As you know, there's not much we like more than movies and adventure travel, so when we heard about the Reel Rock Film Tour, we were naturally pretty excited.
A traveling film festival devoted to flicks about rock climbing and other adventure sports, Reel Rock is screening movies about bouldering in South Africa, rafting through the Grand Canyon and a bio on legendary aerialist Dean Potter.
The tour sticks to its roots, kicking off Wednesday night in the mountain town of Crested Butte, Colorado, with a grand opening September 10 in Boulder and then continues over the next two months across the country, hitting up mostly smaller and mid-size cities, like Santa Cruz, Boise and Asheville.
Based just two hours from Anchorage on the Matanuska Glacier, the company offers glacier tours, adventure trips and, most importantly, ice climbing! Every day during the summer months, tours depart at 10 am and last about six hours. Best of all, no experience is necessary, as they'll tailor your tour to fit what you can handle.
It will only set you back $130 per person and that includes all the gear you'l need. You probably should bring your own sunscreen, sunglasses, gloves and some warm clothes. Once you get good, Mica also offers an advanced class where they'll mix things up and get you climbing some seriously wild ice.
Jackson Hole is famous for being the adopted home of VP Dick Cheney, being on the fringe of Wyoming and not having a home for sale for less a couple million. While these three facts may deter some, it's also a mecca for American climbers and average people who want to be guided to the top of the Grand Teton, one of North America's coveted mountains.
Lucky for those with little or no climbing experience, Exum Mountain Guides has been in business in the Jackson Hole area for 79 years, offering more expertise and successful summits of the Grand than anyone else. This isn't for the faint of heart or those inspired from watching those Everest reality shows. If you decide to tackle this in your lifetime it's time to take out your polishing cloth and get those cojones their shiniest.
Trips up the Grand can be arranged in private or group trips, and the Exum guides are always mindful of your skill level, safety being their top priority.
French stuntman Alain Robert picked an awesome target for his latest publicity stunt: The Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building in Midtown Manhattan. We can't think of a better way to get some ink!
"Spiderman" scaled the entire 52-story skyscraper without any sort of special equipment; the cops corralled him on the roof and peacefully led him away.
While we think it's pretty amazing that Robert did the whole thing without even a rope and harness, a police officer was less than impressed, given the building's latticed facade:
To be honest, looking at this building, you don't have to be a professional. This building is like a ladder.
Justin Votos and Matthew Pitts didn't have a GPS device when they went climbing on Mt. Hood earlier this week, but that didn't keep them from stumbling upon a geocache that would lead rescuers to the stranded duo. Luckily, the climbers, who were stuck on the mountain after bad weather set in, had a cell phone and could call up authorities to describe the cache, which led to their backcountry rescue.
Most people explicitly go hunting for the hidden treasure stashes using handheld GPS receivers, but since all the boxes are listed on the geocaching website, rescuers could pinpoint Votos and Pitts' location from afar. It only took a couple hours to find the pair once rescuers knew their coordinates.
Lesson learned? There are two really. First, don't forget your cell phone and your own GPS receiver when hiking off-trail or in challenging conditions. Second, Geocaching is even cooler than we thought.
As long as it's not flying out of a volcano, rock doesn't burn. So there's still plenty of it to climb in the recently scorched San Diego area. With year-round sunshine and all classes of climbing available, there's no better way to do your part to inject some tourist dollars into the SoCal reconstruction effort.
We caught up with San Diego's Front Range Climbing mid-ascent, giving us the latest from their badass version of the mobile office: a cellphone and a backpack. The outfit's main stopping (gripping?) grounds of Mission Gorge was spared the kind of scorching it got back in 2003. Four years on, the burnt forest has bounced back with fresh greenery--it's an ideal backdrop for a day's climb.
The rock at Mission Gorge offers a variety of surfaces and routes to match all tastes in climbing--boulders, cracks and 185 leads and topropes. (In other words, you'll end the day satisfied.)
Front Range San Diego fields five guides for all classes of climbs. Also on offer are team building exercises like interpretive hikes and GPS Scavenger Hunts. Sure beats doing trust falls in the break room with Gary from accounting.
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by BS
