Revised land deal may craft park for climbers details a land swap that would exchange land near a copper mine (Oak Flat Campground) and set up a state park for climbing instead. The copper mine would bring 400 jobs to the area.

This thread from RockClimbing.com thinks the area they’re talking about for the first ever rock climbing state park is Tamo.

Well, this guy in Climbing’s benefits are rock-solid lost 40 pounds in 2 months due to rock cliimbing. A bit hard to believe it could do that for everyone, but it has a decent photo of a climb in North Carolina with a great tree background.

Wall encourages brain and brawn describes kids playing word search games on their new rock climbing wall. They look for letter tiles that are placed on the wall. They should combine that with rock climbing twister.

Have you heard about the Piolet d’Or award? The committee nominates six climbers annually and selects winners for their alpine climbing achievements. Vince Anderson and Steve House received the award this year for climbing Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. It’s a 26,600 ft mountain that’s also known as the “Killer Mountain.” You can read more about it in
Evergreen grad wins prestigious climbing award. Apparently there’s really good food at the base camps, which might make me climb without oxygen. Might.

More info about the award is on Patagonia’s press release: Patagonia Ambassadors Steve House and Vince Anderson Win 2005 Piolet D’Or.

Photos from the new Sunnyvale Planet Granite in construction are up. If I lived in the South Bay, I’d probably be really up on this news, but I’ve only heard bits and pieces about the new gym until now. Looks like there was an open house yesterday. It’s a great gallery showing how the construction is progressing.

The AP’s article
Outdoor retailer REI blazes a trail has been picked up by a number of newspapers. In 1995, REI’s sales were over $1 billion, the first time ever. The article points out some other things that have changed too, including higher salaries for workers, health coverage for part-time employees, and increased donations.

In Land plan has climbers on ropes we learn that Bush wants to sell 300,000 acres of U.S. Forest land to extend a federal program to support rural schools and roads for the next five years. Of course, some of this land contains some climbing areas.

The Access Fund issued a press release, but I couldn’t find it quickly on their web-site. Instead, you can read about in this article:
Prevent Sale of Climbing Areas on Public Lands. The articles differ in the amount of land (200,000 acres vs 300,000 of U.S. Forest Land) actually up for sale, but they also don’t know how many climbing crags might be impacted. You can look up areas potentially eligible for sale and try and count the total acreage.

Lance Trumbull has organized several peace climbs in the past few years. Now he and eight others from around the world will climb Everest. More info at Nine diverse men to take on world’s tallest mountain for peace and his website: www.everestpeaceproject.org. I thought fundraising for a big climb would be a good cause, but then worried about Team in Training or some other group starting organizing big climbs at Yosemite.

I’d been wanting to post about Yvon Chouinard for a while, but the news item I kept looking for never appeared. Anyways, the founder of Patagonia has lead a 1 percent for the planet campaign for over 2 decades, as described in “How much difference can 1 percent make?” He donates 1% of Patagonia’s annual gross sales to environmental causes and encourages other companies to do so as well. You can find more about this pledge at http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org
Btw — if you’re looking for a pledge for yourself, not your company, you can look at 10over100.org.

I’ve been hoping I’d run into an article about Chouinard’s new book
Let My People Go Surfing : The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, but I think I just need to get my amazon order ready. This Time article Reaching the Top by Doing the Right Thing has some funny insights and explains the title. He has a speech where he tells employees to “live in the moment, ‘as long as the work gets done,’ and if the surf is up, surf.”

Chouinard’s definitely an interesting guy. I visited the Patagonia offices for work a long time ago, and the woman working there says Chouinard would be there in the mornings for the company yoga classes wearing a t-shirt with holes and old jeans. But that’s small stuff compared to his other accomplishments, including switching Patagonia from conventionally grown cotton to organic cotton, building aluminum chockstones in the 70s, and his tendency to drink from every stream he can find.

There are cops on mountain bikes. Cops on motorcycles. In India, Rock climbing for police. Since there are biker scouts, shouldn’t there be rock climbing storm troopers too?