I may have been subjected to rendezvous with the overly rock climbing inclined for a number of years now, but I still manage to be impressed with the level climbing is at today after days like yesterday. A crag like Oliana in Spain isn’t for your beginner or even intermediate climber. The grandiose blue and tan tufa streaked wall homes a hand full of warm-ups (11d and up), and gives your 12+/13- climber a few classic and stunning lines. Beyond these routes the grades jump drastically into the 13+ to hard 5.14 range, in which there are a disproportionate...

Desert, mountains, beautiful boulders, psyched friends and endless splitter days… What more could one ask for? This pretty much sums up my stay in Bishop! After barely bouldering at all for the last five years, over the last month in Bishop I really discovered the joys of bouldering. The simple pleasure of doing a short sequence of moves, being able to focus purely on individual movements. That said, I was most attracted to the big, bold and strikingly beautiful lines, which are relatively abundant and are what Bishop has become famous for. I loved the commitment...

I don’t think I’ve ever been more ready for the tranquilo and slowed pace life of Spain. Our last few weeks in the states seemed suffocated with social obligations, planning, training, moving, packing and squeaking out all the last minute details in between. Life starts to feel a little like a circus, and it’s not until we stopped here in another country that I felt I could take a clear look at the entire process and start to get something out of it.

Alex Johnson, Josh Levine, Nick Milburn and I arrived in Rodellar, Spain after a 3 hour car ride from Barcelona. Rodellar has the best climbing I have ever experienced. Rodellar is in a huge canyon with many styles of climbing. There’s probably a tufa on almost every climb. One of the first areas we climbed in Rodellar was the Las Ventanas, a huge slightly over hanging wall with two arches to the right of it, and on one of the arches was a climb called El Dolphin 13a ,a classic climb with a sweet body rest at...

I had a very good trip to Spain, despite much more unsettled conditions than usual. The first week was very wet, then it improved for a time before another massive dump of rain, which left the crags pretty wet. However, the weather was very mild which made living in the van much more pleasant. It also meant we were able to climb in the shade which was a bonus. We started at Rodellar but after one day the weather broke so we did a bit of driving about, spending an afternoon at the football pitch crag at Santa Linya,...