Month: July 2008

DAY 90
07.03.07
TREE 99

HALF WAY

 

END OF CONSECUTIVE NEW CLIMBS.

Rachel has the day planned with her mom, so I dropped her off and got directions to Shawnee Park. The last major park in Louisville that I had never climbed in, plus, I had never even been there. I drove down Broadway and it was interesting to see parts of Louisville that I never had before. I made it to the park and slowly drove around the park looking for trees and parking. This park is very wide open with few if any dense wooded areas. I parked by some basketball courts and started to walk around. Not too far from my truck I passed an old building and saw a tree, tall, with good branches, not too close, but a path to the top was visible. I jumped to a small limb off the lowest branch and hoisted myself up. Then I began to slowly work from branch to branch, methodical, careful, and calculated. Some parts were very challenging but not the worst I’ve experienced. I pushed ever more upwards all the way to the top. There I marked, rested and took pictures. I had a beautiful view of the fields and really loved this spot and this climb. Very high and quite scared I really soaked it in on this last day of new climbs for the project. My way down was slower and not as easy as it was up. I really had to concentrate to get back the way I came trying different methods in some tricky spots. But I made it to the ground once again. One of my favorite climbs. Very challenging and a huge accomplishment. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer day or a better tree. I am really looking forward to climbing these 99 trees again.

7-3-08:  It says HALF WAY up there because I was originally only planning to climb for 6 months.  The residency was only supposed to be six months so I thought it would be perfect.  Then I decided I wanted to experience all four seasons and didn’t want to stop climbing and made it a year.  THEN… I just couldn’t stop.  Today was 455 days in a row.  2 years sounds good, but so does 1000 days in a row.  But so does for the rest of my life.  We’ll just have to see.

I hope you all have enjoyed Part 1 of my project.  Three parts remain and as I have mentioned before my entries are going to get longer and I am going to start posting many more pictures.  I have also reached over 80 video postings on my youtube account.  If you are interested in just browsing the videos and reading mine and others’ comments please feel free to visit http://youtube.com/user/bizcacha

Also, tomorrow will look a little different… Since Part 2 is the reclimb, I will be re-posting an image or images from the first experience next to images from the second experience.  I think the comparison is interesting, personally, and you can really see the drastic differences that 3 months time can make in nature. 

Now to yesterday’s climb.  We had a very successful parkour jam at U of L last night.  Lots of people showed up, some newbies, and unfortunately we lost a few to bloody injuries.  One in particular was this guy, Brandon, who was there for 5 minutes, did one cat grab on some rough cement and left with bloody hands.  It was his first day too.  Sorry man, heal up and come back.  Another good story was NJ.  He got a cut on his hand and it was bleeding pretty bad.  I look over at him and he was chewing something.  I asked if he was going to put his gum on it.  But it wasn’t gum, it was a wad of grass he just pulled from the ground and was working into some… thing to put on his wound.  He works at Amazing Grace (a small, local, whole foods kinda store in Bardstown Rd.) and has been learning a lot about Chinese medicine.  I then dubbed him The Shaman.  Since we all have nicknames or aliases in parkour and NJ didn’t have one, I thought it was appropriate and I hope it sticks.  And one last injury report:  Maryliz aka Brut Force dislocated her shoulder twice last night.  The second time was particularly bad.  So she left and I had to walk with her and Drew to get her stuff out of my truck.  I grabbed my camera and on the way back to the group I stopped in a quad to climb a nice tall sweet gum tree.  It was dark with some lingering colorful light in the distant sky.  I was surrounded by huge 3 and 4 story college buildings but I was so high in this tree I could see over them.  I was all the way to the top and it was a great climb.  One thing I liked a lot about the pictures I took was the blurriness that makes you notice the colors more than the shapes.  Enjoy: