I finally got around to editing the second part of the video I took on my trek to Cerro Champaqui in Argentina.

Working on this really brought me back to the end of the trek. I’ve seen plenty of bigger mountains, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so completely exhilarated as I did on top of Champ. Maybe it was just the release of finally making it there after four days trekking alone, but I almost felt lighter.

Friggin’ Olympics. Yeah, I spend my time writing about sports, and this is probably some kind of heresy. But I just can’t follow 15 different sports at the same time. The fact that you have to be cold to play them isn’t a good enough reason to have them all happen at the same time. Grumble grumble grumble.

I’m not an Olympic hater. All my frustration aside, the Games are fun to watch and have a great community vibe to them. What’s dogging me are all the non-Olympic sports stories getting lost in the frenzy of news from Vancouver.

Earlier this week, I realized I completely missed a big piece of climbing news that happened during the final build-up to the Olympics. Daniel Woods has sent what may be the world’s hardest boulder problem.

Daniel did the first ascent of Boulder Canyon’s The Game on February 10. He’s calling it V16, the first time that grade’s been seriously proposed for a problem in the US.

The Game, World’s Hardest Boulder Problem? from Cedar Wright on Vimeo.

The full send was filmed by Big Up and Sender Films, and is going to come out as part of this year’s Reel Rock Tour.

After about a month of sitting on the footage I brought back from Champaqui, I finally did something with it, and it turned out better than I thought. Still, as it’s not super-high-quality and is a little me-heavy, I think it’ll fit better here than on Matador Sports.

The story: this past December, I decided to celebrate the end of classes by taking a week-long trip to go climb Mt. Champaqui (2790 m), the tallest mountain in the Argentine province of Córdoba.

The route I planned would start at Villa Alpina, about 12-15 hours trek from the foot of the mountain. From there I figured I’d head west, make the climb, and then head down via another route to Yacanto de Calamuchita.

Unlike most trekkers who set out to do Champaqui, I decided to go totally alone. No guide, no partner, nothing.

I prepared for months before I set out, putting together gear lists, looking for maps, and just generally getting everything as ready as possible. It was tedious work, but it paid off.

For about three hours. Then the gods of the mountains thumbed their noses at me and my plans, and I ended up behind schedule and desperately improvising, as usual. Here’s what the camera caught.

I’ll be posting part 2 soon, so keep checkin’.

I came back from Champaqui (see last couple of entries) with a whole mess of footage that I shot during the hike and up on the ascent. I had pretty lofty goals: I was planning on putting this all together into a spiffy-looking mini-doc for mSports.

What have I discovered since then? First of all, I really suck at video editing. My only experience with it at all was a short stint playing around with Jumpcut, back before Yahoo bought and trashed it.

Second? You can’t make a good video without good raw footage. The stuff I brought back was all shot by me, mostly on my little point-and-shoot camera. Because I did the whole trip alone, the only shots of me were awful, held-out-at-arms-length clips, the MySpace profile pic of videography. It didn’t occur to me that the more interesting shots typically have people in them, even if it’s just for scale.

After about a month and a half, all I have is the 30-second-long intro, and I’m not feeling too good about the way it’s turning out. I have a bad feeling it won’t be Matador-quality when I’m done with it: it’ll probably end up here.

The most maddening part about this is that you don’t really get second chances at a subject like this. If I wanted to re-shoot all the film with a real camera, I’d have to head back down to Argentina, and lord knows that isn’t happening any time soon (especially with the reciprocity fee Argentina has now instituted).

Oh well. Came back with some nice pics anyway.

On the plus side, Jeremy Jones is releasing a new film and it is looking LOCO.

-All the movement - I covered 42 km on descent alone.
-Old-school navigation = compass and relief map
-Spending very rainy, stormy night alone in wet tent, huddled under survival blanket.
-Successfully navigating through the mountains from Moises Lopez’ place to Hector Gonzales’ puesto in the middle of a super-heavy fog.
-Waking up on summit day to see clear skies.
-After about six or seven hours climbing, finally summiting and seeing Traslasierra in front of me.
-Last morning of trekking, with the Milky Way above me and all of Calamuchita Valley lit up in front of me.

What a climb!

My favorite part of my job is working out in the field. If I’m in the city, I want to be out and about, bouncing from interview to interview.

Right now, I’m getting ready for a different kind of fieldwork - mad dash through Argentina’s central (and possibly western?) provinces to hike the sierras and hopefully summit some mountains. Holla!

Words of the week:

-prepared
-chlorine
-ultra-prominent
-Pachamama
-cumbre
-hatchet
-open-ended

Some of my favorite quotes from the recent press conference that got Diego a two-month suspension from FIFA:

“For the people. For those who didn’t believe, for those who never believed, they can suck it. And keep on sucking it.”

And in case anyone wasn’t clear on the concept:

“They can suck it now, they can suck it now, they can suck it now, THEY CAN SUCK IT GOOD!”

And Diego gets personal:

“Come on, come on Carlos! I told you I wanted you. They can suck it now! Come on, damn it.”

“You actually have to want to live, and you have to refuse to give up.”

I spent last weekend celebrating my birthday in a rather unconventional way. Two of my friends and I went to El Calafate in Argentine Patagonia to do a mini trek on the Perito Moreno glacier, an enormous chunk of ice and snow on Argentina’s Andean border with Chile.

As a kind of supplement to the photo essay I’m publishing on Matador Sports, these clips give a “behind the scenes” look at what I saw as I hiked and prepared the article.

This doesn’t really have to do with the glacier trek, but here’s a kind of adorable video from the next day, when LAN tried to make up for pushing our flight by nine hours by sending us to an estancia, or country ranch, for the day.