Finland

Lately I've been hanging out in Finland. A few days ago Chuck Fryberger got here and we've been filming a lot of different things, also some that have nothing to do with climbing. Chuck's idea is to show a little bit of the people's lifestyles too in his next film, not just climbing. I think it's a great idea and it's been really fun shooting all kinds of things along with climbing, like longboarding and bridge jumping.
 

Longboarding in Helsinki

One of the boulders we've filmed so far is an FA of mine from 2004 called Hypergravity, the first 8B boulder in Finland. It's located in Sipoo, about 25 min drive from Helsinki. It's a really small area with a few quality problems and very good rock. Hypergravity has a perfect obvious starting hold and climbs out a horizontal roof on small edges. I'm really syked about the footage we got from this problem.

The plan for next week is to go try a really hard trad project, that I've been working on little bit. Also we want to film a cool problem called The Globalist, 8B+, which i put up this spring. Hopefully the weather will stay like this, because the conditions are prime right now!

photos: Chuck Fryberger

Sunseeker

Yesterday was Mt. Evans day again. I wanted to go try a project at area B, that I had seen photos of earlier this week. I thought it looked really good in the photos, but when we got up there I was blown away. This tall and proud line climbs a sloping rail on a perfect steep overhang, leading to a horrifying mantle high off the deck. It has a good obvious starting hold and about 21 moves, all of them upwards. The bottom part climbing into the stand is probably around V12 and after that you still have to do do stand start which is a technical highball V10. At the moment there is still snow on the landing making it possible to take falls without getting hurt, but when the snow melts it will most likely be a death landing.

After flashing the stand start and almost shitting my pants doing the mantle, I started working on the bottom part. I tried the beginning for some time and I got trough the crux and all the way to the mantle. I felt solid, but then suddenly my heel slipped and I took a really scary fall from about 15 ft, landing more or less on my face. I was lucky and I walked off with only a sore neck. After taking a bad fall I was really nervous to try again. However, next try I made it to the mantle again, scared as hell, and managed to keep it together. I pressed out the mantle, highstepped my foot on a bad smear and grabbed the top. Sunseeker, V13 got it's first ascent! I dare to claim that it is one of the best problems in Colorado and I still can't believe nobody climbed it before me. Big thanks to Carlo and Chris for the real effort; carrying up the pads!

Sunseeker, V13

View from the top of the boulder

Mt. Evans

Rocky Mountain granite

Photos: Jon Cardwell and Nalle Hukkataival