2006 May

If you, like me, had forgotten about the dire shortage of existential comedies in the world, this will provide a most refreshing reminder. More fun than a barrel of nihilists at an NRA pajama party.

Referred by DougieB

Today there are some high clouds, so we optimistically head to the sunny Cactus Cliff area. Lisa & Dave go with some of their friends to the tougher Gem Wall, and we head for Cactus to see what we can hit before it gets too hot.

Crynoid Corner, 5.7. Ann leads this again, and I follow. Such a nice dihedral.

Banana Split, 5.10a. I lead this strange half-crack, half-face route. It puts you to some interesting decisions - I’m happy to have done it cleanly. Ann works hard on it on toprope, and makes it up with a few hangs, feeling good about it.

Hey Pueblo Gringo, got a hanger?, 5.10d. A short, fun, 4-bolt route. The crux throws me once.

The sun is on us now, so we wander over to Gem to find the Lisa & Dave, and I’m tempted into one more…

Unknown twisted crack, 5.10a. I forgot to ask the name of this one, but it made a really nice final lead. A hand crack pushes you from one face to the other as it twists through a bulge. My favorite route of the trip, no falls.

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After a pleasant night in our tent at the Cheese Head Ranch, a spread north of Canyon City owned by a climber from Wisconsin who hosts an annual Memorial day climber gathering, we set out with our friends Lisa, Dave, and Dyson (now a year and half old!) for the Menses Prow area, hoping for shade. The shade is there, and most of the other Cheese Head visitors too. For the rest of the blissful morning the shady wall is covered with ropes and climbers.

Period Piece, 5.8. I lead this nice face climb to start the day, and Ann follows.

Turbo Charged, Inter-Cooled Meat Machine, 5.10c/d. I lead this after Lisa, taking a fall from the balancy crux area. A reminder to find the best direction to weight hand holds. I think the newer book must have downgraded this, Lisa was calling it 10a. Seemed just right for me. A couple of scrunched traversy moves, followed by a reachy one.
The B.O.S.S. Method, 5.8. Ann leads this, overcoming some anxiety and finishing nicely on the steep approach to the anchors. I lead it too, playing a little on some of the pocketed face between the two cracks.

Dumb Waiter, 5.9+. A fun lead, one of those routes that just makes you smile. An improbable-feeling bulge provides sinker pockets when you need them.

This Nuts For You, 5.10c. I give Joe a belay on this. It looks like a nasty second clip, so I TR it. After a fall from that second clip move, I start over, change my sequence, and make it up clean. Sharp handjams, but fun.

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I all but forget I have a body sometimes, and even though I inhabit it 24/7, it’s mostly a mystery to me. I know some crude anatomy, but mostly it comprises a vague model of “stuff that’s in there.” My grandfather, a plastic surgeon, used to dazzle me as a child with the long, strange sounding names of my inner parts, but I don’t think I could ever imagine his relationship with human anatomy until today. There’s something about seeing a real human body that makes abstract anatomy suddenly concrete, and the fact that my own body contains the same organs and organisms working away becomes a visceral awareness.

The real human bodies on display here at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science have been preserved by a novel process called plastination that replaces all the water in a body with plastic. The developer of the process, Dr. Gunter von Hagens, has applied it to the bodies of persons who donated their remains for educational display. The artistry and detail of the exhibits is nothing short of astounding.

After seeing this I feel like I’ve taken an important step towards being a good caretaker of a human body, and the things I do to look after my body’s health have taken on a new significance. It’s not a drastic change in habits or behavior, but a change in perspective that I hope will stick with me as long as I have a body to care for.

The Weather Man is the embodiment of the worst kind of small talk, the completely insincere patter of denial in which we coax each other into avoiding any real, meaningful interaction. Basically we see what happens when the Weather Man accepts being small, and thus his small talk becomes sincere. For such a short story arc, I’m impressed how much interest and social observation this film manages to pack in.
Referred by Nehring

My first attempt at high dynamic range, or combining several exposures into one, just to see if I could employ the technique using the GIMP. Not hard at all - the only trick was lining up the different frames, which weren’t exactly the same because I used a micro tripod strapped to my bike handlebars.

Some of Andy Goldsworthy’s art requires a film to appreciate, and this does the job exquisitely. I haven’t come across any other artwork that evokes a sense of time, place, and the rhythms of nature like this does. Some of the interviews seem unnecessary to me - I’m always sympathetic to artists who have difficulty talking about their work, especially when the work expresses so much itself. Still, it might be helpful to some, and the art is wonderful.

I think we all - me, my dad, Ann, and Sarah - wondered in our own way how well a Symphony derived from a soundtrack would succeed. After some digestion, I’ve concluded that it’s highly dependent on how you approach the listening. If you listen to it like a classical symphony it sounds, as Ann put it, like movie music. This may be one of those things you can’t define, but you know it when you hear it. I argued that it’s overt manipulativeness became too apparent without the distraction of the visuals. As I pondered it though, I concluded that manipulation of the listener is part of the essence of music (and maybe all art). So what made this different? It was woven in its conception into a moving image and a story, and without those things there is something palpably missing, and this absence of a movie is immediately perceived and processed into a label of the music.

At times I brought the story, which I know well, into my listening. This transformed the experience entirely, adding power but also an awareness that the story has been reassembled into a completely different format. Knowing the story becomes a mixed blessing, increasing the emotional response, but also creating a narrative expectation that the music doesn’t meet.

Finally, I tried my technique of emptying my mind and seeing what the music stirred up. This produced a dreamlike state in which the problems in my own life took on the overwhelming force and darkness that is ever present in this work, along with the near-despairing determination of those tiny rays of hope that oppose it.

Music that can be experienced in all these ways is surely not a failure. There were some elements that broke the spell for me. I wished that more of Tolkien’s lyrics were used. But as an experiment I’d have to say it shows promise, and may offer novel ways to listen to a symphony.

Maybe the climbers who named these rocks hoped to keep the yuppies away by giving them impolite names or, more likely, got into a competition that included putting up the hardest climbs with the foulest names. The way I see it, the visions conjured up by the names here make the reality the most pleasant of surprises.

My dad, ever a good sport, buys us breakfast and agrees to explore the area with us. Parking a short way off highway 126 on FR 550, we pick an old road to follow after seeing some other climbers tromp off in that direction. Passing a grand view of Asshole Rock, I spot a small formation through some trees and elect to investigate it. The side we approach looks fairly limited, but as I circle around I see I’ve found none other than The Big Butt, and the climbers I saw earlier are here starting up Ho De Do, 5.7+. I circle the formation to notify Dad & Ann, and after much scouting and a short rain storm start up Hymen Trouble, 5.9. After my recent struggles I’m not really feeling up to 5.9 trad climbing, but this particular route has a big pillar behind it that looks like it might serve as a training wheel for the start. It does the trick, and I make a solid lead of this beautiful, if a bit mossy, finger to hand crack. Ann follows in fine form, without the training wheel, while Dad takes pictures. The location is as good as they come for views, with the Cathedral Spires rising up to the north. I do the climb again before we run out of time. This trip has been well worth the trouble, as we can now return and immediately get on a climb.

I should mention that this formation has been retro-bolted, and not very elegantly. It seems like bolt wars could easily ensue. The other climbers there skipped the bolts on their route, and ours was clean. It’s possible to downclimb from the top, so we didn’t use any of the rappel anchors either.

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I can resonate with this little ditty from Sidewinder:

one lone hiker
here I be
all by myself
on the CDT

my friends are all ahead
by a half day
I must getting closer
or so other people say

dreamt the past 2 nights
of playing in the water
think I’d go crazy
if it got much hotter

walkin’ into Cuba
can’t accept no ride
sun beatin’ down upon me
got no place to hide

caught up with the others
while they were chilin’ in a diner
plate of fries & grilled cheese
nothing could be finer

twenty some miles again
not bad for a stroll
but bein’ on the CDT
that’s the way we roll