Jamie Emerson has had a productive couple of weeks at the Northern Colorado area Red Feather Lakes. He has done the FA of 3 V12s recently in The Big Bang, The Mastodon and The Vampire. The coolest looking line of the three is probably the line followed by The Mastodon, which climbs a long rail before dropping off near the top. Here is the video to give you a better idea of what it looks like:
Mastodon V12 from Jamie Emerson on Vimeo.
As it turns out, The Mastodon adds a few moves to a problem Chuck Fryberger did on this rail called The Product. In the comments of the post on B3Bouldering regarding Jamie’s FA, some people took exception to Jamie’s assertion that his version warranted a new name and a fairly interesting discussion ensued. Some felt as though adding a few moves from a slightly lower start was not that significant while others pointed out that neither version topped out which negates both problems. This is an interesting discussion to be sure, but I think some of the detractors are forgetting the sage words of one Steven Jeffrey when he said, “bouldering is pretty contrived anyway”.
Just when the discussion seemed to be dying down came this friendly jab from Chuck Fryberger who posted this satirical fake e-mail from Jamie Emerson on his blog:
Chuck,
It’s your pal Jamie. I just wanted to congratulate myself on some recent sending I’ve been doing in Red Feather. Last year you mentioned that your problem ‘The Product’ is incomplete and that someone strong needs to link the moves at the end to complete the problem. Well I went there and I couldn’t figure out which end you were talking about so I focused my energy on the bottom end. After two days of effort I have managed to add a contrived variation to The Product that I feel is much harder. It uses the same holds as your problem, but instead of taking them with your feet I take them with my hands. This is surely the best variation in Red Feather. It adds over eight moves to the start of The Product, counting of course the well-known fact that the placement of each finger pad is one move. Check out the video: you can clearly see me taking the footholds with my hands and then proceeding up to the drop-off. I rule.
Sincerely, Jamie.
Snap?
Not to be left out, there is a rather famous sport route in France that has a bit of controversy surrounding its name as well, Realization. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Sonnie Trotter had a great post about this the other week that led to a pretty informative discussion about how cultural differences play into how routes are named. Check it out to learn more about about Chris Sharma renaming Biographie after he completed the extension…errr…after he completed the original line that was there before a 2nd set of anchors were put in lower on the route. Big Up’s Josh Lowell even chimes in to offer some first hand wisdom on how everything went down back in 2001.
