A nice Font video

Here's a nice little video from Fontainbleau that I just came across... nicely shot and edited, enjoy :)

A few pics from Wine Bottle

The sun came back out to play today giving a searing hot blue sky day for us to play in out at the crag today. With the recent reopening of access to Wine Bottle it was a perfect (albeit hot) chance to go play on some fantastic routes in the sun.

Here's a few photos of my buddy Jon Graham ripping it up on 'Where's The Jug?' 5.11a

Enjoy :)

Chinese Mountain Shenanigans

Check out these cool short videos of Kyle Dempster and Bruce Normand doing some epic first ascents in the amazing montains of Sichuan, China. Inspiring stuff!

http://www.planetmountain.com/english/News/shownews1.lasso?l=2&keyid=38596

The season begins!!!

So after months of temperatures in the high 30 celcius range and humidity peaking out near 100% the good temperatures and conditions of the autumn are finally peaking their heads out from under the steamy blanket of summer.
And with good temps comes more visiting climbers and more psyche and the town is starting to feel like a climbing town again with great folk from all over the world popping in on our early season to crush routes all over the place.
Psyche is high and the season is looking to be a great one already! In the last week I managed a quick ascent of 'Paper Cut', a great 7c+ at Lei Pi Shan as well as the amazing 'La Liao', 7c, at Banyan Tree (sans one move that I use a draw on as it tweaks the heck out of my old shoulder injury and we don't want a repeat of that now do we!)
So I am also going to try and be a little less lazy with my camera and get out and take some pics of things around here as things go down. I got out to Lei Pi Shan yesterday and snapped a few shots of my friends Fabrice and Leon on the amazing 'Da Bao Yu' 7b+, check them out :)

Fabrice Vanbecelaere from Belgium on 'Da Bao Yu' 7b+

Fabrice again... pocket pulling!


Leon Khazanov from Israel pre crux on 'Da Bao Yu'

Leon crushing mid crux

The amazing main wall of Lei Pi Shan... it's all steep up there! :)

Shan Xi Climbing Festival

So the other week I headed up to Shan Xi province with my buddy Jake to attend another crazy Chinese climbing festival.

It was the usual crazy event with nice hotels, police escorts everywhere we went, massive ceremonies and the usual political hulabaloo.

But it was great to see a beautiful new part of the country (despite the fog and rain) and to catch up with a heap of friends from anound the country that also came up for the event.

Good times all round really :)

Here's a couple of pics...

The foggy view from our hotel room to the cliffs

Police and military security for the event


Military everywhere...


At the drizzly opening ceremony


Ola with a pretty insect friend

The 70 metre high toprope routes that the comp was held on... pumpy!

Starting off up a route...

The finalists...

My good buddies Ryan and Kata

The drizzly closing ceremony...

These things always have lot's of good food :)

A few videos for the morning...

Hi all, just a few videos that I watched this mornning that I thought I would share...




A nice bouldering short from my good friend Richard 'Sticky' Dale


And this is a cool little website: http://www.youclimb.de/ - go watch the slacklining video on their front page, awesome!

Enjoy!

Back home and back to it!

So the crazyess of another Chinese Climbing festival is over nd I am back home in Yangshuo and heading out to Riverside today to try some of the new projects I bolted out there recently.
I will have some photo's of the festival I was just at up soon but for now here'sa cool video from BD about Alex Honnold... enjoy :)


http://vimeo.com/27728779

The Amazing Arnaud

Last year while bolting routes with the Petzl Team up in Guizhuo in preparation for the Petzl Roc Trip happening up there this October I had the great pleasure of bolting and climbing with some of my climbing heros, two of which were Arnaud Petit and Stephanie Bodet. They were inspirational to me in my early climbing years and still are, if not even more so today.
Here is a really nice video that I just saw of Arnaud doing the mega enduro 'Black Bean' 8b at Ceuse in France... on trad.
Epic.

Check it out and be inspired!

A few nice videos

I have been surfing around watching a stack of climbing videos online lately and thought maybe I would try and share few of my favorites every now and then. So here's a few for you today, enjoy!




Here's the trailer for the new Australian climbing film 'Smitten', it's out now, go get it :)





This is a short from the upcoming Chuck Fryberger film 'The Scene' which looks like it will be another great film from Chuck, look out for it soon.





And some straight up climbing porn... James McHaffie repeating 'The Big Bang' 9a recently at Lower Pen Trwyn in the north of Wales.