Picking Up Where I Left Off...

How do I start this back up? I guess it’s best to just pick up where I left off and try not to summarize too much. I must start out by saying that most (more likely all) of the photos in this post were taken and belong to Charlie Becker. Charlie is a freelance photographer hailing out of the Finger Lakes and you can check him out here https://www.facebook.com/charliebeckerfotos and https://instagram.com/charlie_beckerrr/ here.

Charlie and I started our friendship as BMX buddies in Colorado Springs way back around 2009. Ever since I left Colorado in 2010, we have remained in contact and we meet up anytime we are within driving distance of each other. This last time was a little different: I get a random call from Charlie one night while I am in the Keys and we are just b-s-ing and he says “man, what you are doing sounds awesome; I would love to do something like that” and I reply “yeah it’s great, why don’t you join along?” Before we knew it, we found a ridiculously cheap one way flight down to Ft. Lauderdale and I am picking him up from the airport. First we spend the morning in Miami Beach and then take some time to see a relative of his he hasn’t seen in some time. As luck would have it, within 24 hours of Charlie arriving, he ended up in the hospital. We are still unsure what happened (probably 24 hour stomach bug) but that first morning Charlie woke up running for a bathroom and barely able to walk. I took him to the hospital to be safe and they shot him full of fluids and got him back to normal within 2 days and we were ready to resume our journey. We were off to a rough start but had big plans ahead.

At this point I knew the Kentucky climbing season was still a couple weeks away so we really had no direction except chasing around bands in the southeast and Charlie was happy to tag along regardless of what we were doing. First up was a 3 night stand from Papadosio at the New Mountain AVL in Asheville. Didn’t I just see those guys less than a month ago in Tuscon? YES! But they are awesome so why not see them again and three nights in a row? This was Charlie’s first experience at a show like this and he instantly fell in love. I still picture Charlie’s goofie dance every time I play “Wax” by a similar band named Lotus. We hung out in NC for about a week at exactly the same time a chilly cold snap rolled through. We were sleeping in the van in temperatures down in the 20’s and it wasn’t the most pleasant way to introduce Charlie to van life. Finally it was time to head to warmer weather and to see a band called Cursive in Atlanta.

We made the drive over to Atlanta and were welcomed by slightly warmer temps. We attended the Cursive show and befriended a rando who came to see the show solo because his wife was about to have a baby. We ended up driving around aimlessly, late into the night to celebrate the end of this particular chapter in his life and ended up being welcomed back to the hotel he was staying at. This sounds weird but it wasn’t! Of course we were up to mischief and found our way onto the roof of the hotel and goofed around on the completely open top floor. As soon as we got into Georgia, we were already leaving as we had another show to catch in Nashville!

This reminds me of a Michelangelo painting

Between two ferns..ERR..one fern and a caution sign...ZACK!

How often do you get on the roof of a skyscraper?

Before making our way up to Nashville we ended up taking some time to check out Chattanooga and the Smokey Mountains. Lots of driving led to lots of beautiful scenery and sunsets. One of the main reasons I had chosen to live in a van was so that I could remain mobile to chase warm weather and the sun and I was almost successful at avoiding winter for a whole year until on our way to Nashville we were hit by the last big winter storm of the season. Apparently Georgia has no idea how to drive in snow and driving up the highway was like a graveyard of wrecked vehicles on both sides of the road. We even saw an 18 wheeler sticking straight up in the air which was one of the wildest things I have seen on the side of the road. Regardless of the weather, we made it into Nashville on a frigid ice covered night just in time to see Warren Haynes front his band Gov’t Mule with special guest jazz guitarist John Scofield at the Ryman. The Ryman is dubbed the Mother Church of Country Music and has been the home of the Grand Ole Opry. The atmosphere of this venue always brings a special country flavor to the artists performing there. With the conclusion of this show, our music chasing endeavors were coming to a halt for a month or two and it was time to get back into the swing of climbing…at my favorite destination, The Red River Gorge!

The weather still wasn’t quite right for climbing so we ended up bumming at my friend Mark’s house for about a week until we could finally make our way to the Red. I hadn’t seen Mark in almost a year and it felt very warming to be back in Kentucky with all my friends whom I just left less than a year ago. I was starting to get the feeling of completeness now that I had accomplished the goals I had set out to do and make the trip full circle, quite literally.

We spent just under a month in the Red and it was just as much fun as any leg of the trip. I finally was getting back into the groove of climbing and pushing my limits. It was fun to see how my style of climbing has changed over the past year. The Red is known as being a place that isn’t very technically hard but demands a lot of physical endurance so when I left a year ago, some of my best climbing was being done on steep overhanging sport routes but now after a year, I lost a lot of that endurance and instead could put up more mentally and technically difficult traditionally protected climbs. One of the big highlights for me was helping Charlie to put up his first route ever! We both met through BMX and Charlie is still very much involved in the BMX world but I have since gotten away from the sport as I became more and more involved with climbing. I found that I was injuring myself too much on my bike and the older I got the longer and harder it was to get back on your bike after taking a fall. Insert climbing: the community surrounding climbing is very similar to BMX but instead a lot of your time is spent in the wilderness and when you fall, a rope catches you before you hit the ground, hopefully! Anyway, one of Charlie’s big goals on this trip was to climb and he made it happen. It felt awesome to be a part of that and see how much he enjoyed the atmosphere surrounding the Red and the climbing community.

During our stay, we made many new friends and even ran into some old ones. As it turned out, Melissa was in the area with her school for a spring break trip and I was lucky enough to swap some pitches with her and meet some of her friends from back her way. Another unforgettable friend was Gerard. Gerard is from Barcelona, Spain and this was his first trip to America. Gerard, Charlie, and I had an almost unhealthy amount of fun together full of dirty humor and inside jokes but one of the more memorable moments I recall was actually first meeting Gerard. It may be hard to see the humor in this story unless you can see the big picture: keep in mind that we are in the back woods of Kentucky surrounded by the local country-bumpkins and Gerard is from a big city in Spain very much culturally different. Anyway as the story goes, I was looking for a climbing partner one afternoon and was coming up S-O-L so desperately I started cruising the parking lot looking for anyone willing to hold my rope. Out of the corner of my eye I see Gerard sitting on the back bumper of his little tiny Toyota Prius staring down at the dirt looking fairly distraught. I decided he might be in the same predicament as I and that I should go invite him to climb. He instantly perked up as soon as I started talking to him and was extremely relieved to find a climbing partner. He thought he made the biggest mistake by coming to America. He put his job on hold and decided to take a yearlong climbing trip through America; his first stop being the Red because of its popularity of sport routes and it being a main hub of traveling climbers looking for partners. He just arrived to the Red earlier that morning from the airport and missed the daily gathering of partner-less climbers that gaggle together in the back of Miguel’s so he decided to go shopping for food. He ended up in the local town at a Family Dollar mortified at their choices of food and not sure what to think of the locals. On return to Miguel’s he couldn’t find anyone to climb with and thought that his trip was doomed from the start. That’s when I ran into him and we decided to climb. I informed Gerard that Family Dollar is not a grocery store and that the backwoods people of Kentucky are much different people than climbers and even the rest of America. Charlie and I then divulged all the American culture we could lay down on Gerard and we ended up having an incredible week and a half of climbing together.

Ridiculously good climb and ridiculously good pic. Thanks Charlie!

I wish I could tell every story in here but most of the stories need to be told face to face heh. I’ll just say that it felt so good to be back in the Red and getting to climb with all my old friends, Angela, Mark, Dan, Mandy, Charles, Sarah, Benton, Blake, Andy….and anyone else I might have missed. Louisville is the closest thing I have had to a home in a long time and I really appreciate everyone opening their homes and hearts to me even after abandoning ship a year ago!

Picking Up Where I Left Off...

Turn and Face the Strange, Changes

Please Stand By!

“The summit is for the ego, the journey is for the soul.”