A Maze of Death from Louder Than 11 on Vimeo.

Well, its that time of the year again. Yes, its the semi-annual “time-for-Max-to-get-off-his-boney-ass-and-update-his-little-blog” tradition! Why has it been 4 months? Not really sure. My psych for this internet stuff comes in waves and mostly its been wanning lately. Despite the fact that i’ve gotten out climbing every weekend for the last 6 months, I’ve barely gotten any climbing footage to show for it; too dark, too lazy, no batteries….excuses on excuses on excuses. No MORE!!

My first bouldering season in California was extremely productive. I made a To-Do list back in August of 45 boulders (and one route!) from 9 different areas ranging from V7 to V14, and was very happy to have climbed 20 of them so far! Somehow it took till the end of January to have a major snow storm. Yosemite and Bishop, the spots I’ve been going most often, have been prime for 2 months and counting, even a bit on the warm side sometimes! I’ll spare y’all the gorey details of most of those weekends and jump straight to my holiday adventures.

Having asked for 3 weeks off work and knowing that I would be driving wherever I went, I had been watching weather and playing things by ear until the last minute. Originally Natasha and I had charted a “666″ adventure; 6 days in Bishop, 6 days in Hueco, 6 days in Red Rocks. While that looked good on paper (and sounded totally GOATLORD), the reality of spending an extra 18 hours car-bound combined with the prolonged indian winter the sierras have been experiencing and the addition of some good friends to the mix, we settled for a week and a half in Bishop and 6 days in Vegas.

With Tioga Pass staying open through the entirety of winter vacation, getting to and from Bishop was especially painless. A sizable crew from the Bay had assembled including Sander Pick, Vitaly Volberg, Caitlin Flanagan and her sister Zoe, Anson Whitmer, Gregor Pierce, and Courtney Miyamoto, with people coming and going as their holiday schedules allowed. Most of the down time was spent in cheap hotel rooms with cheaper bottles of wine. My first three and a half days in the Buttermilks were spent polishing off double digit mega-classics. I quickly put down Stained Glass SDS V10+, Haroun and the Sea of Stories V11, and the famed Mandala V12-, all three of which I had tried to no avail on my maiden voyage last Thanksgiving. After a quick successful session on Mandala with Sander and Anson Tuesday morning, I made tracks back to San Francisco and caught G-Side and Main Attraktionz live at the Independent. Perfectly SWAG!!

After few days of down time back home and a blind climbing date with friend-of-many-friends Ander Rockstad at Castle Rock where we humbly chuffed on Eco Terrorist V10 (Ander later sent), Natasha and I made our way down to So Cal for 2.5 days to spend Christmas with her family. Our stay in Newport Beach consisted of meeting various relatives/eating their food, vacuuming up free drinks at Natasha’s sister Vanessa’s various bar-tending jobs, and ringing in the start of the lockout-curtailed NBA season by watching 9 hours of hoops that Sunday…ITS FANNNNNNNNTASTIC.

UN-LOCKED-OUT

Monday morning rolled around and we made the relatively straightforward drive northwest back to Bishop, just in time to warm up in the ‘Milks for an hour as the sun went down. In that hour, mormon wunderkind Gregor Pierce managed to fall twice past the crux of Direct North V14, a fierce link-up on the Grandma Peabody boulder, and nearly sent Mandala Sit V13/14 as well. As it turns out, even 19-year-old tendons need to warm up, and to his chagrin Gregor came away with a pulley injury and left a week later empty handed. Damn inspiring nonetheless. In the spring, Gregor leaves for his mission to coastal Brazil where he’s perfectly content to do no climbing for the next two years. While his order of priorities is quite foreign to my lifestyle, Gregor is a great kid with a fine attitude and I respect the fuck out of him.

The following day we met up with some very good people, namely my infamous BFF Randy Hill and his girlfriend Sarah Purcell, who had been on an indulgent West Coast road trip for several weeks, Mark Heal of Brooklyn Boulders and PGSF climbing coach Ben Snead. Mark was psyched to check out Maze of Death V12 at the Bardini Boulders, a technical crimp-fest that if not for the steep 20 minute approach, would easily be the most popular test piece in the area. I had sessioned twice on Maze previously, both times in elite company: once watching Brian Hedrick finish it off in good form and Gregor run a lap on it, while Ethan Pringle and I flailed, and another time with Sander and Alex Honnold who did it in about 5 minutes with beta in hand. Having made the arduous-by-California-standards hike,  Ben and I watched Mark effortlessly walk the problem second try after forgetting the pivotal drop knee for the crux track-in move. Alrighty then. Not to be upstaged, I pulled myself together and finished it off. Maze of Death is a 3 star classic with a perfect jug to start on and bullet patina that ends on another nice jug at a comfortable 13 feet. I finally managed to get some footage…check it out above! Bonus filming cred to Ben, my bad.

The remainder of the week was relatively low key as we methodically climbed 6 straight days. I got half-heartedly psyched on the sit start to the Mandala V13/14, finally managing the very difficult, very spanned come-around move during 60 mph winds one freakish afternoon. The last few days included must-do moderate highballs at the Pollen Grains, and a 3-try-max rule on classics at the Happies on the 31st. I have recently gotten psyched on a fun little long term goal of climbing as many problems off the somewhat arbitrary list of America’s 1oo best boulder problems, as compiled by readers and voted on by a small committee in Boulder. Since the list was released, I have done 10 more problems off of it bringing my total to 45; not bad! my goal is just to have done 50 by the end of 2012, and I am well on my way to meeting it. At the Happies I notched problems 44 and 45 off the list with the majestic Heavenly Path, perhaps the best V1 in the country, and the iconic double-arete squeeze fest, Atari V6. I also managed a quick ascent of a nice gymnastic problem called Kill On Sight V11. It was nice to have gotten the Happies out of my system and I don’t see myself going back there any time soon.

Mark CRUSH-fucking Return Jedi V10

Sarah, super-sick-near-death-mega-epic on Jedi Mind Tricks. J/K. She crushed it.

The infamous Heavenly Path....totally worth the rest of the choss!

Pong! err, Atari!

New Year’s eve was spent with sushi and naked hot springing at midnight with Randy, Sarah, Sander and Caitlin. This was my first year since ’05-’06 that wasn’t spent in Hueco and it was a welcome change of pace to ring it in under the stars of the Eastern Sierras with a few very close friends. The next morning we bid adieu to BFFs and made tracks across the desert to the sin-liest of cities, Las Vegas. I’m sure the Vegas board of tourism doesn’t really need any help, but for what it’s worth Red Rocks is basically the ideal week-long climbing vacation destination. Having spent a few days here a year ago, Natasha and I were psyched to return and see what else the canyons north of Vegas had to offer. This year, my excess-loving friends Sergey Maslov and Jason Candler of the OG Gainesville crew, made their way up from Phoenix and Florida respectively. While ‘Tasha and I were intent on laying low our first night in Vegas, Sergey and Jason left our semi-swanky hotel room at 10pm looking for a good time. We were roused at an eye-cringing 7:30am to J. and S. returning from a night where “everything that could have happened, happened…” Thus the tone was set for the week to come.

What's a vacation with the boys without Bustelo??

The climbing this time around was only moderately inspiring. Most of our time was spent at the Kraft Boulders and its adjacent Gateway Canyon with brief excursions to Black Velvet and the second pull out inside the park. I climbed four new (to me) V10′s including a flash of the harder-See-Spot-Run simulator Vigilante next to the Cannibal Crag at Calico Basin, and the 4 star Desert Rain at the aforementioned second pull out. Desert Rain was definitely the highlight as it climbs one of the prettiest wind-blown desert sandstone blocs I’ve ever seen, and has movement to match; all the holds are either perfectly vertical gastons or side pulls with a perfect full value mantle followed by a giant sweeping slab to top out. DAMN!

And i miss youuuuuuuuuuuu, like the Deserts miss tha' rain.

Immaculate rock at the isolated zone called The Sanctuary; heart-breakingly beautiful but doesn't look too fun to climb without a TR.

Natasha, at the crux of Steppin' Stone V2R. I made her abort mission.

The real goal of the Red Rocks sojourn was another go at Wet Dream. My all-time US to-do list is pretty short. There’s The Shield V12 (obviously; so close :-/), Sunseeker V13 (doubt I’ll ever get back), The Spectre V13 (can’t do it), Mask of God V13 (haven’t tried it), Yabo Roof V12 (soon?), and Wet Dream V12. I’m not ashamed to admit that I can cull from memory Ethan’s 8a comment for this boulder after doing the FA; “If you psyched little boulders only knew”. Apt indeed. I got half a day, roughly four go’s from the start, on this most humbling of steep power-resistance fests. Old time homie Paul Robinson and myself were thoroughly dissuaded by just how pumpy/insecure feeling the top slot moves were even when starting from half-way. Not wanting to get too wrapped up over such a short trip, I cut my losses and resolved to return next year much more focused. The day was far from wasted as P Rob “settled” for a quick ascent of the ultra-compression test piece Atlas Shugged V12.

Wet Dreamin'

While climbing for Natasha, Sergey, Jason, and myself was fun yet largely highlight free, the nightlife experience our last couple nights more than made up for it.  That Thursday, we had a warm up evening at Red Rocks Casino with our new friends Marisa Ware and Jonathan Seigrist over good burgers and beer with a minor foray gambling. The next and our final night in Sin City we resolved to go as HAM as humanly possible and largely succeeded. The night started off rather late as we met up with Paul, his girlfriend Alex, and some others at the Monte Carlo where Sergey and I proceeded to lose a cool hundred at a Texas Hold ‘Em table within 20 minutes of sitting down. We left Paul with a decent chip stack to hold down the fort, and made our way over to the Cosmopolitan where Jonathan and Marisa had promised us a dance party for the ages. DJ Dirty South of the UK did not disappoint. Upwards of a thousand people crammed into the very euro-style dance club reminiscent of Denver’s Beta. After 3 hours of dizzying electronica, the four of us slipped away from JStar and Marisa and on to more lurid pursuits. I always prefer to leave at least a bit to the imagination but some key words from the rest of our night included: topless, lap dance, crazy horse, 7am, and nubian.

All in a night’s work.

Another winter vacay is on the books and the cycle moves forward for another go-around. I’ve barely climbed outside in January save for a mostly uninspiring outing at SF’s semi-local sport crag Jailhouse and a couple days on the improbable Impossible Traverse V13+ at the ol’ Mortar Rock. Mostly I’ve been live-streaming NBA games and gorging out on vegan cookie dough ice cream. I promise to get back into writing and shit, and probably about different shit than you’re used to seeing. An interview perhaps? I’m psyched to be involved in some upcoming clinics and events at Planet Granite, so perhaps that will make an appearance too.

Everyone needs more James Harden in their lives. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Till then, stay SEXY.

-MZ-