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Core
Shots The
Employee Owners of Black Diamond
Don’t call us core. Because the second you
do it means we just sold a fashion helmet that matches
your shoes and a designer-label-recycled-polarwool
tutu perfect for snacking on free-range organic grayling
sushi but of no use whatsoever in the Harding Slot. “Core” is
the “Extreme” of the ‘00s—an
overused buzzword sucked dry of meaning by vampire
pitchmen bent on selling you fluff you don’t
need. Wear Brand-X beanies, float 5.14! Our apologies
to Buddy Lee, but nothing says “Can’t
Bust’ Em” like showing up for a crank
session in a Zen bouldering dress shirt. Yeah sure.
We’re blowing it if any piece of gear in this
catalog does anything but increase your chances of
climbing success. Ask any of the boys in our shipping
department and they’ll tell you climbing gear
is like prison sex—you want less, not more.
Which
brings us to bouldering. Because we love every
sick dyno hucked, every succulent flapper torn
off, every pad-thumping failure and every chest-thumping
success, we’re bent that bouldering has been
hijacked as today’s
hot marketing vehicle. Take taut-abbed fitness model, objectify with undersized
sports bra, add crash pad and dreadlocked boyfriend of indistinguishable ethnicity—roll
the cameras and voila! We have Hip Hop Nation’s disposable income in
our back pocket. Next, let’s hit up Woodstock Generation with the graying-yet-rugged
guy from the ED ads; slap rock slippers on him and we’ve got one grand
metaphor for the staying power of our mutual funds. Yep, bouldering can sell
anything these days. But when everyone else drops their obsession with bouldering
in favor of a new image du jour, we’ll still shamelessly fill these pages
with sexy pics of beautiful people cranking nasty boulder problems with nary
a stitch of our gear on. Simply put, we want you to obsess over climbing the
way we do. Because then, every time you see a bouldering photograph you won’t
think of SUVs, overpriced watches or low-carb beer. You’ll think, “I
need to get out there.”
Now
that we’ve etched these clever marketing
images in your subconscious, it’s a good time
to remind you that when you buy Black Diamond gear
it will enhance your climbing experience, not detract
from it—otherwise we
aren’t the dopest, freshest, dare we say “Core-est” company
out there.
Homecoming Peter
Burling
I’ve
got a blood blister covering the entire pad on
my right foot that should be talking sense to me,
but the Gunks are calling again.
So
it’s grab a cup of coffee, borrow the wife’s
boss’s
car, light up a smoke and head from Brooklyn into
The City. Pick up my young friend, whack on the
cruise control and plan what we are going to climb.
I probably should have done more acid 30 years
ago when I was climbing all the time, but noooo,
I became an adult, blew out my pelvis (which has
been replaced with this weird motorcycle chain-like
thing, grafting tissue, plates and screws) and
replaced climbing with talking.
My
memories of the rock and community are strong,
and you have to remember that thirty years ago
the climbing community was small. The Uberfall
was for all of us back then; the big, the small,
the fat, the tall, the ugly and one mofo that was
so handsome he married the only girl there. I remember
once, admittedly with a head-full of swarming THC,
meeting Chouinard who had come back East to climb
with McCarthy, Williams, Barber and the rest of the cool.
All
my stories led to this young man who called me
on it. “If you’re
alive, you can climb.” So he dragged me off to a gym (Geez, Louise,
they climb in a freakin’ gym these days?) and I discovered that I
was back to the beginning and 30 years fell away as I climbed on plastic
weirdness. “Hey,
rock isn’t like this; there’s nowhere to rest!” But resting
was not to be; all I could think about was the rock. I called “Kid
Flash” to
announce “we are off to the real stuff, buddy,” off to see
if Williams and Co. were still alive 30 years later.
And
we haven’t stopped. Switching leads, soaring
on the 5.5s, working our way up to CCK, this time
without the Mexican Green lingering in the front
lobes. I’m back doing my dreams for real.
Back to where I belong, chasing away those fear
rats that found the sewers in my brain, looking
around to find the next move, and finally, again,
finding that utterly clear, beautiful serenity that
comes when the rock winks and welcomes one home.
Peter
Burling
In
the shadow of WWII, Peter was born to a father
who owned the Model A that enabled Fritz Wiessner,
the Underhills and Betty Woolsey to don their hobnail
boots and open the sport of climbing in America.
Like all flower children, Burling gave up his parents’ aspirations in exchange
for pot, but kept his father’s love of the
vertical, hitching weekly to the Gunks. After a 30-year
doctor-enforced retirement from climbing, he recently
gave the Universal Sign to the medical profession,
and bought just enough gear to scare the hell out
of his partners and say hello to Dad again.
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Time Andy
Kirkpatrick
A
friend of mine once returned from a wall in the
Himalayas and pronounced that his climb was the pinnacle
of climbing experience. This conclusion—no
doubt formulated on some god-awful bivouac—was
that this climb would linger with him forever. He
believed memories of shorter climbs were less lucid,
fading as quickly as the chalk left behind. “A
hard alpine route will last a week, a single pitch
perhaps a day, and a boulder problem—well that
may be forgotten by the time your feet hit the mat.”
I
think about what he said often, especially when
engrossed in the types of climbs he believed would
stay with you forever, and I think about the prevailing
memories of my past climbs...
A memory that often returns is not of an alpine face or artic wall, but of
a cold Mooreland morning, and a single heather-ringed millstone-rough boulder.
Once used as target practice in the Great War, it sat tank-like, surrounded
on three sides by a moat of dark water, the bullet scars still visible and
just deep enough to accept fingertips.
Wary of the dewy grass I clean off my slippers, dab chalk on finger, pebble
and scar, and attempt to move, only to fall back again—and again. Not
until my fingers are as raw as meat do I go home dejected.
I
knew the boulder had been there for a million years,
but in the time it takes for young skin to mend
I returned. The ritual is repeated, but I need
more than faith, and soon the pebbles run with
blood and I walk away.
And
then on a morning cold enough to turn the moat
to ice and stop the mud from sticking to my boots,
I grasped those pebbles and pulled as hard as one
can when holding onto nothing more than just the
desire to move off the ground. But this time the
desire was so great it saw me to the top even before
the first chalk had time to rain down on the heather.
I
often think about that boulder as I hang on a belay
a mile above the talus, or buried within a snow
cave far below the storms. I wonder if it’s
still there, I wonder if its pebbles are more worn
now or even broken away and lost, I wonder if my
fingers would find it easier, perhaps just because
the skin is now thicker with age. The older I become
the more I wonder about past climbs, but what I
know is that my friend was wrong, and it isn’t
necessarily the memories of epic alpine climbs
that stay with you the longest....
Andy
Kirkpatrick
With
a strange penchant for the long, the cold and the
difficult, Andy Kirkpatrick is one of climbing’s
real characters, most at home when the conditions
are cruel and the climbing is hard, if only because
the stories will be as tall as the climbs. Best known
for his winter expeditions to Patagonia and several
solos of El Cap—including an early solo of
the Reticent Wall—Andy’s overriding aim
seems to be to delve deeper into his fear threshold,
explore hostile environments and forge new partnerships
while dealing with both the success and failure of
alpinism... and bouldering.
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