Saturday September 6th is the annual Rifle Mountain Park Clean-Up

This years projects Include:
• All day trash Clean-Up
• Bolt and fixed biner replacement, with gear generously donated by the Anchor Replacement Initiative
• Project Wall trailbuilding
• Nappy Dugout trailbuilding
• Bridge Repair

As always there will be a raging BBQ at the end of the day at the Community House with 3 kegs of Avery Beer, tons of food, a raffle, and all the drunken beta you never wanted to hear.

$5 gets you food, beer, and raffle tickets

Proceeds go towards equipping new routes in the canyon.

The event is sponsored by Wolverine Publishing, Rock & Ice, Avery Brewing, Access Fund Adopt-A-Crag, Patagonia; Sanuk, Prana, Petzl, La Sportiva, Stonewear Designs, Cloudveil, Larabar, Black Diamond.

Here it is! The new guidebook for climbing in Rifle Mountain Park and other areas in Western Colorado.

Featuring over 900 routes at the following areas:
Rifle Mountain Park
Rifle Arch
Main Elk
The Fortress
Glenwood Canyon
The Narrows
Redstone
Coal Creek
Frying Pan
Lime Park
Hagerman Pass

Many of these areas have never been published before and are a wonderful addition to the climbing in this part of Colorado. This book is packed with incredible action photos and concise beta that you can’t find anywhere else, not even on this site!

Check out the sample pages below:

Project Wall - Rifle
Glenwood Canyon Intro
The Skillet - Frying Pan

All orders get a free SplitterChoss.com sticker. So what are you waiting for?

I came across these cool videos that Renan Ozturk put together about a trip they are doing with Sender Films in Europe right now. Looks wild, climbing without shoes or chalk. Yikes! I’m sure the footage that gets released in Peter Mortimer’s next film will be intense!

Part 1

Part 2

Time again for the Monday Morning Movie. Here’s a cool clip from Patagonia of Lynn Hill and Katie Brown on the West Face of Leaning Tower. In their words: “In the summer of 2005 Lynn Hill and Katie Brown made the first female “free” ascent of the West Face (V 5.13b/c A0), Leaning Tower, Yosemite. See Lynn and Katie’s climb and find out about the challenges they faced on the Leaning Tower.”

Enjoy.

The folks over at Momentum Video Magazine have their new site up. I tried to check it out, but the videos were super slow, and I noticed other glitches. They should have waited to send this thing live, and I’ll wait until the kinks get worked out to see how I like it. It does appear the bulk of the site is built with Flash, which is a big fat check in the negative column. More to come…

UPDATE 11/15/07

I went back and checked it out some more, and here are some more thoughts. I liked how the videos were bigger in the old version, these seem pretty small. I guess you have to pay now for the bigger ones, although from the free preview they aren’t all that big, especially if you are paying for it. I don’t like the navigation for the videos and news columns, the mouse over scroll thing is just too jerky.

The paid option is interesting, but most climbers are pretty damn stingy, so it’ll be interesting to see if folks will pay for this stuff. I would have probably left everything free for awhile longer, to get people really psyched on it, and then offered a paid model. Of course without knowing how much traffic they get, it’s difficult to say whether they jumped the gun or not. Going straight to paid I think leaves a lot of folks wondering if it’s really worth it.

It would be nice if the news had an rss feed, and the same goes for the videos, so we could easily see when new content is added. Welcome to 2007 people.

I did enjoy the video of Jaws II, but because its a flash site, I can’t link to just that video, so you’ll have to go there and find it for yourself. It would also be nice to be able to embed the free videos, like how you can share a YouTube video. That would probably really help them to gain some exposure.

I don’t want to come across too negative, I still think the idea behind the site is good, I just feel it could be executed so much better. And part of what I do for a living is make websites better, so I can’t help but notice all the flaws. Maybe the NEXT redesign will be better