Interviews and New Sponsors

This past week went pretty great. I had an interview with Kenosha News about my trip to Utah and Nevada. Our interview was Thursday at 3 and it lasted about an hour and a half. Then today we had a photo/video shoot with Kenosha News. The photo shoot lasted about an hour. The photographer got 5 videos of us climbing and explain what we did while we out in Utah. He also got about 50 photos along with the 7 we sent to the writer for the paper. I have three sponsors and two companies giving me pro deal discounts. The three I have are PowerBar, Five Ten Climbing, and ClimbTech. The two I am getting pro deals from are Rock Candy holds and So ILL Climbing. I am almost with Petzl Climbing, I just need to show the number of outdoor routes I have done or attempted. I am pretty excited how I am doing right now with climbing. I am very excited that sponsors are starting to accept me for the their teams. Keep an eye out another posting here in the next week about my week of training.

Red Rock Canyon and St. George Climbing week

Red Rock and Zion National Park Climbing Trip

Before the week of climbing started, I found out that I had been chosen for the Five Ten Youth CORE Award as second place. I was pretty with happy with that and didn’t really know how to react to this. This helped get started a great start to the week of climbing that was going to be a tough road ahead.

Day 1-  Red Rock Canyon- Sandstone Quarry- Monday, we got a little confused with directions that were given to get us to the area of climbing that we originally wanted to go climb at so we headed over to Sandstone Quarry. The Front Corridor is really cool and I am very excited to get a chance to climb on it Tuesday. After we walked around looking and new areas to climbing, we went out to hike around and see the new sights. We went back to the Calico ll (pull off two) to see if there was anything there that we thought would be nice. I found an area that looked like a rainbow that also had an overhang in the middle of the face. The only problem was it was a mixed climbing area and we didn’t bring any cams with us.  The wall looked very cool and I really wish I had a chance to climb on it.  The day really turned in to mostly a hiking day and a sightseeing day. I got a lot of really neat pictures of the rock around us and where we would be climbing.  We set up new climbing routes that we planned to climb.

Day 2- Red Rock-Sandstone Quarry- Tuesday, we left the hotel around 530am in order to get to the rock by 6am. We had a pretty good idea on where we were going but didn’t know exactly where the routes were. Once we found the route that we planned on climbing. We had to determine which route was the warm up route. The warm up route and the harder route start the same until the second bolt. I got a little bit confused on which route I was climbing. I continued to climb up the route I was on and I was making a move towards the third bolt and my foot hold broke away. I ended up falling about 12 feet. While I was falling the corner that broke away hit the middle of my shin to my knee. It looks like road rash down my leg. I was a little upset that I was unable to finish the route but was very pleased that I took my sport climbing fall, along with just my second lead climbing fall since May. After the rope was set up for top rope, I was reading our handy little Red Rock book. I found out that the route I was climbing was a 5.11d. I tried the warm up after it was set up and made it no problems. During all of the climbs we had the GoPro Camera recording. We got a clear shot of my fall that I took. Which looked pretty beast!!!!

Day 3- St. George- Woodbury- Wednesday, we headed out to Woodbury Desert to climb the Black and Tan Wall. The route we took to get there was pretty entertaining because the road was hilly and very windy. Once we got there we hiked up the hill to find out that there was an Upper and lower portion of the wall. Again after figuring out that the routes are in a different order than the website said we found the route we wanted to do. The Route I started on was a 5.12a and made it just to the first bolt. The rock we were climbing was limestone so it was sharp. Since I took the fall yesterday my cut was still hurting a little and the limestone was not helping my case because it kept breaking out the scabs. The route we were climbing on at Black and Tan was a 5.9 that was 100 feet long. This route I made it to the fourth bolt and was unable to continue. I took a little break and let everyone else go try the route. I went after everyone else and completed the route. Over all the week has been going pretty well and I am happy with how I am doing.

Day 4- Thursday was a hiking day and trying to find some route that were in Kolob Canyon in the South Fork area. The day started out by driving to Zion National Park in the South Entrance. We drove through the scenic drive and I took a lot of really neat photos of the wall. The arch ways that we saw were very cool and wish that we were able to climb on them.  Going through the tunnel that was there we got a lot of neat photos going through the windows. Just outside the tunnel we saw three mountain goats on the side of the road eating. Farther up the road we saw a cave going in to the side of the rock. It looked like the tunnel went pretty far back. After Zion National Park we headed out to Bryce Canyon to hike and check out the soldiers there. Our first stop was the natural bridge that is there. It looks like the bridge extended farther than what it is now.  We went to Sunrise Point and hiked down about one mile. The sights of the rocks were really cool and being able to see the rocks that close up was awesome. After we finished hiking at Bryce Canyon, we headed to Kolob Canyon to find the routes we wanted to do. When we got there we just did the scenic drive to see all the rock then we went to find the routes. The trail to the routes was not a set trail so it was just something that few people walked frequently. The canyon narrowed the farther you went back but there was a creek that got in the way of the trail. We got to a point where we could not get across to the trail on the other side of the creek. We decided that it wasn’t going to be very easy to get where we did with climbing packs on because we had a hard time just by ourselves.

Day 5- Black and Tan- Friday we decided to go back to Black and Tan in St. George. We went to the same area of climbing but did a different route. I started off by leading the route to the top. I made it to the fifth bolt. After everyone else climbed the route I went back up the route to finish it. The day was very nice out on the rock. The valley was about 100 degrees and the little cave we were in was about 80 degrees with a nice breeze. The day of climbing was fun and hard at the same time. Everyone was pretty tired from the week of hard climbing. So we did two climbs then headed back to Las Vegas. Back in Las Vegas we went to the pool then got to the ready to go down the strip. We walked from the north end down to the south end of the strip. Our main stop was at M&M World. It was pretty cool to see all the different colors of M&Ms they had. The trip was a lot of fun and I would really like to do something like this again. The pictures of the both our hiking trips and when we were climbing are very cool and really show the shape of the rock. All the videos and pictures from this past week will be uploaded to Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.