Go Light, Go Fast by CAMP

Next COSMIC race: San Juan Rando - Durango Mountain Resort, CO - April 23

Join us April 23 for the San Juan Randonee race. In years past this has been one of the most technical courses on the COSMIC schedule and this year won’t fall short. With the previous winning time of 1 hour 40 minutes and an elevation gain of 4,200 feet competitors are showing up knowing that this course will put their endurance and climbing skills to the full test and bust the quads on the technical descents. Learn more at the COSMIC website HERE.

ps. This is the second to last race of the season!

 

 

Next COSMIC race: The Five Peaks - Breckenridge, CO - April 9

Join us at the Five Peaks Race in Breckenridge on April 9 and put your endurance to the test! This is the second season Breckenridge will be hosting a COSMIC race and with the newly routed course, athletes will have to pound out 10,000 vertical feet and summit 5 different peaks while climbing, hiking and skinning the Breckenridge resort and surrounding Ten Mile Range. Find more information on the COSMIC website HERE

 

Access Fund secures Jailhouse Rock

The Access Fund Land Conservation Campaign in correlation with the climbing community has completed the initial fundraising for the Jailhouse Rock climbing area near Sonora, California. The Access Fund announced that due to fundraising and climber donations they exceeded the initial goal raising over $49,000. 

These funds will be used to create a new access point, trailhead and parking area as well as ensuring long-term conservation for the area to help keep it open.  Also upon the request of the landowners for a toilet facility the Access Fund has applied for a grant to help cover a portion of these costs.

As the year progresses the Access Fund will continue working with the local climbers to open the new trailhead and parking area and will still be accepting donations, which will be put towards the long-term upkeep of the area. You can find more information on Jailhouse rock and follow the progress on the Access Fund’s website here.

 

Blake Herrington shares the First Free Ascent of 'A Fine Piece'

This blog is called go light go fast. It is designed to showcase the light and fast superhuman endeavors of the world's best adventure athletes and, in turn, analyze how the gear we use promises to affect our performance. Blake Herrington, one of our US athletes, came up with a nice caveat during his recent trip to Patagonia. It is important to be fast, and traveling light is tantamount. But it is also important to approach climbing, especially on the big peaks, with an open mind. In other words, one has to be flexible. We hope you enjoy this summary from Blake about his recent trip to Patagonia where he bagged the first ascent of one new route, the first free ascent of another, and visited a towered region above the town of Bariloche where the team cragged around on the beautiful spires. Here is a summary from Blake about their long hike and short climb for the first FFA of A Fine Piece:

Scott Bennett and I both were the fortunate recipients of Mountain Fellowship Grants from the American Alpine club, which provided a few hundred dollars to help offset the cost of our trip to Patagonia. It was in the peaks surrounding Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre where we may have gone 'light', but it was also going slow that actually paid off.

Our primary goal was to climb the unrepeated 1999 route 'A Fine Piece', which rises from the Marconi Glacier, adjacent to the massive continental ice sheet, and climbs the West Pillar of Cerro Pollone. This route had never been free climbed, or followed to the summit. From atop the peak's West Pillar, we hoped to cover new ground to the top, and continue on a traversing carry-over, tagging the East summit, and finding a way down onto the glacier between Pollone and Fitz Roy.

The plan started out well, with a projected 5 days of clear weather. But as we began our approach, lingering illness and unsettled conditions had us continually re-evaluating our itinerary. We required good weather to attempt a FFA of the route, and ideally we'd even give the pillar a day to melt and dry off first. After three days of approaching (instead of the one we'd expected), Scott and I finally stood, well-rested and ready, with enough food for two more days. And although we were down one ice axe (river crossing mishap) and 500 feet too high (route finding mishap), spirits were running high. 

A normal backpacker's load for a 6 day hiking trip is well in excess of 40 pounds. But we were not just backpacking. We had found ourselves on a 6 day hiking trip with climbing thrown in as well. In addition to the necessities of sleep and survival, we carried 2 ropes, 2 pairs of crampons, a full rack, rock shoes, helmets, and an ice tool. For us to succeed, all this gear had to be as light as possible.

Early on the morning of day 4, we powered down most of our remaining food and finally were able to make the switch from light-and-slow to lighter-and-faster. Three rappels and a speedy glacier crossing got us to the base of the pillar and 13 stellar pitches up to 5.11d got us to 'Hotel Pollone' - a classic alpine bivy ledge overlooking the ice cap. We had initially hauled one pack and followed with another, but as the climbing got easier and our packs were destroyed more and more by the coarse stone, we switched to both climbing with a pack. I can honestly say that I am not a strong enough climber to have done this route in the free style we were able to maintain with the older and heavier gear of a generation ago. Whether a 23 gram Nano carabiner or a single 10oz shared bivy sack, having lightweight logistics on our side allowed us to free the route, complete the traverse and get off down the other side just as clouds and rain began to move in off the continental ice cap. 

And although our final rappels onto the Fitz Norte glacier were made through an active waterfall, the added pounds from soaking wet ropes (and almost everything else) were made a little more manageable by the greatest human advantage of all ... adrenaline and sense of accomplishment.

Read more about Blake's trip on his BLOG.

Blake At A Hanging Belay 

 

Bivy Site 

 

Blake On Route  

A Reward Ontop of 'A Fine Piece'  

Night sky over the Pollone Group

Team Crested Butte Owns the Power of Four

Members of Team Crested Butte, the elite racing team we sponsor, snagged the top spots in the Power of Four COSMIC race. Check out their BLOG for full details. Congrats team!

A Crusher Weekend - Part 1

I had the opportunity to live the dream a few weekends ago when I settled a vendetta with a new mixed route near Redstone, CO and then accompanied our athlete Rob Pizem as he established a new line on a tower in the Colorado National Monument. For me, climbing is first and foremost about adventure and exploration. Secondarily, it is about strength of body and mind and realizing demanding goals. I describe this particular weekend as living the dream because it combined all of these aspects in a striking way. I left for Redstone on Friday evening and met up with Rob at a buddy’s house in Carbondale. He had sick fajitas coming off the grill and we spent time around the table catching up. Rob and I drove a half hour down to Redstone in the morning. In Coal Creek Canyon, Duane Raleigh and Jeff Jackson, publisher and editor respectively of Rock & Ice Magazine, have been establishing amazing new mixed lines on a West-facing wall that rarely sees ice bonding in any sort of meaningful way. This year, for some odd reason, the ice was rad. It ranges from a quarter inch to four inches thick and bonds to the porous red conglomerate remarkably well. The route I was after is called Silver Surfer. It is an M9 established by Duane Raleigh that travels over slabby stone with few features, through a short roof, then to a sheet of thin glory ice to the anchors. The bottom third is all about begging for picks to stay put. The roof requires a sketchy stein pull between two slabs of rock with no features to catch the pick or hammer, then campusing up over an ice bulge. The upper third takes one short screw. I had tried to onsight the route the previous weekend during the Redstone Winterfest and got tossed from a precarious mantle in the very worst place to take a fall on the entire route. It was a 35 footer that bounced me off a ledge, flipped me sideways and sent me splatting into the slab below. Remarkably, I was totally fine, climbed up again with one tool (the other was stuck in the ice 40 feet above me) and finished the route. I top-roped the route that day with relative ease, but when I went for a redpoint burn, the ice had rotted to a point where the picks would not stick and and crampon points just sheared right out. The red stone on which these routes form up radiates heat and I had discovered that these are morning routes, best get them done before noon or the ice will probably be rotten.

 

I was lucky the next weekend when I showed up and the ice had crept about four inches lower offering me a pick placement at the second bolt that would ultimately allow me to get through the crux where the ice had rotted out the last weekend. It wasn’t much, but it was enough! I fired the route on the first go, but it was not without its trial and tribulations. The conditions were downright wintery. We post-holed up to our armpits (I am 6’2”) and snow covered much of the route requiring me to spend time on route scraping off slabs to find the point placements I had used the week before. The ice had also formed up in such a way that about a half inch of junk ice covered the small amount of good ice below. I had to make extra kicks to make sure my crampons would penetrate the good ice instead of just shearing out of the junk ice. If I kicked too hard, the ice below shattered out. Not hard enough and I would slip out of the crud ice. Nonetheless, I sent and bagged the second ascent! Duane Raleigh was filming so I even have a few good stills to document the occasion here.

 

M9 is one thing when you are climbing out a juggy roof to a curtain. It is another thing entirely when the route feels more like a 5.12 slab and the slightest tweak of a tool means you are coming off. I think the new routes in Coal Creek Canyon are some of the best mixed climbs I have ever seen because they are true mixed routes from bottom to top. They are unclimbable without the trickle of ice that bonds to the undulations in the rock, but they come together as beautifully delicate and conditions-dependent gems when they can be climbed. They offer a sense of improbability that is becoming increasingly rare with the advent of bolts and manufactured ice. Truly gifts of nature that pale only in comparison to the route I would be a part of the next day … TO BE CONTINUED.

 

 

Fabrizio Zangrilli visits CAMP Headquarters in Premana Italy

Working closely with our athletes to further the testing and development of new products is a point of pride and joy at CAMP. Of course, we are gear geeks and it is fun to work on gear with like-minded hard asses. Our athletes from around the world have been an instrumental part of our lightweight revolution and they are intrical to the field-testing part of our R&D. Just because a concept is good on paper does not mean it is ready for K2!  

One of our US athletes, Fabrizio Zangrilli, had the chance to work for several days in our Italian headquarters during his recent three month trip to Europe. We stayed in close contact during his stay because it was an opportunity for CAMP USA to have one of the world's leading alpinists dig deep on the gear and truly analyze its applicability to climbers in the US and worldwide. He came away with the same impression we have -- that CAMP is the world's leading innovator of climbing gear and it is stunning how much work our small but elite staff of engineers is capable of producing each season.

You can read his full lively account of his visit on his blog HERE.

 

Tow Truck Carabiner

We get stories from customers on their unique uses for our gear. We love these!  Here's a recent one.  Although we don't design the gear for this type of use, it does lend credence to a phrase we use all the time to demonstrate the overbuild we all love with climbing gear, "this stuff is built to hold cars, man."  Literally we find out from one of our customers who was nice enough to share his story with us.

In an email received from a customer:

So I have a story that involved your climbing gear. My family has a cabin near Leavenworth, Washington. I like to drive my Subaru Impreza places it shouldn't go - like snowmobile trails. Today I got stuck and high centered in a snow bank. Four guys worked on digging it out for an hour. After that failed, we drove to my cabin and got some fishing rope (like they use to secure crab pots in AK) and a chain. We attached the chain to my trailer hitch, the rope to the chain, and the other end of the rope to a four wheel drive truck with chains. I then used the orange biner from the Orbit quickdraw to attach the rope to the four wheel drive truck. So it was integral to the tow system, bearing the full load, probably in excess of 4,000-5,000 pounds but probably much more than that. We pulled my car probably 300 feet backwards out of deep snow, and into and out of a ditch. The biner held up great. It did get slightly elongated so the gate doesn't close (I won't be using it anymore - don't worry!). Just thought I'd share. Everyone was impressed that the biner held that massive load with little damage. Thanks guys. 

 

THE NEW 2011 GEAR IS NOW AVAILABLE!

We are excited to announce the release of our new products for Spring/Summer 2011. We will be releasing the long awaited, highly anticipated hyperlight full size Photon carabiners and draws, new colors and options for the popular Orbit line and much, much more. Drop into the WEBSITE to see all of the new gear.

 

The Access Fund needs climbers input

As climbers we all have a responsibility to protect and care for the places we love to climb and the environments surrounding these areas. The Access Fund is asking for the support and response of climbers in regards to the National Park Service's January announcement of an updated draft for its wilderness management policies.  This policy talks about a generalized ruling on placing fixed anchors in iconic climbing areas such as Yosemite, Zion, and Rocky Mountain National Park.  The Access Fund understands that there needs to be some form of regulation on placing fixed anchors but does not believe that it should be a system wide policy.  Instead, they believe and we agree, that this is something each park should have control over and it should be based on local commmunity input.  Please take a moment to offer your thoughts before it is too late.

Learn more and offer your comments HERE