a crudely cropped Jimmy Chin photo.

Photographer Jimmy Chin has an excellent set of Yosemite photos posted on National Geographic right now, and the one stolen and cropped above is my favorite. I’d point you to the original, but all I can do is point you to the overview since the site is setup in Adobe to specifically avoid people stealing photos like I’ve done here. But my point is, why do climbers love drinking King Cobra? It’s especially true in Yosemite, even though there’s no actual venom in King Cobra nor does it help cure cobra (or other snake) bites.

In 2008 Todd Carmichael set the speed record for a solo, unsupported run from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. It took him 39 days, and toward the end he ran out of fuel, food had no way to contact the outside world besides an SOS and bordered on going insane. And he recorded it for our pleasure. Check out the trailer and feel good about doing it on company time - Todd’s donating all the money from his film to Charity: Water.

via The Adventure Blog

Being scared of heights seems like a pretty good survival mechanism from an evolutionary standpoint, but it could be troubling for a sponsored rock climber. Alli Rainey filed an excellent post for the prAna blog about her own battle with a fear of heights. Rainey is a Harvard grad and climbs 5.14. Her method: “I’ve undergone systematic desensitization/exposure therapy.” I think that means she just jumped in a pool to teach herself to swim, but the pool was only a foot deep. Or something like that.

The new film Solitaire from Sweetgrass productions is marching towards release. To promote the film, they’re running the 12-part webseries called On the Road with Solitaire, with a new episode out the 21^st of each month. They’re up to episode 3, The Raptor - and it’s the best so far. You can watch the others on Vimeo.

Is CAMP USA still using prison labor to make some of their products? Look, I’m all for rehabbing and offering these guys a valuable skill, but can it be something that doesn’t endanger my life? CAMP USA is reporting that an extremely small number of their ultralight Photon carabiners somehow open their gates when they’re loaded. No one’s been injured, and CAMP is voluntarily recalling the biners and quickdraws.

UPDATE: It was not CAMP USA using prison labor, it was Omega Pacific, who apparently no longer uses prison labor either. Please just focus on the important message here. There’s a recall. If you take away nothing else from this post, take away the fact that if you have CAMP USA Photon biners, you are definitely going to want to click the links above and take care of business.

The Gold Hill Development company that owns property adjacent to Telluride resort has been mixing it up with locals all winter, demanding that skiers stay off their private property. Unfortunately for them the U.S. Forest Service doesn’t necessarily agree that the development company’s mining claims mean they can boot people off the land. The situation is threatening to become more interesting this summer since the developers announced in the newspaper that they’d be hiring armed guards to protect their property at random times this summer. Is it legal to shoot trespassers in Colorado? They should probably looking into these specific zoning ordinances before they start gunning people down.

via Wildsnow

It’s Utah, they probably could have found somewhere else to jump, but I doubt it would have held the same thrills. Two guys threw themselves off the church headquarters in Salt Lake City a couple months ago after climbing over the observation deck. It seems they were identified from security footage and fined $300 apiece for criminal trespass. Worth it? Every penny.

Oklahoma police made catching a squirrel that repeatedly vandalized police cruisers their top priority over two weeks. The police announced the catch on their Twitter feed and they posted a video to YouTube, and the squirrel made a similar announcement on its own Twitter account. It seems the Oklahoma Country Police have an extraordinary amount of free time on their hands. And how do they know they caught the right squirrel?

This means I’ll have to find a friend willing to take a run at the same falls in a canoe if we want our own tandem record. Sam Freihofer and Todd Wells went over Metlako Falls on Eagle Creek in Oregon and both managed to stay in the boat falling over 82 feet and beating the previous record by 12 feet. It must have been tough for the guy in the back to hold onto the camera. Buds for life.