Crash goes to the Tradeshow (etc.)

Right now I sit in a Costco, looking across the small white table at a depressing line of condiment dispensers. My hand itches to grab the small black Sharpie in my back pocket and write the word “life” after the word RELISH on one of the machines. However, lacking the aforementioned small black Sharpie in the aforementioned back pocket, I turn my attention to the nearly finished lemonade in front of me and wait patiently for my German friend to finish shopping.

There’s a certain feeling that pounces on you after a major competition. It’s like depression, but milder. Easier to get over. For the duration of those few hours as the staff pack up their booths, the last of the freebie-collectors wander of and the people you wanted to say goodbye to are already out the door, this feeling kicks in and life slows down. Way down. It was this moment in the Costco that the feeling started to wash away, and I began to brainstorm all the grammatical and adjective-laden ways one could relate such a journey as mine through the festive and much-famed Summer Outdoor Retail Tradeshow. (I’ve been busy here, sorry I haven’t been spending time online.)

Our adventure began with the lightning speed of a drunken snail. In the furnished apartment of Monsieur Jean-Michel Casanova we were packed and ready, our few clothes washed and the odd bits of food lounging nonchalantly in the cooler - cashews, the necessary mango, a few yogurts and the ingredients for a sandwich. It was a ten-hour drive to the tradeshow in SLC from LA, which landed us in at the Front climbing gym two minutes after the check-in for the Pro comp closed.

After dragging ourselves across the parking lot in the killing heat and quickly registering, we slipped into the back entrance of the Salt Palace (the big classy Tradeshow building) and found the Madrock booth between Mammut, Simond, HRT, The Access Fund, Walltopia and FiveTen. The entire building was, mercifully, air-conditioned, and the booths crammed together like the stones of the Egyptians, so close you couldn’t slip a knife between them. The Madrock booth was decorated with large posters of JM’s Joshua Tree pictures and sported a wooden loft for dealers to talk with Mad’reps about their new draws and other retail monkeyness.

Before leaving the booth, Joe warned me to keep my sense of direction and remember where the Mad’booth was.

Yeah, the tradeshow was that big.

Endless walking. Even after two days of aimless meandering I was still discovering more secret booth areas. It felt like a video game: walking past a giant fishes and polar bears and people, finding freebies at the counters, stopping to talk to characters and finding level-up boosters (disguised as energy drinks and power bars) at the ClifBar and Cytomax booths. I never made it past the first floor, I think, except for the one trip to North Face. But what I found was overwhelming enough to strike me to the point of happy speechlessness. As I’d left my starting point in this large maze, the Mad’booth, my feet took me through Sterling Ropes and FiveTen and into the Main Street of the tradeshow. My soles were sucked into the flowing stream of tourists and booth staff as my hands collected piles of stickers and small trinkets, stuffing them in a wanton order in my bag.

So much happened over those four days of tradeshow, I’m not sure I could keep your attention for the entire twenty-odd pages of random stuff I could write about my time there. I mean, there’s the Mormon concert, the infitite number of people, my unicycling trips, the disassembly of the show…and I’m also supposed to be packing for my flight to Ecuador, so there’s no time to lose…

Most of my time was spent walking the booths, but the rest was consumed via loitering near the Mad’booth and trying to win free swag at the bouldering wall. Yes, there was plenty of free swag! Unfortunately I was running in the bouldering competition and as such was banned from extraneous exercise, but I did come close to winning $1,000 from NorthFace in a pull-up contest. A day later, Sterling Ropes held a tie-a-figure-eight-the-fastest sort of thing, which, as we found, was much harder than we thought and many couldn’t even finish the knot! Who wuddha thunk. Originally only ten contestants were accepted, but I was ushered in when they decided they had an extra five minutes and in the end won a ridiculously bright yellow Fusion 9.2 60-metre rope. It glows with an eerie radioactive light, even now, and I’m planning on giving it to a friend of mine since I already have two ropes.

By the end of the show I’d accumulated a bags of free junk and met with many acquaintances (“Brett! You’re bald!”), heros (Sharma/Graham/Kehl/SoiLL Brothers/Katie/…most of which I was too shy to introduce myself…), and random people (Neal from the Enthusiast group, a monstrous white dog named Thor, Beaver- owner of prAna, etc). And it was during all this excitement that I was supposed to compete in the Pro Comp.

Okay, time is running short. It’s nearing midnight and there’s way too much to say…

So I did okay in the qualifiers, was the only one to even get close to a second ascent of the final (fifth) route in that round and still sunk to tenth, barely making the cut-off of twelve. Our problems were nasty, but not nearly as INSANE as the guys’. I mean, their problems were the most bouldery of boulder problems I have ever seen. Short, powerful, and ridiculously crazy. Even Woods and Robinson were making faces when they hit the third route…which remained unsent by the end. And there were a lot of people watching that day, all of them with their video cameras and Sonys pulled out as Paul and Daniel and Chris each started climbing. The crowd was pretty crazy about the girls…not nearly as much as the guys, but our setting was better and we still cranked pretty hard.

The finals was a spectacle. They set the Thunderdome on top of a hotel parking garage – imagine that! – and sold beer and bevs to a milling crowd of people as they watched the climbers suffer. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the people were actually just there for the beer and knew nothing about the climbers or climbing itself, but they were still hypnotized by the lean and muscular competitors that attempted to scale the walls.

We were shooed into iso at 5pm, where I finally met Giaoum (spelling is definitely wrong here), one of Madrock’s imported French climbers. He’d placed very well in the qualifs and spoke very little English, so when I saw him off to the side on one of the couches in iso, by himself, I encouraged him to a little fooze-ball. He’s better at climbing apparently. :) We finished a game and I sat down again, only to see Chris walk in and set his stuff by another couch. He slowly came over, barely recognizing me with my cropped hair. “Tiffany, right?” Of course I remembered him, he came from the same home gym as I started from – Pacific Edge – and I’d met him a few times, even if I was too humbled every meeting to say more than a few words. This time I was able to put together a few sentences (was still a little awed after watching the premiere of King Lines the night before) and noticed he hadn’t changed much at all.

He has this big presence about him, an aura if you will, that would make conversation comfortable if one weren’t so consciously aware of his fame and reputation. He’s a really peaceful sort of guy, so it was kind of painful to hear the man on the mike screaming at him in finals for the simple purpose of pumping up the crowd. Was it just me, or was the guy on the mike overdoing it a bit? Sometimes I wish climbing weren’t getting to be such a showy sport. The whole show was about playing it up just for the crowd, even if the competitors had to suffer a little for it. Give me local comps any day.

Moving on. It’s 1:07am now.

With hardly fifteen minutes of warm-up to cling to, ten of us, including a humorous photographer hired by the Mammut series, piled into a long black limo and set off for the garage…but our chauffer took a wrong turn and we ended up at a jiffy lube of all places! Haha. But eventually we got there and they hurried us to our second iso.

This is where, to our dismay, the competitors began to get the short end of the deal. Our iso was the back side of the wall, a tiny area with little room for the nine of us to stretch, which consisted of two fingerboards, some chairs, and an ice chest. Did I mention it was hot? In SLC it was a constant 90-something degrees, at least 85 at night, and the iso we stayed in was an easy 95.

The setters also committed a merciless act by putting the wall facing west, so our urethane holds were in the hot sun for hours before the first climber was led before the crowd. Since the women went first, we had to endure melting holds as we climbed and the hot sun in our faces as we rested. I remember squinting at the hotel next to the garage, trying to shake out my arms, watching as people ran up the flights of stairs to get spots to watch from a whole building away.

It’s getting so late, I have to write this now since there’s no time tomorrow. Okay, so Sharma finished first and Alex Johnson (gasp! That’s right, Johnson, the spunky tall one, not Puccio, though Puccio did some amazing flashes herself and settled into a close second. Our lanky, hardcore boulderer Miss Johnson flashed all the problems.) My new French acquaintance placed fourth and Paul and Dan placed close behind Chris. I flashed the first two and flailed on the last moves of the third and fourth, stuck the dyno easily on the fifth but was already losing strength by then.

After. The next day we hit up the Momentum gym with our German friend, Christian, and found out how impossibly rad the routes were. The best were set by the initial “S”, a guy who apparently holds low popularity in Europe but is still an amazing climber and awesome route-setter. The gym itself is agonizingly strict – no loose chalk, shirtlessness, jumping on the slack line, top-roping on lead walls, etc… - but since it’s only three months old the holds are all new and the walls (by Walltopia) are the best anywhere, maybe the best in the states, and the bouldering is great. I had this really weird feeling that I’d dreamed of the bouldering area…yeah, weird, right?...except the walls topped out at ground level in my dream, next to a road.

The second day after, I was quickly surfing yourclimbing and I spotted Katie’s blog - saying she was checking out the Momentum that day, same as us. Cool, thought I, and we set off, but with a number of stops we arrived much later than planned and walked in literally as she was waving goodbye to the staff. I heard one of the staff saying, “How do you use loose chalk? We all use chalk balls!” or something like that, and she was gone. Oh well. But several hours later Dave Graham walked in with some friends, one of which who demonstrated his slack-lining tricks between my pathetic attempts to get the hang of just walking. It’s neat to see someone do something so fluid, I think he’d said he hadn’t slack-lined in months or something…strange, isn’t it, how things become innate?

Two days later we hit Maple Canyon, where the rock is conglomerate (sp?). This means it was made up of millions of rocks put together, from the size of a pea to the size of a watermelon. Weird climbing, and remarkably/surprisingly good climbing. The only down side is the breaking holds, i.e. the solid move that shatters into a fall that has your belayer frantically dodging small rocks and other painful debris. After nearly hitting my belayer on the head with a stone and trying a route that obviously had seen better days, our day was saved by meeting two companionable guys with a dog whose colors blended into the rock, Ray. Funny how I remember people’s pets better than their humans. I think one guy was named Burton, the other was…Jeff?…they showed us some great .12s…

Final day in Utah-

“I’m sorry, you’re not allowed here any more.” “Uh?” “We can’t allow you to climb in our gym.” My face couldn’t decide what expression to take and decided to go blank. “Why?”
“We got the managers together and decided that because of the dangerous belaying techniques…” The woman behind the desk stopped. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just recognized you.” She was looking at me. My confusion left me as I realized what she meant. “You mean the German?” I asked. She apologized - to both of us - explaining that in case our German friend was to come back (he’d left for Germany) the gym would kick him out because he didn’t belay their way.

Christian was belaying me a couple days ago when one of the Momentum climbing gym staff walked up and asked him to stand closer to the wall. Having climbed for a ridiculous number of years and safely belayed thousands of times, he quietly complied and moved towards the wall. A day later, they caught him in the gym café as we were on our way up and told him they’d had a complaint from one of the staff about his belaying. I continued to chew my muffin as I stood a little to the side, listening to them talk it out. Christian started right off the bat with a good explanation, telling them he’d belayed for so many years and giving them the technical aspects of why he belayed the way he did. “A dynamic fall is better than a static fall, and with our big weight difference I can stand away to watch for when she clips and when she’s about to peel…” They nodded, trying to be understanding, and the woman suddenly asks, “Do you hop?” “Hop?” “You’re supposed to hop,” here she gave a small hop, “right when they fall.”

I must go! All the packing to do now, and I get up at 6am. Hope this will make up for the absence of writing. I’ll be sending in more from Ecuador…