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A Climbing Conversation with Steve House and Josh Wharton
6.8k Plays10 months ago
In the latest episode of the Uphill Athlete podcast, Steve chats with long time friend and climbing partner, Josh Wharton. Josh is a man of all trades in climbing and a highly accomplished climber. Steve and Josh dig into the origins of Josh’s climbing dating back generations to his families experiences in the UK. The two discuss how his family’s principles around climbing influenced Josh’s career and passions. They bounce around the climbing areas that have been most meaningful to Josh and how he grew through the lessons he learned on the walls. Two legends of the climbing world reminisce on past experiences and how their learnings can be applied to future generations.
If you'd like to learn more about Uphill Athlete, visit uphillathlete.com or write to us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Travel Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the uphill athlete podcast. My name is Steve Haus and I will be your host today with my good friend, Josh Wharton. Welcome to the podcast, Josh. Thanks for having me, Steve. So you are on a trip with your wife and daughter. Tell us a little bit about that and the significance of it and where we are. We're sort of on our annual European
00:00:29
Speaker
Sport climbing slash cultural trip. We're in Brienne Saint France. It's been lovely. We've been, we spent a couple of days in Paris at the start of the trip and then in sport climbing and touring around and enjoying ourselves. Do you always do a trip with your family? Yeah, we usually try to do one every year. And like, I think it's a really good way for my daughter here to get some cultural experience and see the world a little bit and
00:00:57
Speaker
wife and I love to travel as well. Where's Hara been so far? She has been to Europe seven times in her nine-year-old life. How many times were you in Europe when you were nine? Zero. Zero, yeah. I'm not sure that she knows how good she has it. But yeah, she's been to Sicily.
00:01:24
Speaker
Spain a few times, various places, UK, Sardinia, and now France. Nice. What's next for her? I actually think that next summer we might go to Peru. Wow. That's a big step up from France to Peru. Yeah. I feel like she has gotten an experience of seeing this sort of like Disneyland vacation cultural tour.
00:01:51
Speaker
So I'd love for her to go to a place that has some real poverty and is a little harder around the edges. And I feel like she's finally getting old enough that that might be a worthwhile experience for her. So and also the mountains in Peru are sort of benign and kind also as well. So it seems like a good mix of that. Good mountains, good weather.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah. A little different cultural. Yeah. Still in the developing world. And, you know, she'll see, I mean, going to Lima in the Peruvian winter feels a little apocalyptic. It's so cloudy and dusty and dirty and third world bits of it. And so I just think that would be a cool growth experience to share with her and show her that it's not all like, you know, sugar plums and lollipops everywhere. Lemonade Springs. Yeah.
Climbing Philosophy and Experiences
00:02:45
Speaker
So let's zoom out just a little bit and I want to frame you up in your career as a climber and a little bit of our relationship as well. You know, tell me a little bit about, you know, what is important to you as a climber in your own words. Yeah. So I think, um,
00:03:11
Speaker
My climbing experience is really diverse. Maybe the story of my climbing is that there is no one story. I've kind of like dabbled in all the genres and found them all rewarding in their own way. And since I started climbing 25 years ago now, I always kind of wanted to be the best climber I could be, but in
00:03:36
Speaker
every genre of climbing. To me, the best climber was somebody who could do everything well. You could put them at the base of any pitch and they could get the rope up with some style. And that's kind of what I've tried to do with my climbing and where I've gone into a whole bunch of different genres and all sorts of different things. When you say genre, what do you mean? I mean like alpinism, sport climbing, bouldering, trad climbing, a bit of everything, essentially.
00:04:04
Speaker
Bouldering and alpinism are pretty opposite. Unless you boulder in Rocky Mountain National Park, in which case they might have a lot of similarities. Yeah, fair. But you know, one thing I've learned through doing this for the years is that like, the genres really kind of are connected in lots of ways. Like you might say alpinism is way different than bouldering, but
00:04:26
Speaker
A lot of times the cruxes of big alpine roots are kind of like boulder problems. There'll be some tiny steep wall that you need to figure out how to get over on this giant mountain and not be a boulder problem. Yeah. Yeah. The whole route comes down to 15 feet of climbing. Yeah. That's very true. Very true. So you've been climbing for 25 years. You're roughly early forties now. So
00:04:52
Speaker
Where has climbing taken you so far on this journey and what are some of those experiences that stick out in your mind for you as meaningful or personally rewarding or personally terrifying? How do you want to categorize that? Yeah, I have a tendency to get excited about a place and then return to that place over and over again.
00:05:20
Speaker
because I feel like to get some level of mastery of a place you have to really know it. So those places for me through the years have been the Black Canyon in Colorado. That was going to be my first guess. Yeah, tons of times there. And then Patagonia is a place I spent a lot of time. And then also Pakistan is a place where I've been on a bunch of trips, although I wouldn't say I really mastered that one, although I did go there quite a lot.
00:05:49
Speaker
That's a big place, hard to master. Yeah. And then, you know, dabbled in other places like the Canadian Rockies and, you know, other climbing areas, Peru and places like that. Yeah. So tell me about what the climbing is like in the Black Canyon. If for the audience, it wouldn't be familiar. What does that mean to you with climbing the Black? Yeah, the Black is a deep gorge in Southwest Colorado.
00:06:18
Speaker
cliffs from maybe 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet tall. And you walk down to the base of the route, and then you climb out. And as a result, it's sort of committing because there aren't a lot of fixed anchors. So you can't just propel from the route very easily. The route finding is kind of tricky because there's lots of weird features. It's known for having some loose rock. So in some ways, it kind of mimics alpine climbing because you have to
00:06:47
Speaker
have good route flying skills, you have to deal with funky protection. They're often hot or cold, you know, it's just a, it's kind of an adventurous place to go rock climbing. But it's, it's sort of a smaller version of big wall free climbing, I would say. Yeah. With an alpine flavor. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. And I had a really cool, interesting relationship with the Black Yang in the way that I found it because
00:07:15
Speaker
The very first trip I did to Pakistan was with Mike Pennings and Johnny Cobb. And I was 19, like total newbie. We went to the Trango Valley. I couldn't, this is pre 9-11. I couldn't probably have picked Pakistan out of a map before we left. Went there. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:07:35
Speaker
So, okay. You went there, but why did you go like, how did you meet Johnny and Mike and how did it end up that you were 19 years old? I also went to Pakistan when I was 19. I think that's not, that's one of the things that we share and it's also a little bit unusual. So I want to hear how that came to be. Yeah. So that came to be because my good buddy, Brian McMahon that I was climbing with at the time was roommates with Johnny Cobb and a couple of other guys.
00:08:01
Speaker
I didn't make that connection between Johnny and Brian. We were all students at CU, but they were a few years older than me. Johnny was a senior. Shout out to Brian because he listens to our podcast. Okay. All right. Hey, Brian. Johnny asked Brian if he wanted to go. Brian asked me because I was his primary client partner and I said, hell yeah.
00:08:24
Speaker
I'll go, even though I have no idea, you know, what I was in for. We climbed the diamond a couple times. We felt like we're ready for Pakistan. Yeah, it was just a hilarious experience because we of course thought we were going on an expedition.
00:08:38
Speaker
So I took like all my heaviest stuff. I had one of those Columbia jackets.
Traditional vs. Modern Climbing Ethics
00:08:43
Speaker
It's like the three in one that you zip together with like a fleece and then a puffy and a layer and like plastic boots that I bought at the sports recycler and just random stuff, heavy, like a 80 liter backpack. And Johnny and Mikey kind of just blew us away because they climbed like a new route on Shipton or they repeated a route on Shipton Spire.
00:09:08
Speaker
You were on Cats here, you were on Hana Block, and Brian and I did some little things. But I was just like, wow, that looks amazing and fun. And that really changed the course of my life. And how this ties back to the Black Canyon is that we had to go home early to start school again. And he said, go into the garage and you'll find my Black Canyon binder there. And you can make a photocopy of it and you guys should go climbing in black.
00:09:38
Speaker
And that's how I started that relationship. For those that really want to go down in the weeds and have a little obscure reference, there's a really iconic cover of the American Alpine Journal from that year. I believe it's Mike on the top of cats here or one of those roots that they did and he's wearing like
00:10:01
Speaker
I don't know what he's wearing, like sweatpants and he has no shirt on. He's taken his shirt off and it's like kind of tucked into the back of his harness or something. And you know, I remember seeing that and this is the American Alpine Journal, right? And these guys went climbing in the Karakorm and there's this picture of this dude with like, he's not wearing a helmet.
00:10:27
Speaker
He's got like a harness, some like track pants, a t-shirt sort of stuck in his harness like pistol Barolo style. And he's like, you know, Mike Penning's on top of the new route, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was just like, what? Yeah. Yeah. That was the thing. And as a young college kid and a new climber, I was completely inspired by that. Like it just seemed like they were having a lot of fun. They were badass climbers. They would do things like take flutes up the route, you know,
00:10:56
Speaker
And Vivian extra night, just cause it was enjoyable and pretty up there. And I was just like, wanted to do that and thought that was inspiring. And it seemed like the place to do it and to get that good was the black, according to Mike and John. Well, I think that they, uh, they had a good idea about what worked because it obviously works for them. Those two both spent a lot of time down there.
00:11:20
Speaker
And at the time there was this real like narrative that, you know, when is Yosemite going to get taken to the big mountains? And this idea that Yosemite climbing would somehow transfer to places like the Karakormen Trango. That had been going on for decades already, right? And the reality was like, well, there's not two bolt anchors up all the routes in the Trango Valley the way that there are two bolt anchors up.
00:11:43
Speaker
the nose. So like all the speed climbing tactics and all the stuff that people were practicing in Yosemite in a place with great weather and good rock and all those things weren't really transferring in the same way that the Black Canyon transferred to a place like Patagonia or Backstand. How many people do you think made that connection? Not a lot, actually. Not a lot.
00:12:10
Speaker
Because there's something a little bit masochistic about climbing the black too. And there's a... Can I just say that I think at that time in particular, and to a certain extent today,
00:12:24
Speaker
People didn't talk about climbing the black. It was sort of like Fight Club. Yeah. Do not talk about Fight Club. First rule of Fight Club, don't talk about Fight Club. First rule of climbing the Black Canyon, don't talk about climbing the Black Canyon. Just kind of go do it. And it's kind of on the down low. And you know, now there's guidebooks and all this, but before there weren't even guidebooks. And then for a while there was one guidebook that was really bad.
00:12:48
Speaker
and no topos, just like old school descriptions, some bad photos with some big wide lines, drawing up some really big faces. So, you know, how much of that kind of, I almost think of that as like the pirate mentality of just kind of flying under the radar of conventional wisdom, but yet figuring out something really important.
00:13:15
Speaker
Is that what Johnny and Mike were about back then? Or am I glorifying it? Yeah, I mean, I don't think they would have put it in those terms. I think they just enjoyed climbing the black and it just, you know, so happened that the skills transferred very, very well in that mentality.
00:13:33
Speaker
And I just think the mentality of the sorts of people who enjoy climbing the black, if you enjoy that kind of adventure, but also you have to be a pretty high level rock climber for the harder routes, you know, that just transferred really well to what, you know, things like the Trango Valley. Right. Right. So you, so you're 19, you come back.
00:13:55
Speaker
you've got the binder, you and Brian, or you've got a copy of the binder, which at that time was like gold, right? Like that wasn't, that information was not easy to come by. And so you guys, then what happens? So we have a few days before semester starts. So we get in the car and we drive to the black in August.
00:14:22
Speaker
having no clue how hot it is in the black and summer and we climb the scenic cruise with a shared half liter Nalgene. Oh my god. Just parched out of our minds.
00:14:37
Speaker
Luckily we're relatively fit in decent climbers so we don't die up there if heat stroke and get it done. But that was a real wake up call to like, oh yeah, you can have some suffering and some adventures here. Yeah. And for those that aren't aware of the scenic cruises, I would say it's a classic
00:14:54
Speaker
intro route yeah it's sort of like the classic 510 plus yeah i mean when i lived in southwest colorado and people came and visited me and wanted to go climbing the black that's why it would take them because it is an amazing route honestly like yeah it's great climbing but it is also
00:15:11
Speaker
facing due south. Even on a cold day, it's hotter now. And it's a route that gets underestimated too. You know, you think, oh, it's a 10 plus, but it's actually like a fair bit of climbing on it, wandering, you know, it's not just a straightforward romp.
00:15:27
Speaker
No, those pitches are sustained. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So now you guys have climbed a starter test piece, I would call it, in the black. And then from there, I just started going to the black on a regular basis and just sort of had a onset goal of doing all the routes. Yeah. And that's how I was with many places where I climbed Neo in college, I climbed in Eldo a lot, and I just wanted to do all the routes.
00:15:57
Speaker
Do them all. Um, for no other good reason, really. Did you care about like all the five star routes or did you also care about all the negative stars? I would do the negative star ones too. For me, it was often, I, you know, I, I'd learned to climb in a really traditional way and been influenced by my dad who was a climber in the fifties and sixties. So it was a very like work your way to the grades. So, you know, it was like, I want to do every five 10 in Eldo. And then it was, I want to do every five 11 and I would really.
00:16:26
Speaker
go through them very systematically trying to do a new one every time i went out that's interesting because that's that was what i was in inoculated with as well like you know you can't be you can't try five eleven roots until you've done like all the five tens and now i feel like there's this
00:16:51
Speaker
cultural norm where we encourage people to just skip right through to whatever their natural limit at that moment is and Not do all that work to kind of get there and I feel like something important is lost in that Kind of shortening of the apprenticeship for sure. I think I
00:17:16
Speaker
I feel very fortunate that I took that approach because I got to have so many experiences and go climb so many routes that I might not have done today had I spent climbing. There are like lots of cool routes I went and did.
00:17:33
Speaker
were great trips with friends or to really beautiful places or had something, some learning experience or growth experience from them that I think a lot of younger climbers in today's climbing culture miss out on because they're just jumping to the hard thing and that's changed a lot. I think that it held me back physically and technically to some degree because I spent way too much time you know
00:17:59
Speaker
getting my head around 510 where I could have been climbing harder or whatever it was at the time. I mean, arguably you could have been doing both, right? Yeah. But I do think that that's something that's changed a lot culturally. And I actually think about it quite a bit in the front range because there's all this talk about how standards have risen.
00:18:20
Speaker
and climbing in general. And I'm not really totally sure that they have risen. I just think it's that people are willing to go try something much, much harder and spend a whole bunch more time working at that one specific pinnacle achievement thing than they used to be in climbing. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your father's, let's say, upbringing in climbing and how that affected you.
00:18:50
Speaker
So my dad grew up in Liverpool, England. Very traditional. Yeah. And had two parents who were in this sort of hill walking and mountaineering.
00:19:04
Speaker
in a bit of rock climbing. So I guess my grandparents were climbing. I have my grandfather's old climbing journal, which has like his list of climbs and some topos and their roots from the 30s and 40s. And my dad's godfather growing up was a guy named Scotty Guyer who owned a guide service in Wales. So my dad would go up and work in the summers for his godfather guiding through his teenage years.
00:19:34
Speaker
And my dad went to eventually move to the States to go to school at Princeton. He was 18 and wound up just immigrating to the US, but he climbed a lot of the Schwangunks in like late fifties, early sixties. And then got married, had a couple of kids. I've had two half brothers that are much older than me and kind of just fell out of climbing, you know, stepped away from it.
00:20:03
Speaker
but then would take me kind of once a year. Basically we'd go do some like super easy 5.2 and actually we went on a trip to Wales when I was a kid and we climbed some really easy routes when I was maybe 10 or 11. So that was kind of my influence from him was very old school. And those that aren't familiar with the culture
00:20:27
Speaker
And I'm speaking somewhat out of turn here as a non-British citizen, but I would say that having climbed in the UK and especially in Scotland, that there is a heavy emphasis on what I would call traditional climbing values of, you know, trad climbing in the sense of, you know, placing your own gear,
00:20:52
Speaker
traditional in the sense of you don't leave anything. The original leave no trace ethic, they used to have fights about chalk use, I remember back in the day. So that was even considered unethical, let alone sticky rubber boots and all these other.
00:21:13
Speaker
other things. And I think that that still permeates the culture, I would say. And so I can imagine your dad climbing in the 50s and 60s and in Wales, which apparently I've never been, has amazing rock climbing and is also very traditional.
00:21:32
Speaker
He must have and how did he pass out along to you in terms of the values? I mean he took your climbing Introduced it. I know that that wasn't originally your love as a teenager And
00:21:48
Speaker
How did that happen? How did you aspire to be more of a, let's say, traditionalist? In an era, I mean, you're about 10 years younger than I am, so by the time you were 18, sport climbing was a real thing in the United States. You could have easily gone much more in that direction, given your age.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I mean, well, I grew up when I first started climbing on my own, it was in New Hampshire and New England. And so there wasn't really that much access to sport climbing. Yeah. And it was top roping mostly with my friends at small crabs, like the Tuckaway and this cliff called tumble down Dick near the school that I went to. Um, my dad actually didn't have a lot of influence on my climbing ethics and things like that. Okay. What he really had more of an influence was like,
00:22:37
Speaker
a conservative approach to it. I remember my dad telling me that his entire climbing career, which I guess probably was only like 20 years from when he was a kid until he was 30 or something, he fell twice.
00:22:51
Speaker
So if I would come home and be like, oh, we tried this hard route and we fell off, he would say things like, maybe you should try something easier. Like he came from this school of like, you don't fall. You're very much within your abilities, bowling on a bike around your waist kind of thing. So he just wasn't like up to speed on modern climbing and the approach to it really at all, even though he looked at climbing magazines and stuff. So he didn't really like influence me in terms of
00:23:20
Speaker
ethics or anything, you just sort of guided me down this conservative path and that whole like, take all the grade until you move up mentality.
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah. So I'd like to kind of pull together that thread that we sort of started with your first trip to Pakistan, the Black Canyon, and what we began with.
Family and Climbing Safety
00:23:43
Speaker
Here we are in France. We just went to a beautiful crag today, came back, had an amazing meal. You know, you're here with your wife and nine-year-old daughter.
00:23:57
Speaker
How does that, where's that, how does that, how do you close that, that loop? I mean, I know I'm, I'm the 20 year loop, right? But so what, what is the thread here? What is the, what is the, what is the, what is the constant for you?
00:24:16
Speaker
I don't know that there has been a real constant other than that, like the bottom line is that I've just really loved climbing in all its way and whatever form it takes, I really love it. And, you know, the reason we're here sport climbing is because sport climbing has become kind of like, I feel like once you have all the experience and have
00:24:41
Speaker
all the sort of like technical skills with gear and footwork and all those things you build through the years with all that stuff I was talking about doing every 510 and doing every 511, then really like it comes down to, at least for me, because I feel like I've always been pretty good mentally, then it comes down to a lot of like physical stuff. So now like I spend 90% of my time sport climbing and that feeds my other climbing and I can translate that to things like
00:25:05
Speaker
hard alpinism or guy tooling or climbing. And so I spent a lot of my time doing that and it's safe and it's fun.
00:25:13
Speaker
And you could do it with your family and friends. Yes, exactly. I think that that's a great answer. One of the things that I interact with are uphill athletes all the time. And one of the constants that I see with them is it would answer in that same exact way. They would just say, I just love it.
00:25:38
Speaker
You know, it doesn't really particularly matter which genre or whether we're talking about how dude mountaineering trip or you know An ultra or something, but you know that they have would all have a think a similar answer. So I think that's very Relatable and universal. Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah, so that makes sense. So once you have all of those
00:26:04
Speaker
all of the experience. So it's just, I think that that's the best thing, the judgment. You have the judgment to make the right decisions, but then your limiting factor always comes down to your technical limits because that's what you can, as long as it's safe, you can always push. Right. And I think, yeah, all that experience gives you a time to be able to judge, you know, whether it's perceived danger or actual danger.
00:26:32
Speaker
Um, and then I also think pushing, having a high technical level. And this, I think is something that people don't always recognize, gives you some margin just in the same way that, you know, your climbing skill really is your best piece of protection in a lot of ways. So, you know, if you climb five 13.
00:26:54
Speaker
5.10 with poor protection is not going to feel as dangerous or as intense as it would if you are only a five solid 5.11 climber. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's very true. And I think that one of the things that I also take from this is the difference between
00:27:16
Speaker
I think in alpinism, sometimes the pushing alpinism forward, let's say, are trying hard, hard roots in the big mountains. The technical piece is sometimes confused with the risk piece. And I've always made, in my mind, for myself, a real distinction. Like risk tolerance is not something you can really push.
00:27:42
Speaker
Right? Like, especially with objective hazard with like, I don't know, a CERAC or bad weather or whatever, like something that's out of your control. That's just something you have to know and understand and be able to have a conversation about with yourself and with your partner as to where you're
00:28:02
Speaker
kind of comfortable and what is acceptable and what is not. But the technical piece as long, you know, again, like, I mean, this goes back for me to my first climbing experience when I was 24, 25 with, uh, 25 with Alex Lowe. The first time I saw somebody do really hard ground up trad mix climbing and his approach, you know, when I would look at this, I'd just be like,
00:28:30
Speaker
kind of like, Jesus, dude, like what are you doing? And he'd just be like, well, I'll figure it out once I get up there, but as long as I can get gear in and I'm safe, it's all good. I mean, of course he sent it too, so that in terms of like what you were saying, he was strong enough and he was, you know, he was onsiding, you know,
00:28:52
Speaker
trad 512 plus at the same time back then. And we're climbing stuff that is probably mixed, but more like a 510, maybe easy, 511, equivalence level. So yeah, that is interesting. How do you think about that? And how do you think about, I know you just
00:29:13
Speaker
after a bit of a quest, I want to talk about this, that I played some tiny role in with you just recently, or a year ago, climbed a route on Jirishanka in Peru. And that was a multi-year project. And a big alpine route, technical climbing on a big mountain, you know, 6,000 meters, I don't remember the exact elevation.
00:29:39
Speaker
How does that, how does something like that fit into being a dad and husband? Yeah, for me, G. R. Shankar in a lot of ways was super attractive because it works as a family.
00:29:57
Speaker
guy and a dad. The mountain, and again, this is somewhat a matter of opinion, but from my mind compared to some other things I tried or been a part of like felt pretty objectively safe. And then it also had, you know, it checked all the boxes of like being relatively easy to get there, not being so high that you had to spend a lot of time acclimatizing, having
00:30:23
Speaker
supposedly good weather, although as you know we didn't have good weather on our trip. And so that worked well as a as a dad and was kind of how I went to that mountain in the first place and then kept going back and then kind of got drawn in by it because after a trip realized that it was had really cool high-end climbing in every genre
00:30:48
Speaker
which made it unique and fit what I said before, what I espoused to or aspired to, which is to be the best climber I can in every genre. I never really had that in a lot of ways. So that's why I found it so attractive. Yeah. And for those of you that
00:31:06
Speaker
that don't know Girishanka is a mountain in the Cordillera Y Wash region of Peru. How high is it, Josh? 6,100 meters. 6,100 meters, so roughly 20,000 feet, just a touch lower than Denali. But the base, of course, is much higher in a meadow. Yeah.
00:31:26
Speaker
And that's also one of the things that sold me on it when you invited me to come along on that Trip when which year was that? I don't remember 2018. Yeah, 2018
00:31:38
Speaker
that it is pretty safe. You're climbing a pretty steep rock wall for a good chunk of it at the bottom. There's always loose rock. There's maybe some icicles, but icicles tend to break up into millions of shards. They're not
00:31:57
Speaker
as dangerous, but yeah, that definitely, and climbing with another dad as a father myself, right? Like it was like, okay, yeah, like this is going to be, we're going to keep this reasonable. Yeah, I think that's a good, yeah, it's funny how that dad piece puts you, puts your wrist tolerance a little bit in context as well, if it has for me. I mean, for me, it actually has felt more like
00:32:22
Speaker
age, but I guess it's also being a dad too. And I think that there was a time probably in my early 20s where I would have confused badass climbing with objectively dangerous climbing or conflated the two. And through the years of doing it, I've sort of realized that that's not the case.
00:32:48
Speaker
that just taking huge risk doesn't necessarily make the climbing badass, it just makes it dumbass. Yeah, I've often maintained that there's enough amazing routes to do that are not objectively hazardous that you can just sort of skip the ones that, there are some really cool routes that people have done that have tremendous objective hazard, but it's just like,
00:33:15
Speaker
Like why? Like, you know, there's, there's plenty of other things to do if you're, if you're, you know, I think one of the things that I
Challenges and Sponsorship
00:33:23
Speaker
want to ask you about is I want to go back to the Black Canyon kind of era, if we, if we can, and talk about how you kind of
00:33:34
Speaker
how you kind of just put it together to you know learn how to do all of these things and live a life and feed yourself and you know have a relationship and you know there's there's it's one thing there's plenty of
00:33:54
Speaker
I think there's a well-worn path to excellence that, you know, I would say that I ascribed to or prescribed to for many years was like, just don't do anything else. Just de-prioritize everything else and only have one priority and laser focus on that. And of course, I mean, if you do that and you're not good at it,
00:34:19
Speaker
That's another problem. But you've sort of been able to balance a lot of different things. And I think that that's really interesting. What do you have to say? What do you have to say for yourself? That's a tough question.
00:34:39
Speaker
What was it like being Josh in your late 20s for example, like just paying us a picture of a month in the life or so? Yeah Yeah, no, it wasn't all green and pretty I suppose Like injuries were always tough for me, you know because they derail and
00:35:02
Speaker
But I was like, you know, and still am to a large degree, but of course it's been tempered by fatherhood and age and all those things and obsessed climber. So I always had the next trip I was planning for and trying to figure out how to come up with the money to make it happen.
00:35:20
Speaker
Um, I fell into climbing full-time and professionally, although at the start, you could say it was like extremely semi-professionally financially, um, really through luck in a lot of ways. I went on my second or third trip. I guess it was my third trip to the, to the Trango Valley was with Kelly Cordis. And we climbed a big.
00:35:48
Speaker
route on Great Trango Tower. 2004. Yep. And Kelly's a great storyteller and came back and told lots of great stories about that adventure. And it had all sorts of cool things. Like we ran out of water and went 48 hours or ran out of fuel and went 48 hours without water and did some run out climbing altitude and things like that. And I got a call from Marks in it after that trip, asking me to be on the North Face team.
00:36:18
Speaker
And at the time I was like piecing it together, like feeding myself, like building fences part-time. I'd just graduated college. My kind of, my college slash fund had run out. I had like, you know, I was like living on 500 bucks month kind of thing, just getting by. And Mark was like, oh, we'll give you $8,000 a year. And I was like, holy shit, $8,000. Yes. But I didn't, I also knew that the North Face was sort of like,
00:36:47
Speaker
these production things, like you'd go and do photo shoots and you'd climb with other people on the North Face team who I didn't necessarily know or wasn't friends with. And I was very like goal driven and ambitious with my climbing at the time. So I didn't want to do that. And so I was getting some ropes and some clothing and stuff from the guy at the MOOC in Vermont. And I called him up and I said, hey, I don't really want to do this, but he's going to offer me $8,000.
00:37:13
Speaker
And he said, I'll match that. And that was like the start of full time, quote unquote professional climbing for me. And from there, you know, just chasing the climbing that interested me and going after the things that I was excited about and psyched about at the time, you know, whether they were rock climbs or alpine climbs or whatever. And that's kind of how it's been ever since.
00:37:35
Speaker
So many threads I want to pull on here. I want to go back to the route on Great Trango and hear a little bit about that. First of all, what is Great Trango? Where is it? How did this route come to be? I mean, I've been there. I know what it looks like, but paint a little bit of a picture for me. So very first trip to the Trango Valley that I was talking about earlier with Mikey and Johnny.
00:38:03
Speaker
Timmy O'Neill and Miles Smart were there and they were trying to climb this huge unclimbed ridge on Great Trango that was maybe 7,000 to 8,000 vertical feet of rock climbing. Great Trango is a 6,000 meter rock spire. It's right next to the iconic Nameless Tower in the Trango Valley.
00:38:27
Speaker
They had gotten quite high on it, had some poor weather, had to repel. Their repel devices were paper thin because they'd repelled them in this big storm. I remember my eyes were saucers hearing about their experience at the time. Wait, why were their repel devices paper thin? Because all the friction from their dirty ropes and wet ropes. Sort of wore out there. Wore out their repel devices. I mean, they did something like 70 repels to get down from their high point in the storm.
00:38:58
Speaker
Some Spanish guys had climbed high on this ridge, so there were some anchors and bolts and things. That's how Miles and Timmy had managed to get down. I had a pretty successful trip there with Brian McMahon in 2002, I guess it was, summer 2002. Just got another story because it was cool because it was right after 9-11 and no one was in Pakistan.
00:39:22
Speaker
So anyway, I just was, you know, excited about the Trango Valley and wanted to go back to this thing and, and had befriended Kelly Cordis. And, um, we went back in 2004 and, um, had basically Assyria, you know, they, as they say, there's the fine line between dumbass and dumbass or badass and dumbass. And we walked that line.
00:39:48
Speaker
Very well, and Kelly told the story very well that made us look bad But like You know three pitches up the route I had this gear sling that also had sort of a camelback built into it that my moot made and Inside I did not know that where it was attached like where the gear clipped on the side of you Came in and was had like a rethread that had not been rethreaded. I just never even looked in there and So like third pitch
00:40:18
Speaker
The sling comes undone and all of our cams go down this chimney. And you keep going up? We keep going up. So we recover what cams we can. We've lost a third of the rack. Yeah, that seemed more on the dumbass. Yeah, exactly. All these things in retrospect, you're like, what the hell? I always found water on all the routes I climbed in the Trango Valley.
00:40:47
Speaker
running in streams, but hadn't really thought through the fact that the whole thing was like this giant ridge, rounded ridge. So we only had one fuel canister. So day two, we ran out of fuel at dinner. So we had no water for the next two days. Yeah, and that was just like
00:41:12
Speaker
You still went up. We still went. We wanted to go up. I was psyched and motivated and Kelly was too at the time. Yeah. You were just in Sandoval. Yeah. In the end of the day. So if you look back at that, do you think that it probably would have been good to have maybe gone down after we dropped part of our rack or
00:41:36
Speaker
Once we realized we weren't getting water, we should have gone down and retooled, adjusted our strategy, come back a little more prepared. Or do you just think that unfolded the way it needed to? I think maybe now I would make those decisions differently. At the time, we didn't have a good weather forecast or anything like that. We were just taking advantage
00:42:05
Speaker
And the weather seemed amazing. So it was sort of this like, you always felt like you're racing against the weather and you weren't, you didn't know like, do we have two days? Do we have four? And it never seemed at first, like if those things went wrong, like that we were that stretched. It was only really, as we crested the ridge and started to traverse horizontally, that reversing what we had come up became like really serious because we would have had to climb pitches in reverse.
00:42:33
Speaker
And we couldn't, we had big walls on either side of us. So repelling was sort of out of the question to repel off the side. And then it became more serious. But I have to say like, in the moment I was not thinking what, you know, what are the risks here? I was just thinking climb up my, I mean, early twenties, your sense of your own mortality is not all that great.
00:42:55
Speaker
So, you know, and I wasn't motivated and excited. And I think sometimes on Alpine rates, you have to find that space, you know, at least at the high end. But you have to find that headspace. Yeah, that's a really interesting thought. And I do want to pause for a second.
00:43:17
Speaker
You started at $8,000 as a professional climber. I started at $1,500. And I don't know what the starting salary, if we can call it that, for a junior pro climber is these days. But it was never really even, it was just very informal. I think with the exception of the North Face, who started with like the Oxlow
00:43:47
Speaker
Craig Child and, you know, there's a kind of a group Conrad Anchor, for a while, Kitty Calhoun and Jay Smith. There was kind of a company, the Dream Team back then, I remember. But outside of that, everyone else in the outdoor industry that was doing this kind of support against climbers, it was
00:44:11
Speaker
It was almost seen more as like a tithe. We'll just like feed this young site guys, a few bread crumbs to kind of keep them going because they help keep us all motivated and they have big dreams and we just kind of want to be a part of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, really it was like, that was fully enough for us. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my goal was never to be a professional climber. It was just to climb full time and figure out how to make that work. Right.
00:44:39
Speaker
And I think that has changed, but that was really, I think the goal of anyone at the time was to figure out who was... I don't think there was even a term professional climber. It was just harmful time. And then that also always meant that you were planting trees or guiding somebody sometime, like doing other things that didn't actually mean that you were
00:45:02
Speaker
not having to do a labor outside of your climbing pursuits, your sports pursuit. But yeah, that's, that's really interesting. So let's talk about the mindset of, you know, kind of how did you just put it this, just go up. Um, I think that I've had this conversation with so many different climbers and different climbers have different ways of
00:45:31
Speaker
managing that moment, but I think you already alluded to it once about how you can be up on a big route and it can come down to, as we said before, hypothetical 15 feet of climbing or something like that. There's always this sort of key bit. There's always, you know, I think Greg Childt called it the moment of doubt, or maybe that was David Roberts, I guess, in his moments of doubt. There's always this place on the route, on the experience, in the experience where
00:46:02
Speaker
Maybe it's just a better idea to go down, but for some reason you're in a certain mindset. Talk to me about how you, how you access that, what that means for you, where it is, how you found it in the first place. Yeah. I think it's changed a lot through the years. I used to find there be in that space and way more often than I am now. And now I kind of reserve it for roots that
00:46:30
Speaker
mean a lot to me for some reason or have some investment level. And most of my climbing feels very safe and not that kind of level of commitment. And I mean, a bit of that was being younger. A bit of it, I think, is maybe just my childhood and my parents. I had a lot of, like, my parents were very encouraging and I had a lot of self-confidence for better or worse.
00:46:57
Speaker
Like, you know, my mom would always encourage me to do things. Like my parents were very much about supporting whatever I was passionate about. So if I was passionate about something, if I took the initiative to make it happen, then they would support that thing. And that was all through my childhood. So like an example of that would be, you know, certainly to BMX racing as a kid racing bikes. And my parents would drive me
00:47:25
Speaker
from like New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to go to a BMX race. But I had to call and register myself for the race. I had to look at the map and figure out how we were gonna drive there. Like I had to take the initiative to set it all up and make it happen and like tell them what the plan was. And if I did that, then they would support it. And so I think from an early age, I like got a lot of self-confidence that then led into those being able to like believe in myself in those moments.
00:47:55
Speaker
and think, you know, it's going to work out all prepared. I'm ready to try hard. It sounds like, I mean, we're, I'm 10 years older than you are. So, but my parents had similar things. Like I remember, you know, for my family, one of the things we did a lot was backpacking in the wildernesses of Oregon and Idaho and Washington. I would make a calendar for the summer.
00:48:19
Speaker
of all the trips we were going to do, because I had all these backpacking trips I wanted to do. And it was, you know, my dad was working, so I had like his, you know, his calendar. My mom was a teacher, so she had a lot of the summer off. But, you know, my sister might have had activities, like, but I would have to take all these variables in and then
00:48:40
Speaker
sort of be like, okay, here's the, here's the trips we can do. We got three days here. We're going to go do this hike. Cause it takes three days. We have a week here. We're going to do this one kind of stuff. So very, very similar. I mean, I think we'll go through that with our kids today. It's kind of fun to turn the tables. Yeah. So you just had a lot of confidence and you would just kind of go for it. Is that what I'm hearing?
00:49:09
Speaker
Yeah, at times, I think that was, you know, was the case and continues to be the case in moments now, I pick and choose my moments a lot more than I used to. But I think for people that are coming into climbing at a later age, where they are past that developmental period, they're already in their 40s or 50s or 60s. And they're trying to find the zone. You know, they don't
00:49:35
Speaker
They don't have that. They can't, they can't plug into that careless, reckless sort of 20 something unaware of your own mentality. Lots of testosterone, you know, young male. Yeah. Just speaking from my experience, not presumably yours. So, you know, where is that space? Like, does it, how do you, yeah, I mean, you, you found, you found it there, but where,
00:50:03
Speaker
Tell me more, like how would you describe to somebody that doesn't know where it is or doesn't? Yeah. I mean, I think if you're coming into climbing later and you miss that moment and you're finding you're struggling with it, then you have to spend a lot of time getting those experiences so that you can get into a mode where you're able to make, you know, objective, high quality decisions about whether you're just being scared for no good reason.
00:50:29
Speaker
or scared because you're actually in a dangerous position. And that just comes with experience and being in those situations and doing the thing a lot. And that's something, you know, I go climbing with people who don't get to get out as often or get to climb as much. I think that that's a real struggle. Like if you're the kind of person who works regularly and only can get away to the mountains a couple of times a year, like it's really just hard to build up that breath
00:50:59
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that there's a couple of things that happen that I think are universal. One is there's this doubting of oneself.
00:51:18
Speaker
So especially when you haven't climbed something, then you come down, you're wrecked with doubt. Like, oh, you know, was I just, you know, was that a bad decision? Should I have gone up? Would it be different? You're like all the second guessing and there's no right. There's no answer. And you can't go back and replay the hand again and see what would have happened. Right. Like you'll never know.
00:51:43
Speaker
But yet it's sort of this torturous thing and I've seen and I myself have been in that space so that I'm sure you have too. And a lot of people come down there in that. And when I see someone like with that now, you know, I really kind of go out of my way to try to tell them like, hey, this is this what you're experiencing right now.
00:52:07
Speaker
Is the real learning like it's you know, you actually want to try to hold on to this feeling And understand it and sit with it and feel it Because this is going to happen again And you're going to be in these situations again if you keep going in the mountains where there is no right or wrong answer it's only shades of gray and You're going to have to make the best decision you can and eventually This is going to go away
00:52:38
Speaker
That's what I tell people because eventually you go through that enough and you realize, yeah, there is only the decision I make and that's the only one I can live with and I can't replay it and I can't do it differently. And I think it's a really great lesson and I think it's a really great part of the mountain life journey.
Risk, Skill, and Culture Changes
00:53:03
Speaker
that I've really appreciated is because I think life in general is kind of like that. You don't get to play at a second time. So we have so many decisions that we face every day that, you know, are irrevocable. Like we can't go back and change them. And once you kind of get over that angst of whether it was that right or wrong,
00:53:28
Speaker
And you could just be like, it was, that's, we've made the decision and we are imperfect and it, maybe it was wrong, but maybe it was right. I think that that is, is super valuable for people. And I think the other piece that I want to ask you about is imposter syndrome. Like this, I think there's a lot of this in climbing and I don't think people talk about it where people are out there.
00:53:58
Speaker
pushing often really hard and trying to pretend like they're not. And I think they're doing it because, you know, and I certainly did this, that's why I'm talking about it. You know, you're, you're fundamentally insecure about yourself. You're unsure about your own skillset, your own experience level. And you're just sort of trying to, let's say fake it until you make it and hope nobody notices. But in climbing that has,
00:54:26
Speaker
different consequences than like, I don't know, a desk job or, you know, learning, you know, something more academic, right? Like you can, thinking until you make it can have real mortal consequences if you don't, if things don't break in your favor. So, you know, is this something that you ever dealt with yourself? Was it ever like when you're in Pakistan and you're 19, was there in your
00:54:54
Speaker
you know, tri-zip Columbia and your secondhand plastic boots and your 80 liter backpack. Were you like at some point just being like, Oh God, I hope nobody notices that I don't know what I'm doing. No, at that point I really didn't think I knew what I was doing. So I felt okay. Um, or was realizing that I really didn't know what I was doing. I have not felt that imposter syndrome aspect in alkenism, but I have felt it in rock climbing.
00:55:24
Speaker
to some degree, because in rock climbing, I'm not like, I have to work really hard to be good at rock climbing. I'm not physically gifted at rock climbing. I didn't, when I started climbing, I could do like one pull up. I came to it from the cycling world. We top her up slabs and put Tuck away. Like I was not one of these kids who like came into the gym and was climbing five 12 off the bat. So it was like a very steady progression.
00:55:49
Speaker
And still to this day, to climb at a high level, I have to like work pretty hard at it, climb a lot, train pretty hard. It's not riding a bike for me. So I felt that in rock climbing, like, Ooh, do I deserve to be here? Like am I capable of doing this route? Like this is over my head or, you know, whatever it is. Um, what do you say to yourself? Um, I mean, I just usually like turn into it by working harder.
00:56:19
Speaker
when it comes to roots like that. Doing the work. Yeah, just trying to do the work. And then that gives you the confidence to show up. Yeah, and it doesn't always work out. There are definitely roots that I've put a lot of time and effort into that I haven't done. But I still kind of like, I think a principle that I've really tried to like, guide myself, I can't remember this, is a Harrison quote or Throgoro quote or something is like,
00:56:51
Speaker
Being great is not about being better than your fellow man. It's about being better than your former self. And that's kind of the approach I've tried to take to my climbing. And I say that holistically, not just like physically and technically, but also like in relationships with partners and all of that stuff that goes into climbing. And so I let that kind of guide me. So I kind of give myself a pass, you know, if I'm getting worked by a route that I'm doing all the work and trying really, really hard.
00:57:19
Speaker
being smart about it, but I am hypercritical of myself. If I don't think I'm doing those things, then I will be like, did you really show up and do your stretching every day? Did you really actually like eat right? Did you really actually put the time in, in the, in the garage training, like, and just try to be hypercritical about that and be fair. And like, if I'm doing that stuff, then I can feel okay about it regardless of the outcome. Hmm.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. You know, I think that this is, I've said this on this podcast before, but you know, really one of the things that I love about mountain sports and the reason that I'm so passionate about all mountain sports, but climbing in particular, of course, but is, you know, I really want to emphasize and, you know,
00:58:18
Speaker
bring to the front of people's consciousness and that this is a process and a practice of doing these things. It is actually lifelong. And what I love about that is that I don't love, and I know you're a competitive sports fan. That's another topic. But it's not about a winner or loser. It's just about, as you throw or whomever said,
00:58:48
Speaker
it's about being better than your former self and staying in the process and showing up for yourself and doing that 45 minutes of, you know, rolling and stretching that you actually don't want to do, but you know that that's one of your greatest weaknesses as an athlete. So you intellectually know, and then you have to translate that into practice and that's really hard to do. Yeah. But that is also how you get to the point where, you know, you get to
00:59:18
Speaker
any, any significant level, not even, of course the highest levels, but any significant level. It's just by showing up literally every day and just doing those little trips and drabs. Yeah. And hopefully you do those things long enough, they become habit and then they don't feel as difficult as they once did. Right. Yeah. And that's very true, right? That's that, that just becomes part of your routine. That's one of the things I've really enjoyed about
00:59:48
Speaker
living in Austria and one of the things I wanted to pull out of the conversation about your grandfather and your father and your climbing now is how it's really a gift when these things are part of our culture and it's actually just normal. Like, you know, the last couple of days have been hiking with your daughter and, you know, she's a great hiker and we just like kind of cruise along and have
01:00:17
Speaker
You know talk about stuff, you know one book she's reading her friendship bracelet project or whatever And this is completely normal to her and she doesn't Even realize how much of an effect that's gonna have on Basically her whole life like you know that that's that's normal I mean And it doesn't mean that she has to hike her whole life or she may not climb
01:00:41
Speaker
probably hopefully she does. But, you know, she's, she has this and I see this with my kids with like the skiing and just being out in the mountains that it's just kind of part of life. And that's what people do. And it's good and it's healthy. And they see old people, they see young people, the friends go like, it's just, it's just a thing. And it doesn't have to be this,
01:01:07
Speaker
like super special, you know, I kind of want to get away from this concept that, that alpinism and not nearing and climbing in general, especially climbing outside is this, you know, it is sacred in some ways, but it shouldn't be exclusive sacred. It should be inclusive sacred. It should be, you know, uh, you know,
01:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, I just, this is something that I really want to emphasize in terms of, I'm not being very subtle here, but I definitely want to impact the narrative as much as we can around this. And I know that you and I share that viewpoint and you certainly practice that every day. So, you know, I haven't been able to convince you to drink a beer with me in like six years or something.
01:02:01
Speaker
Which brings me to a question that Hara wanted me to ask you. When did you first become afraid of the sun? Okay, so this is a story going back to Trango Valley. Which came up yesterday because we were hiking and you were like all sun hoodied up. Yeah, sunglasses on. I am terrified of the sun.
01:02:22
Speaker
I hate the sun. And Harrah's like, Daddy? I call it the death orb. It could be called the life orb. Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, I'll be climbing the sun if it's like 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, so second trip to Trango Valley with Brian McMahon. This summer we were there post 9-11. You're like 21 or something? 21. No one's
01:02:52
Speaker
No one's in the Trango Valley. We saw no one there for, we were there for almost eight weeks. Not another party there. Cause no one, everybody thought we were there. We were crazy to go to Pakistan post-9-11. Of course everybody in Pakistan, as you know, having traveled there was like, why is no one coming? What happened, sir? So that was a real wake up call, learned something about how media works in the world and stuff then. But anyway.
01:03:19
Speaker
Brian and I were hiking up to this very high camp. We were climbing a spire that was a long way away from base camp. And Brian put the sunscreen on in front of our tents, left it on the rock, assuming I would see it. I did not see it. And we started walking up the glacier and I walked for six or eight hours on a sunny glacier and just got the most horrendous sunburn of my life with like
01:03:47
Speaker
blisters all over my face. And of course it stormed when we were up there. So we were like stuck in a bibbler on the glacier for two days. A tiny tent. Tiny, tiny tent with this bad hanging stove set up. And during the course of cooking one day, I managed to burn a huge hole in my down jacket. So feathers went all through the tent. And then I wound up with feathers stuck in all of these blisters all over my face.
01:04:20
Speaker
And yeah, that was the beginning of my... Is there a picture of this somewhere? I don't know if there is because... I would love to see that. Yeah, I don't know if there is because we were shooting like slides at the time and we would not waste them unless we were climbing basically. Right. So there was very few. Very few pictures. We also... Yeah, like the four rolls of film. Yeah, and we also made a terrible mistake on that trip. That was another learning moment.
01:04:46
Speaker
You know how you often will get boulders on glaciers that sit there on a little pinnacle of ice? Yeah, the glacier basically shades the ice. The ice around the boulder melts because of the solar radiation and it ends up being on this little pedestal of ice. So Brian and I thought, brilliant idea. There was a big boulder. We'll stash our stuff under this boulder.
01:05:07
Speaker
Oh, I know where this is going. So that it'll stay dry and we don't have to carry our stuff back up to like where we need our crampons. And I stashed some of our rolls of film in this bag kind of unknowingly with the crampons and our ice tools. Two weeks of bad weather. We come back and the boulder has rolled onto our ship and the weather's good. And we're like, fuck no. Like we're looking at the ice tools sticking out. We spent like three hours with a rock.
01:05:38
Speaker
chopping our stuff out, got our stuff, and continued. You got stuff out. We got the stuff out. But some of the rolls of film had been damaged. Crushed. They'd been crushed. Right. So not too many pictures. So actually, like, a bunch of pictures from that trip have a big, like, scratch through the slide where the roll of film got smashed. Yeah, I remember stashing rolls of film because it was like, oh, there's this extra, like, 20 grams that I don't have to get back up here.
01:06:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. And, and arguably that sunburn, you know, probably saved you from skin cancer. Cause now you're a super paranoid of the, of the sun and never have had a sunburn since probably. Yeah. Maybe, maybe I'll survive unless that one sunburn gets me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's.
01:06:34
Speaker
It's so interesting how we, every climber I know has some story, I mean, not necessarily with the sun or the boulder, but just has those stories of things that went sideways. Like, yeah. And learning what you learn from those. And then also how you take that experience into whatever the next climb you do is. Another funny story about that is that after I climbed that route on Great Trango with Kelly,
01:07:04
Speaker
And we went without water for 48 hours. That winter I was in Patagonia climbing with Bean Bowers and Johnny Copp. And Johnny and I wound up doing the first part of the Fitz Traverse, like the Dela S2 points now section on that trip. And I remember just being like petrified about not having any water.
01:07:28
Speaker
And oh, he's talking to Johnny, like we need to stop and get water and I'm going to repel here. Like, and I just like obsessing about needing water. Cause I had been like traumatized from that two days without water. So those lit, those like intense learning experiences, you know, burn into your mind. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're little traumas. Yeah. They're little traumas that then you are, you know,
01:07:52
Speaker
It takes a while for those to wear off or just get scabbed over very deep enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, pulling this back forward, you know, to France and traveling with your family and, you know, you've had this, you know, really incredible career as a climber and you have literally
01:08:21
Speaker
You know, when I think of it, you certainly have exemplified that more than anyone else, for sure, in North American climbing, where you've excelled in every discipline possible.
01:08:40
Speaker
I don't see any signs of you kind of slowing down or, you know, not that you need to, but like what is on your mind as a, you know, 40 something father who's had this amazing career or what are the big, you know, we all, I think can say that we all think about that we only have so much time here and
01:09:06
Speaker
What are the things that you would like to get done? And what time you have left and how do you prioritize them and you don't have to name specific things but are there things or you have a list in your head or Yeah In the short term and I mean like in the next couple years most of the things I'd most like to do are rock climbing related and that's just because I think that like
01:09:32
Speaker
the reality of father time and the physical component of rock climbing comes into it. And so there's like some rock climbing goals that I'd like to go after why I still can train hard for them and maybe not necessarily grow physically, but like maintain and take tactical technical approaches to achieving those things. And that also works a little better.
01:09:55
Speaker
as a dad and with a family because just rock climbing doesn't have like all the variables like alpinism does with weather and time away from home and expense. It's just not as complex that way. So that's kind of why I've prioritized those things. And I'm hoping that I could do a couple of those things, you know, like, um, I'd like to, I haven't free climbed El Cap in a day. I like, I'm going to try to do Corazon sometime in the next year or two in a day. And that's a,
01:10:25
Speaker
a goal for me, um, uh, and some local close to home sport climbs that I haven't, they're kind of like a little beyond me. Um, and then alpinism, I've just sort of like the last handful of years, just kind of like dabbled in it. You know, it's just like try to do a route or two a year that feels interesting and rewarding and has that cool, like the piece of alpinism that I really love and I have a hard time letting go of is the partnership.
01:10:54
Speaker
connection. I mean, you and I became friends. So, you know, like, we spent so much time together, basically, having Chirshanka, getting to know each other, like, became friends with Vince recently, like, you know, guys like Brian McMahon, I've been friends with for decades, and, you know, those kinds of connections that I don't think you really get very easily in normal life, especially not in adult normal life, like, you know, maybe they happen to you in college and things, but not in the same way, you just don't, those times, that time you get someone and also like,
01:11:23
Speaker
doing something intense and focused together, you really get to know somebody and who they are in that space. So that's why I've really wanted to keep alpinism in my life to a large degree, because I crave those experiences and those connections and it makes it feel worthwhile to me. And I am still inspired by the climbing, but I think I've come to recognize that piece of it as being equally as important to me.
01:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's, this is an interesting topic because I, and that's something I've thought about and we have similar, we've talked about this before, but you know, is the framework or the structure of alpine climbing necessary, in fact, to have those relationships and develop those relationships on that deeper level? I think, I mean, for, I don't know that it is for everyone.
01:12:22
Speaker
But I think for me, it's really useful. Yeah, maybe necessary is the wrong words too, binary, but useful. Yeah, it's really useful and helpful in a way that it's just, you know, and I don't know that it's, there is an element of like the intensity of it, I think that has that and this like shared teamwork aspect to it, like working together team, which I'm sure other people have in other areas that are life, like professionally, career, other teams, sports,
01:12:50
Speaker
Um, and I'm sure that's a piece of it, but it's also just a time component. Like when you go on a trip with somebody, even to a place like Peru, that's only for three or four weeks, so much like hanging out at base camp, just chilling together, getting past your past small talk, like a weekend, right? So it's like, you know, you're just chatting with you'd be like, you just really get to know someone. I think in a deep way that takes a long time to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. And I think it's also.
01:13:20
Speaker
For me, they, it's, you're, you're only doing one thing, but you're going to Jerry Chanka and you're going to go try to climb Jerry Chanka. You're not also going to work and on Saturday going skiing with your daughter and on Sunday meeting a friend for a tour. And, you know, like it's a big chunk of time and it's focused on that one thing with a really small group of people. Yeah.
01:13:50
Speaker
And something about those experiences, you know, I can certainly say that there's friends like yourself or, you know, Vince or a number of other people where I can not see them literally for years. And then when I see them again, it's just like, yeah, it's that immediate connection. It's like, Oh yeah, this is Josh safe here. I know this person. I really care about this person. And, uh,
01:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to daily life is so segmented and fragmented in so many different ways. And we all play so many different roles and wear so many different hats, especially as we get older, that it's, it's hard to stay in the moment with one person for any more than an hour or two and interrupted by your phone. And I like share this, you know, I climb with a lot of,
01:14:47
Speaker
climbers in various genres, like young rock climbers and people in the big world climbing space or sport climbing, sport climbing space and bouldering like around the front range. I just have a lot of people that I interact with and climb with. And when they asked me about like, why do you go do outline routes? That sounds like miserable and terrible. Like, why would you want to do that? And this is kind of the answer I give them the same thing. And I think that it's something that used to be a part of climbing in general.
01:15:15
Speaker
that's kind of not as much a part of climbing because pre-internet, pre-climbing popularity, you only had, you know, like a handful of partners and you were really connected to those people because like you love to do this thing together. And it was sort of this unique, weird subculture thing. So you grew those relationships with those people. And I probably came into climbing just at like the tail end of that, like late nineties, early two thousands.
01:15:40
Speaker
And that's something that I've seen really drift out of climbing in a lot of ways, especially in a really popular place like Boulder, you know, that's the part where I live. So people just climb with so many different people or will just like show up at the crag and get a belay. And they miss out on a lot of those connections and that's not a piece of it for them anymore. I don't know how I...
01:16:02
Speaker
Like if I, you know, as long as they're getting those connections somewhere else in their lives, but I just think that that's a little bit sad in some ways, that that's not so much climbing anymore. I think it's absolutely sad. Yeah. I agree. You know, and I think, you know, when you look back at things you've done in the past, I think any of us can think back, like we played the highlight reel of our life of the last, I don't know, five, 10, pick a number of years.
01:16:32
Speaker
you know, and think about what you remember, you know, it does tend to be the things that were connected to deep, meaningful relationships. I mean, there's certainly specific moments for me, my alpine climbing, where I can really remember super clearly, I don't know, pitches I've climbed or summits I've been on or
01:17:03
Speaker
You know, like, like those kinds of more like movies, but most of my memories are more about like the people and the interaction and how I felt while I was on the trip with those people that I feel supported. Did I feel judged? Did I feel, you know, like I gave my best that I feel like I felt came short. Um, although all those things, um, that's what, that's what I remember.
01:17:32
Speaker
about those trips. And it is something really nice about alpinism. And one of the things I always loved about alpinism is traveling. I love traveling. We both spent a lot of time in Pakistan. We've talked about it a bunch.
01:17:50
Speaker
how much we both love Pakistan, and we've had such amazing experiences with the people there. Today happens to be Father's Day, and I got a video from Houshay from Russell telling me Happy Father's Day. Like this guy, I mean, he was like cooked on budget expeditions, and I have no idea how he knew it was Father's Day or why he thought it.
01:18:15
Speaker
I mean, I haven't had any contact with him in years and then you know, but it was really meaningful Like I'm really connected to the him and other people over there. So that's You know, I think that those that those trap the travel piece the cultural piece beginning to know that people everywhere are just people and They're basically good and basically kind and they basically, you know want you to succeed And of course, you know, they're gonna look out for themselves to a certain extent
01:18:45
Speaker
But they'll also sometimes be incredibly generous and, and, and selfless as well. And she really developed a relationship. I mean, brussel probably speaks like 200 words of English max and like, you know, the guy would fall on the sword for me in a heartbeat. I'm sure of it, you know, like that kind of guy, right? That's, that's, that's pretty.
01:19:09
Speaker
pretty special. You don't get that sport climbing the VRG, not to put sport climbing the VRG down by any means. That has its own beauty in many ways, but it's just an entirely different experience.
01:19:25
Speaker
I think that, you know, climbing is definitely drifted away from that. I'd like to see, I think that ultra running has actually developed that in my version because there's a whole culture of like the pacer supporting running aid stations for your friends, taking turns.
01:19:45
Speaker
And it is sort of this cult, right? Like this underground secret society that has this pretty high entry fee. You have to be able to run like a hundred miles. Really, really hard to do and really painful and all those things that that experience is shared.
01:20:03
Speaker
Yeah. And then once you're in that club, like you're, you know, you're a blood brother or a blood sister, you know, like you're, you're in deep. And I feel like with alpinists it's, it's quite similar in that way. Um, whereas, and it used to be that way, I'd say with broader climbing and I do, we've talked, I do miss how funky and esoteric climbers used to be. Yeah. Yeah. I do too, for sure. Like.
01:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. My dad's old, my dad sold climbing partner that I knew as a child growing up because they were still friends. David Ailes was this completely eccentric guy. He was like a math professor at Tufts and he had like this giant head of white hair that went like straight sideways a foot and would just tell wild, crazy stories. It was like a total nutball.
01:20:57
Speaker
Obviously, a highly intelligent, total nutball. What a great character. Right. And there were lots of those people, like the guy who I built fences with out of college, this guy Rob Cadwell was like a complete character. He had moved to Thailand for a few years and married this Thai woman who was 18 years old and moved back to Boulder with her.
01:21:19
Speaker
And, um, you know, that was like mind blowing to me at the time, totally nice guy, but like completely wild life story just out there. Just out there making his own way. And I think those people are there and climbing now, but it's more just like a pie of, you know, climbing has become just like general society, you know, if it's not, whereas it's not majority centrics or.
01:21:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It used to be, it used to be a real counterculture. Climbers were part of the counterculture, literally, by definition, because it was not really even something that was allowed. It certainly wasn't considered to be a sport. I mean, even for me, I had a hard time using the word sport and climbing in the same sense. It's not really a sport.
01:22:11
Speaker
Track and field is a sport. Basketball is a sport. Climbing is something else. I think of it as part art, part sport. And sometimes those get tuned up more or less depending on what kind of climbing you're doing, what the experience is. So if you think of climbing as your art, and this is maybe a good way to pull some different ideas together that we've talked about,
01:22:41
Speaker
how do you, you know, how do you see your art? What is your art? What would it look as a painting? What would it look like? Hmm. Well, that's a hard question. I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I don't know if I have a, if I,
01:23:11
Speaker
What's a bad answer? Yeah, I don't know if there's a bad answer. I just haven't thought about it in that context yet. And maybe that's because I'm not super reflective about my climbing still. I'm still... I'm going to challenge that, Josh, but I know you think you're not super reflective about your climbing.
01:23:35
Speaker
Maybe I am. You're just hiding. Yeah. Maybe I'm hiding the, I mean, I guess, I guess I just am like doing the thing is what inspire, like I am passionate about doing the thing and I really do like love it and driven by having these, you know, ambitions, whatever they are, whether they're like a 50 foot sport route or a 5,000 foot Alpine wall. And I'm just kind of like, yeah, using it.
01:24:02
Speaker
as a way to sort of like move forward through life and the happy path. I also find something I really like about climbing. There are like aspects of society that I don't love like capitalism and like the way that the US functions and chasing things and accumulation of materials. And so I like that climbing is purposeful and has goals and you can be ambitious.
01:24:31
Speaker
But at the end of the day, you're chasing windmills and it's exotic and it doesn't really matter. And so it exists outside of a lot of that stuff. And I find that really fulfilling about it. So it gives me purpose, some way of moving forward, some way of chasing things without feeling like a cog in the machine or chasing these things that aren't really important to me. And that's a bit of it that I really, really like.
01:24:59
Speaker
I think that's incredibly beautiful. Yeah.
Minimalism and Critique of Modern Sports
01:25:05
Speaker
I really love that. And I think that's a great answer. One of the things that I think of that is sort of a, maybe a little bit in parallel to that, for me climbing was always about minimalism to a large extent. And that's one of the things I loved so much about alpinism is how
01:25:30
Speaker
You know, to your point in so much of today's society, the point of having more is to have more. And in Alpinism, the point of, you know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but in the other direction, like the less, you know, the greater your inherent skill and knowledge and judgment, the less you need.
01:25:57
Speaker
And the less you need, the more you can do with that inherent knowledge, experience, skill and judgment. And so it fulfills and reinforces those things that are actually really important and valuable, which is, you know, to me like the, the very human piece, you know, the person in their thinking and feeling and acting and striving and
01:26:27
Speaker
it, um, what's the opposite of enforces, dis, de-enforces, de-emphasizes, you know, the, the, you know, having the point of hav, doing more is having more kind of mentality. And I feel like
01:26:46
Speaker
climbing in particular, but mountain sports in general really have a lot to teach society about that because I think society is still, and I think that a lot of the sports that we have today that are essentially cultural events, I'm speaking as an American here, you know, they are actually just giant businesses and they
01:27:15
Speaker
are very lucrative for a lot of people. And that's actually why they're part of our cultural cultural story. And it's not just because of their inherent beauty or greatness or humanity. And that's reinforcing entirely the wrong things. And no wonder we are where we are in this sort of late stage capitalism, as I would call it. And, you know, climbing
01:27:45
Speaker
It sort of strips all that away. Tools that we use for climbing may seem superfluous to many people like a pair of crampons or ice acts or a climbing shoe or rope. Why do you need this super specialized 80 meter piece of nylon that's exactly this diameter and has these characteristics, et cetera, et cetera. And we all geek out about that.
01:28:14
Speaker
It's a tool that has a very specific and narrow purpose. And that purpose is to sort of unlock the human that's tied to it. And that's far more interesting than scoring points or winning goals or one country beating another country. I sort of feel like this whole culture of
01:28:39
Speaker
Let's say World Cups or Olympics or whatever is just so outdated. I'm so tired of like, Oh, we are metal count is this and their metal count is that therefore we're better than they are. It's like what?
01:28:53
Speaker
what a tired story that is, you know, it's just like so over it. And I just so much rather talk about, um, you know, the stories of, of, of the process and finding the goodness and working through the badness and growing and learning and finding those connections and travel and experiences and people. And I don't know, there's just, there's just so much more than let's say, quote, quote, winning and losing.
01:29:21
Speaker
And I think you really exemplify that. I've known you for a long time, and you're a little younger than I am, but we kind of have come up and gone through a lot of our climbing career together. We both, you're still at Patagonia. I was at Patagonia for whatever, 20 years. And as an athlete, ambassador, and you've always
01:29:51
Speaker
exemplified that and you never really got sort of, I would say, tempted by the quote unquote dark side. There used to be, I remember like when I was my late twenties, like being quote unquote sponsored was actually considered a bad thing. Like you've gone to the dark side. Like it was not cool. You were a sellout. You were a sellout. You were a sellout. Yep. Yep. Yep. Because you were just a paid after and everybody knew it. Yeah. And I've had a little bit of that, like,
01:30:22
Speaker
punk rock mentality since I was a kid. I mean, I remember in high school, my buddies and I would put duct tape across the brands on our tennis shoes. Cause we were like, Oh, we don't want to advertise for this company. Why are we advertising for this? Yeah. Totally. Totally valid. Yeah. Totally valid. And I feel like there is some of that kind of coming back again. Yeah. I think there's a little bit of that vibe in the climbing world. Yeah. I just want, I just want,
01:30:51
Speaker
What I want for the climbing world too is for it to find a voice that sort of, I don't think it has to be inclusive, but I think it needs to not be divisive, if that makes sense. I just feel like so much of the national conversation is black and white without any kind of room for subtlety. And I just would like people to start to
01:31:20
Speaker
see the subtlety and see the humanity and things a little bit more. There's so many examples. That's a whole another conversation. But I think that again, the mountains just and by extension, nature, I'll say, you know, have so much has so much to sort of teach us about that, if we just, you know, sort of stop long enough to think about it.
01:31:46
Speaker
This is something I think about maybe in the context of being a parent. Because I feel like we invest so much in our kids and often lead them down these paths to things that can't really be lifelong passions. And I feel so like, A, just to find something that you're really passionate about, I feel so grateful for that to have found something that I really love and am passionate about.
01:32:12
Speaker
But even more so to have it be something that I can participate like it's a lifelong pursuit to some degree is really rare. So things like you're talking about like soccer or football or those things like you'll some kids put like so much time and energy and lives and like
01:32:30
Speaker
Even if you are messy, at some point, he's probably not going to pick up a soccer ball once he retires. He really doesn't love it in the way he did as a kid or whatever. I feel unfortunately fortunate. I think that that's a really cool thing about mountain sports.
01:32:48
Speaker
Um is that they can be a life long for sure and then and there are other things out there in the world like that for sure Oh, yeah, and that's like my my greatest hope for hara. My daughter is that she finds something that she really loves And that that thing is something that she can do throughout her life in a way that's fulfilling You know, I was going to ask you To tell me what the meaning of it all is
01:33:16
Speaker
But I think you did, honestly, like in your, you know, it is, and I was exactly what I was essentially hoping you would say, but I didn't know how you were going to say it. I didn't know how I would say it either. It was, you know, that finding this passion, knowing that it is
01:33:37
Speaker
tilting at windmills, but yet it gives your life direction and you're not contributing to a system that you...
01:33:48
Speaker
you know, likely don't necessarily believe in or, you know, are willing to support to a certain level, but not too much. Yeah. You know, we all want to live safe and happy and healthy lives and have, you know, healthcare and schools and basic things that we would consider, you know, basic to life.
Technological Impact and Personal Growth
01:34:11
Speaker
But, you know, there is so much disillusionment
01:34:17
Speaker
out there. And as you know, technology gets better and better. You know, I sort of wonder at what point the disillusionment becomes so great that people just straight up revolt somehow. And yet I also think that
01:34:41
Speaker
One of the things that I've certainly seen with uphill athlete and my own experience, and I think you've seen it, we've talked about it, is post-COVID, how many more people are out in the mountains, biking, running, climbing, doing all those things. And I think part of it is
01:34:56
Speaker
they realized that they were disillusioned a lot of people and those that weren't fully locked into certain, you know, prior decisions, whether financial or whatever they were, you know, had the flexibility to
01:35:15
Speaker
spread their wings literally and figuratively and do things that they've always wanted to do and just be like, yeah, maybe it is meaningless, but this is my path. I'm really passionate about it and this is really incredible to me and I want to.
01:35:30
Speaker
I want to dive in like all the way in and do it. And I think that that's, that's really cool. I really, I really feel like with uphill athlete, that's been, you know, I keep trying to tempt you into you, help me with all the rock climbing training plans and written much of them.
01:35:48
Speaker
But one of the things that you know, I really love about this project is That it is a way of kind of guiding people along on certain parts of their journeys you know as they either come come to sport out sports for the first time or come back to them or work through injuries or towards goals or
01:36:10
Speaker
And I never talk about it like this, like the windmills aspect as you brought up, but it is really rewarding to just be like, no, kind of in the back of my head and watching people through their process. And I'm kind of seeing, because I've been there and just sort of seeing like, oh yeah, I know exactly what's going on with you.
01:36:30
Speaker
I'm not gonna tell you because you can't see it yet Yeah, but this is where you're at and this is what you need to go through and that's why you're doing that and that's okay that you don't know that and It's also perfect. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, cool And that's baby what all means
01:36:52
Speaker
Anything else last you'd like to say? We purposely did not talk about training. I didn't really want this to be a training talk tonight, but maybe we can do some of those sometime in the future. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you at the beginning of this conversation, I wanted to ask you about that Giroshanka Vivi. And you said, bring that back up when we're on recording so they can cut it if they want to, whatever. But so I didn't fully understand what you meant by that, whether you meant that you were not
01:37:21
Speaker
fully tuned into the fact that it was like you were just sort of like lazy fare with the fact that it was dangerous too much or that you felt scared in that time that it was I didn't quite see
Evolving Climbing Pursuits and New Focus
01:37:34
Speaker
which. Yeah. So just to paint a picture a little bit, we were we had bad weather. So we attempted a variation basically that was in with some ice and stuff that was was mixed climbing. And we went up there and tried to kind of
01:37:51
Speaker
put it together. And I think it was like the very end of the trip. We had like two days left. Yeah, it was sort of like a Hail Mary. Didn't really think it was going to happen, but we hadn't climbed in a while. It was what the hell.
01:38:02
Speaker
And yeah, we, we had a hard time finding a place to sleep and that's hard on that, that route. Right. And, um, yeah, I remember, I think didn't, I can't remember exactly how it went down, but we, you pointed out like, Hey, we don't want to put the bivvy here because you know, this is a funnel and there's all this rock, there's rock fall coming down. I think there might've even been little bits of rock dribbling down.
01:38:41
Speaker
how it goes down that you don't survive up here is because you stop being scared. And you stop being, and if you're not scared, you're not thinking proactively about what the risks are and how to minimize them like you were. And, you know, I mean, that's part of partnership too. I mean, we all have been flow, right?
01:38:51
Speaker
I was really upset with myself that I wasn't scared.
01:39:02
Speaker
And so it was good that you made that. And I remember that night, we were at three in a little first light tent, you and me and Mikey. And the weather was just getting worse and worse all night. Your head was kind of right under the end of the tent where the whole... I was just sort of...
01:39:26
Speaker
on pins and needles the whole night. I never really slapped. I was just kind of like, this is not where I want to be.
01:39:36
Speaker
Like starting to feel nervous about it? Yeah, then I was nervous about it. Then I was nervous about it and I was scared. And then that next day, like going down, you know, there was a bunch of snow on the rock. It was hard to find the anchors and everything got super wet and the ropes are, you know, it's just, it's steep, but it's not that steep. So the ropes are like hanging up everywhere and having to throw the ropes off like every 10 feet again.
01:40:07
Speaker
like, man, there's like so many ways this can go sideways. And none of them really seemed like they were worse. Like what we were, yeah, we're doing. And I was
01:40:25
Speaker
I kind of, I kind of went away from that trip. I didn't know it, but that's, that's literally like the last time I think I went real Alpine climbing on a big mountain. I mean, and then there were some other experiences that were similar here in the Alps. I told you about one, like, you know, climbing the long German route in winter and the North Face of Triglau, which is a route I'd done, you know, when I was 19 and that winter, like my friend, Andy and I did it. We got to the top at dark.
01:40:55
Speaker
And, but then climbing down, you're just like going down this really long, like, I think it's like, you know, 3000 vertical feet of like 50, 55 degree hard snow. Like if you just, and you just couldn't not be totally turned on. And I was just sort of like, I was like, I don't, you know, I
01:41:19
Speaker
I know I can do this. I know I can go into this space, but I just don't know that I still find value here. And that was a few of those experiences were just like, yeah, I've just done this so much. And I read this book around that time called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And I think that title kind of sums it up.
01:41:49
Speaker
it was about like trying to learn new skills and stuff. And I kind of got me motivated to start learning new things. And because I would, I realized I'd maybe just, I thought I was going to do that with Alpine mentors. Remember that project where I was hopefully going to learn more about myself and about alpinism through trying to mentor others.
01:42:12
Speaker
And then I think there just wasn't a good business model for that to really work. And then it was like, well, I really want to learn something new and experience some new things. This is all feeling very repetitive at this point. So then I kind of transitioned more into focusing on Apple athlete and that's been very engaging and very interesting. And I love it. I'm learning so much.
01:42:37
Speaker
Nice. So it's really cool. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So all works out, but thank you for the chat job. Yeah. It was great chat. Awesome. Yeah. Right. Subscribe and review. And thanks for listening to the uphill athlete podcast. Catch you next time.