Jason Lancaster

I came to an interesting realization today: My two passions, lindy hop and bouldering, are relatively new hobbies in mainstream media. Both were emerging and gaining popularity just as I was in high school. Things that didn’t exist in my childhood like having a local climbing gym or a local dance scene (on certain levels the dance scene did exist but not as it does today) are something that would actually be accessible and cool to someone of age 16 today. I don’t doubt there were areas around the world that picked up on these cultures sooner than others but it makes me wonder about the future of my investment in both if they are so incredibly new. And if they are just a phase, they must be leading to bigger and better passions. But what could be better? I have no freaking clue!

Now that the hubbub of purchasing/finding Christmas gifts and tweaking GiftListIt is over, I can spend a bit of time organizing things like my photos. I’d like to show you a picture of what I think will make a really great boulder problem at Rocks State Park. The problem with the problem is, in order to do it safely I’ll need at least on more (if not 2) mats. 

This is definitely in my list of things to do in 2008. I’ll need to wait until we’ve had a period of warm dry days — the area this is in has a lot of ground seepage so things are always damp.

Dave took some great pictures of some bouldering we did at Rocks State Park on Thanksgiving Day. The picture above is from that album. Check out my picasaweb gallery for the rest of the pictures.

Last Wednesday, I had a really great climbing session with Tio Dave at ET in Timonium. They were setting a bunch of new boulder routes and I quickly sent a couple of the new unrated problems. It’s always fun to do that as it is a “no limits” kind of night. You might try something that is v9 but you’d never know because there is no official rating. Also, there was NO ONE there so we felt like we had the place to ourselves.

The bummer came towards the end of the night after trying some “easy” routes that were setup by Jason Kehl. I say “easy” because they were only rated 5.10 but were damn hard and took a few tries to figure out. I don’t think it was anything in particular that I did… I never heard a snap or a pop or anything. It didn’t even hurt much during the evening but the next morning my finger was swollen and hurt like crazy when I curled it in to my palm. It’s an old-school injury from when I was just out of high school rearing its ugly head again (at least, I’m pretty sure). It’s a fracture of the right index finger right at the big knuckle where the tendon from the palm pulls on the knuckle. It just ends up pulling a little chip off the bone which then floats around and hurts like crazy.

I’ll find out for sure on Wednesday when I have my appointment with the hand specialist. In the meantime, I’ve splinted my finger and I’m not climbing. What a drag. I’m not sure what I could have done to prevent this from happening again. This is the 4th or 5th time it has happened now. All from playing one stupid game of basketball in high school gym class and getting my finger jammed. I hate that game.

Update (12/21/07): Nothing conclusive came up with the doctor visit. The swelling went down after 2 days and after a little time off things felt great. I climbed again on 12/18 and again on 12/20 with no pain. Not sure what happened but I’m happy to say things are just fine as of now.

I’ve been urged by some people to write about a rather scary experience Dave and I had at Rocks State Park a week or so ago. We were climbing at the bottom of Breakaway wall and I heard a rather large rock hit the ground behind us. I proceeded to do one of those, “woah’s” in which Dave knew something was up — even though he was about 40 feet off the ground climbing. After asking what happened and me explaining that a big rock just came tumbling down, a water bottle comes flying off the edge of the cliff and topples down. Needless to say we both started yelling and, unfortunately, no one had the courtesy to say sorry or even acknowledge us, leaving us both a little worried about what would come toppling over the cliff next. I understand that rock sometimes falls but a deliberate act of throwing a rock down on climbers is a little scary. I can only hope we scared the rascal that threw the rock and water bottle just as much as he scared us. Probably not though…

Beyond that, I’ve been very successful climbing routes in the gym this week. I flashed a 5.11a this evening and began working on a 5.12a that spit me off three times on the first try and once on the second try. I was burnt out after that and wasn’t too successful on my third or fourth tries. I’ll be sure to give the route a try sometime next week and hopefully surpass one of my previous goals which was to simply “work” on climbing 5.12′s, not necessarily send them. Boulder-wise, last week I flashed a couple v5′s which was nice but no news on breaking through the v7 barrier that I’ve been stuck on. Soon, soon.