Skip to main content
Category

Musings

Time to Mourn

By Ethics, MusingsNo Comments

I was an A’s fan. What happened? Fuck John Fisher, the spoiled bitch-boy son of the founders of the obsolete clothing store that charged $45 dollars for jeans all the way back in the 90s, The GAP. That’s what happened. My anger at one man’s greed, and a society that apparently allows rich assholes to shit all over everything (see: the 45th president), has finally overcome the irrational attachments that one has to their favorite things from childhood. My dad took me to games at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, and I took home souvenir cups with Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Dennis Eckersley, and Rickey Henderson on ’em. There was no Mt. Davis, and there was iceplant where much of the outfield bleachers would’ve otherwise been. One of my earliest memories is of the ’89 earthquake, which happened shortly before the A’s swept the Giants in the World Series. Last year, my brother and I scattered a small portion of our dad’s ashes in left field. In high school, my best friends and I would take BART to games all the time, despite often getting home late, and despite the summertime fog keeping temperatures in the 50s (but feeling much colder). We joyously celebrated the start of the Moneyball era, when blue-collar journeymen at the end of their careers, like John Jaha or Olmedo Saenz, could have a shot to be difference-makers and fan favorites. The bleacher fans were legendary, as were the signs and nicknames they created for the A’s…

Read More

Hello Again, World

By MusingsNo Comments

Hey World. It’s me, Spenser. Are you there? For the past 6 months, the days have been getting longer and the nights have been getting shorter, and all the while this blog has stayed the same length. The reason? Well, that’s complicated, but it’s in large part due to how much of a pain in the ass it was to put up a new blog post. You see, we weren’t satisfied with so many of the plug-and-play website themes, so we tried to customize things to our liking. This road leads to plugins and workarounds, and ultimately compatibility issues. The backend of RVproj.com probably resembles a hoarder’s basement. It got to a point where every time we wanted to post some writing, we’d have to spend half a day getting the PHPs and the SSLs to HTML the right CSS, and we had such a mess of bandaids on top of the wound that we never got around to excising the infection. OK OK, that’s horrible metaphor-craft, but I hope I’ve conveyed something about what a mess our WordPress-GoDaddy lovechild has become, attributable mostly to our utter lack of understanding in the realms of coding, hosting protocols, or really anything to do with this current iteration of the World Wide Web. I’m hoping to tackle that issue with an online course or two, but I’m also hoping that what we did this past week was enough to let us input words and images and publish them without as much drama…

Read More

7 Years of Joe’s Valley Fest

By Bouldering, Musings, Trip JournalNo Comments
Coming back to Joe’s Valley after a 2 year hiatus felt like we had come home, after what felt like significantly longer than 2 years. I have missed the people and the place like a piece of me was misplaced. Sunrise from Horn Mountain from our last trip to Joe's in 2019. Vikki photo. Taking a selfie while pretending like we don't know each other. Food Ranch, circa 2012. Missed 'em like crazy. Spenser photo. Them, too! Brief aside as I'm rolling down memory lane, but this still is some of our best work. 😂 Inspired by our first trip to Emery County, and capitalism. This year was the first where I was able to fully step away from my roles as Marketing Manager and Sponsorship Coordinator. Patrick and Katherine are in the drivers' seats, respectively, and I took on a Master’s in Public Health program. I still don't have the words to encompass how honored I felt to witness where the Fest is at now. On the drive back to Bishop, Spenser and I looked back to the beginning. How the Joe’s Valley Fest came to be feels like a series of disjointed events: a bunch of boulderers living in the dirt, a town clean-up, and a message from Amanda to the Joe’s Valley Bouldering Facebook page. With this message, Amanda reached Steven Jeffrey and his then-girlfriend, now-wife Adriana Chimaras. I’ve never looked back on these messages until today. I thought this one below is particularly hilarious. Just goes...
Read More

Choppers, Choss, and Chaparral

By Musings, Trip JournalNo Comments

The last time we caught up was before Halloween 2020. Aye, it’s been about 4 months, in fact. Jeez. The RV Project has been regrouping. The past 12 months have been hard and weird for everyone, and the 10 months before that were pretty fucked up for us too. As far as I am aware, I’ve never had a proper concussion, but if I understand the symptoms correctly, then it would be fair to say that we’re recovering from something of a Traumatic Brain Period. We’re a little disoriented, we’re a little more irritable and quick-tempered, and we fatigue easily. Sensitive to bright light, too. After spending the better part of 2 years helping my parents navigate Life With Cancer (and a few months helping my mom embark on Life as a Widow), we now find ourselves in sunny San Diego, La Jolla to be precise. We’ve rented an apartment a few blocks from Vikki’s parents for a few months, so that we can help them navigate Life As Lonely Immigrants. Let me tell you something: Fuck La Jolla. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s not that. It’s the way people scoop up their dogs when they see Little Dude, because they don’t actually have dogs, they have Urban Accessories, and accessories don’t need to socialize. It’s the way that store clerks, especially California Bicycles in La Jolla, size up your wallet with a glance and decide if you’re worth a smile or not. It’s the straight-faced existence of businesses like…

Read More

Fuck Cancer. I Miss My Dad.

By Musings11 Comments

My dad never taught me how to ride a bike. At about 12 years old, I learned how to ride a bike that my parents had gotten for my little brother’s 6th birthday. Riding bikes became a big part of my life fairly quickly, and if it weren’t for the fact that climbing has my heart, I’d probably be either a spandex-wearing slick-tire racer, or putting together epic bikepacking journeys. As it is, I recently picked up a more aggressive, full-suspension rig off of Craigslist, and mountain biking is beginning to compete for my time in a very serious way. My dad never taught me how to ride a bike because he didn’t know how to ride a bike. His parents wouldn’t allow him to learn. I ended up teaching him in 2011, because my friends and I had organized a Burning Man camp and invited the family along, and without a bike my dad would’ve been severely limited on the playa. Lately I’ve been lingering on the little idiosyncrasies that made my dad who he was, both as an individual and as a pater familias. I had always enjoyed saying “I taught my dad how to ride a bike,” because it’s a reversal of a common sentiment (ie fathers teaching sons how to do basic childhood things) that feels almost like wordplay. Nowadays, it reminds me of how toxic and oppressive my dad’s mother was, and how unpleasant it was to visit the grandparents, and how little it seemed…

Read More

How About a Climbing Update?

By Climbing, MusingsNo Comments

Ain’t no climbing! F’reals. The gyms are closed, Owens River Gorge is closed, the Happies and Sads are closed, and the Buttermilks are about to be. As I’ve said before, I’m on Team It-Don’t-Matter, since I’m also still on Team Rehab. I would never wish for good people to be prevented from climbing, but I am definitely benefiting from the absence of envy. I may not be doing Soulslinger this season, but neither will anyone else, haha! Talking to my parents, who are in quarantine in the Bay Area, it sounds like the public there is quite panicked, and very wary of each other. My mom tells me that people aren’t smiling at each other in the grocery store anymore; her observation is that those who choose to appear friendly these days are almost exclusively ethnic minorities. I can’t really comment on that aspect; around Bishop, people seem to be pretty friendly while keeping their distance. In the first 2 weeks of March, barely anything had changed at all in terms of folks’ behavior. The last 2 weeks we saw checkout queues with zones taped on the floor 6’ from one another, and Main Street has hardly any pedestrians at all. So, here in RV Project world, we are climbing on the trailer-woodie waaay more often than we ever thought we would. The weather this week is warm and sunny, and when there’s no wind, we can lower the wall without losing all of our important documents. In fact, when…

Read More

The Souls Linger at Soul Slinger

By Bouldering, Musings, Trip JournalOne Comment

It’s the year 2020, and I still can’t do Soulslinger. I’ve waged war on that thing, with fresh skin and good conditions, many more times than I can count. I’ve heard it called “soft” or “easy” 3 times for every time someone said they found it hard. It was my buddy Dan Kovner’s first V9, and he said he did it in 4 tries. I just learned it was Ethan Pringle’s first V9, and he only needed 2 attempts. I am certain that there is no climb V9 or below that I’ve tried as many times as Soulslinger without success. I won’t complain, because we’ve been resting our heads at an off-grid cabin near Mono Lake. The place belongs to a photographer friend who works almost exclusively from a small airplane, making beautiful and thought-provoking images of the American southwest. His name is Mike Light, and I owe him thanks for much more than a stay at the cabin. During a previous visit to the cabin, I grabbed one of the photography books off the shelf. It happened to be called Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes by Trevor Paglen, and its pages depicted that which we–civilians–are not supposed to see: “black sites” in the desert, spy satellites in the night sky, and documents pertaining to CIA shell corporations. Mike told me that Trevor had used this very cabin to take images of the night sky for the book. It’s the year 2020, and it’s an election year. It’s the…

Read More

As Years Go, 2019 Was a Bit Shite

By Musings, Trip JournalNo Comments

As most of you know, I love doing lots of stuff and then collapsing in an exhausted heap. Right now I feel like collapsing in an exhausted heap, but I don’t feel as though I did anything. It’s like the difference between swimming and treading water…2019 felt like a year of trying not to drown. OK, maybe not the whole year. 2019 began well enough. The trailer was parked near Hueco Tanks, plugged in to the grid at Gleatherland. We climbed a few things, made new friends, solidified old friendships, survived an Emergency at the Border, and we even got to take my parents out to White Sands in New Mexico. As spring began, we hitched up and moved back to Castle Dale, UT, so that we might do some climbing in Joe’s Valley. Mayor Danny invited us to park the trailer on his land, and the next few weeks passed in a blur of hiking, climbing, and planning the Joe’s Valley Bouldering Festival for fall. Tumors and Tendinosis Then my dad got cancer, specifically Angioimmunoblastic T-Cell Lymphoma (AITL). The disease first manifested in late March as severe back pain and night sweats, which were unexplained by any imaging or blood tests. After a month or so of worsening nerve pain and a loss of 30 pounds, they finally biopsied a lymph node, found the AITL, and began chemotherapy. On the day of his first round of chemo, my dad was barely able to stand without assistance. Already struggling with…

Read More

Vote, And I’ll Give You Boulders

By Ethics, Food for thought, MusingsNo Comments

We voted, y’all. If you send me proof that you’ve voted, I will tell you where these boulders are. Seriously. Hit us up @thervproject. November 6th. Extra boulders for you if you can drag a millennial to the polls with you. I spent 90 minutes with my 6 different ballots, reading Balletopedia and Bay Area newspaper op-eds to try to figure out if Yes or No or she or he will improve life for the majority of people I care about. There were some tricky choices. Candidates with similar positions, bills with names that sound like things I like but with provisions that I don’t like, that kind of thing. All in all, though, it was pretty damn painless. I voted in California. I’m a bit jealous of people who have an opportunity to cast a vote against, say, Ted Cruz, or Ron De Santis, or extremely-thinly-veiled-white-nationalist Steve King, or another one of these pathetic, ugly-souled power-suckers with the moral compass of a rabid possum. My most satisfying vote had to do with getting rid of the twice-yearly time shift known as Daylight Savings. It’s not that I want the Democrats to win. I do, but only incidentally. What I’m really hoping for, what we should all hope for, is a strong statement by the American People that we reject the shittiness of the past 2 years. That we stand by the free press, by the minority groups, by the victims of domestic terror. That we give a shit about…

Read More

It Pays to Pay Attention

By Adventure, Food for thought, MusingsOne Comment

Wisdom is everywhere, and what we know is exactly what keeps us from being wise. Ain’t that a paradox! If the goal of learning is knowledge, then how can knowledge prevent us from learning?  I don’t know, but here’s a story. I certify that the events contained herein are true and factual, to the best of my recollection. Although, frankly, one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The year was 2011, the address was 1015 Folsom in San Francisco, and the time was approaching midnight. Several folk, myself included, had organized a camp for Burning Man called Camp UP, which included a rather large bouldering wall, and we were caught in the grips of a multi-splendored culture of psychic exploration (read that as you wish). Most of the core group of Camp UP was selflessly partying in the name of raising funds for another Burning Man camp, Opulent Temple. Most nightclub veterans know the importance of staying hydrated, particularly on a hot summer’s night. The hard part can be choosing between dancing and the procurement of the necessary element of water. Savvy partiers that we were, Zack and I had gotten plastic water bottles from the bar earlier in the evening, which of course could be filled from the taps in the restrooms. A brief note on nightclub restroom attendants: They’re almost always there, they’re almost always polite but irritating at the beginning of the night, and they’re almost always among your favorite people…

Read More