Wednesday, April 8, 2015

We never go out of style

Shout out to Tay Tay.   The weather is starting to shift in favor of the climbers here in AK.  It was a weak sauce winter with minimal snowfall.  Pretty sure Boone, NC got as much, if not more snow.  Fortunately, this has led to a pretty early season for outdoor climbing.  The higher elevations are still inaccessible, but we have been able to escape to the south over the past couple weekends for a bit of good fun. 
Byron Glacier has some great lines and impressive boulders.  We were able to get on a few hard lines before the limited daylight passed us by.  We started at a fun/sharp compression line called Shere Khan.  I botched the flash, but managed a second go send.  This climb led to one of the worst flappers I've ever seen.  Lots of skin missing.  Blood everywhere.


Falling Up is a 2 move wonder on a pretty steep face.  I worked some sneaky heel hook beta and managed to fire it fairly quickly before moving on to an unrepeated Todd Helgeson line called Frog People.  Apparently Todd flashed it for the first ascent and gave it v9.  Some of the strong climbers here contend that it may well be v10.  Who knows.  I feel like I very nearly flashed it, but then it took a few more goes to actually send.  Hunter pulled it out just before me for the 2nd ascent, and I settled for 3rd.  Good problem to go sit under if you have limited pads to work with.  We didn't get to climb on anything else, but there are a lot of great lines to get back out to. 
The past 2 weekends, I've been going out to a recently developed boulder down the Seward Highway.  The SCAR boulder sits down by the mud flats and is very tide-dependent.  David Funatake and Todd Helgeson developed this boulder a few weeks ago and put up some good lines, including a v10 link-up called Crouching Shark, Hidden Octopus.  Me and Hunter were super psyched to get out to try and repeat this thing.  Our first trip out proved unsuccessful, but we figured out some of the subtleties of the movement.  Last weekend we made it back out and we both managed the send.  This time I got the 2nd ascent, with Hunter sending a few goes later for the 3rd.
And here's the vid of all that shite. 

AK Pt. III from Brian Clevenger on Vimeo.

Ketchup

Some extremely old stuff here.  I had a massive backlog of photos from my journey up to AK.  Largely from passing through Yellowstone and whatnot.  I also have a pile of photos from the airshow up here in AK.  So, long story short, here's actually a small percentage of that..