Midweek News – 08/22/07

Here are a few interesting stories to check out

• Splitterchoss has a couple of cool tidbits on climbing at Rifle.
  • First is a post about a feature story done about climbing at Rifle Mountain Park in the Glenwood Post Independent.
  • Second is news about a new guidebook for Western Colorado climbing that will feature updated Rifle information among many other areas. The book will be published by Wolverine Publishing. Check out my post on the new Red River Gorge guidebook for some samples of their work which is awesome.
• Mike Doyle is back on the road again after taking a bit of a break upon returning home from his lengthy roadtrip to places like Hueco, Smith Rock, RRG and Australia. In the past month he has been in Riggins, ID, Maple Canyon, UT and Rifle. He has done 13 routes 5.13 and harder in just the past 3 weeks.
• This is probably only exciting news to me, but a team of Russian mountaineers have put up a new route on the hitherto unclimbed West Face of K2 in Pakistan. K2 was the peak featured in the laughable film “Vertical Limit” and it is probably the toughest of the 8000m giants to climb via any route. This was the first new line put on the mountain in 21 years (and not for a lack of trying).
• Even if you are not into mountaineering, the latest pro blog at climbing.com by Freddie Wilkinson is still a really good read. He recounts the sort of emotions a climber has when going on a rescue.
• Check out the video of Steve McClure climbing one of the hardest routes in Great Britain, Mutation (5.14d), after you read the write-up at Dr. Topo.
• Last week I raised a question after watching the new MomentumVM video in which it was said that Ben Scott only goes to Area D at Mt. Evans once a year to “lessen impact”. It seemed like a strange thing to put in a video. Courtesy of Chad Greedy, here is a more lighthearted take (along with mass repeats of Seth Allred’s new V11 Two Ton Tongue):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpSNWFEznNQ]