I would like to first apologize to Bob Dylan for this title, but also I’m not really sorry. A few weeks ago my friend, Kathy Karlo, posted a completely black image on her Instagram page. She captioned it with this: “How do you tell the internet when you are feeling sad? […] It’s hard to curate…
Author: cherryblossomsandpines
October 30th
That used to be a very important date. I would plan for it months in advance, asking time off from work, planning out trips or special things to do. To me, it was a very important date- and not because of Halloween. I am an extraordinarily sentimental person. I have keepsakes from all over the…
Getting After It
“You just gotta get after it!” seems to be the mantra of every climber I’ve met recently. My ex used to say it constantly and despite my best efforts to ignore most of the habits picked up from him this seems to be one that I can’t shake. I won’t blame him entirely for this…
Utah: A Love Story, pt 2
I sat at the second bolt on a route in Wild Iris, Wyoming last weekend. I was leading a harder 5.10, it would be my fifth of the weekend, something I had never thought would happen and I stared at the blank looking section of limestone in front of me. The holds were small,…
The Jam
Since I’ve moved to Salt Lake I haven’t stopped climbing. I live at the gym and usually if I’m not in the gym I’m convincing myself that 90 degrees plus are total sending temps (it’s dry so it doesn’t count, right?). The reality is that between belaying children for four hours a day, climbing for…
You Know There’s a Foot There
This was not the blog post I was going to share. I had a nice blog post- reminiscent on the last four years and looking forward to the next. It was lovely, really. But then, as I sat in front of a v4 boulder problem at the gym last night, resting before giving it another…
The Big Two Six
When I was ten and living in Germany, my mom and I went to Poland. We visited the Wielickza Salt Mine near Kraków, it contains four chapels carved within the mine as well as dozens of statues- all made of salt. In my room back in Atlanta I have a tiny barrel topped with glued…
Go
When I was 10 my mom and I moved to Germany. When I was 10, I hated it. I had been forcibly removed from my dad, my friends, my language, everything but my mom (and barbies). We traveled all over Europe- Czech Republic, Poland, France, England, Ireland and various parts of Germany. When I think…
Climbing is Not a Solo Sport
While listening to Kathy Karlo‘s newest endeavor, a podcast of the same name as her blog, one of the stories heard in the trailer mentioned the speaker’s fear with climbing. In his brief story the man relates that his fear of climbing seemed to dissipate after an exceptionally hard break up. Perhaps the best thing…
