV Project: mostly, selling Ernie and finding our new home. The trailer is on Craigslist and RV Trader, no bites so far and it’s exactly half way through the month of July…but I don’t really want to start thinking about that yet. I decided to go back in time and debrief about our long, straight, and steamy road to Colorado (and not steamy in a good way). Alright, forget about Colorado for a second and back to New York we go… During our time at the Gunks, I climbed higher and got more exposure than I ever thought I would be comfortable with. Despite all this, living in the back of the truck with thunderstorms taking us off the rocks every afternoon and the chigger larvae infestation under my skin had started to get the best of me. I needed a…

Read More

5.10×10 and Hunter’s Rocks, PA

By Bouldering, Climbing, Trip Journal3 Comments

Watch out Alex Honnold. The new speed-climbing trad-masters are in town, and your reign on top shall not last long. In a remarkable display of endurance, guts, and athleticism, two relatively unknown climbers managed a feat heretofore unimagined at the Shawangunks. “We used to joke about how someday, Wolfgang Gullich’s grandson would be able to climb ten 5.10 routes in a day at the Trapps,” says guidebook author and Gunks veteran Dick Williams. “What these two did will inspire generations of future climbers.” Okay, so Dick Williams didn’t really say that, or at least not in reference to us. Here’s what really happened in our last few days at the Gunks. Also, mega-congratulations to Alex and Hans, for making the old Nose record look foolish. Vikki picked up a shift on Sunday, June 10, so we spent the day working at Bacchus, a pub with internet and hundreds of beers to choose from. While there, I saw on Facebook that Murph had a list of 3-star 5.10s he wanted to tick, and a few messages later we had a plan: Tackle ten 5.10s in the Trapps (the main cliff of the Gunks) the very next day. In contrast to the rain and humidity we’d been having, Monday turned out to be perfect. Temps were in the 60s, a breeze was blowing, the sun was kept at bay by the stratus layer, and it was dry. We met at the Bistro Mountain Store for coffee at 8:45, had breakfast, and headed…

Read More