Tina and Mike Basich interview

Like I said in the last post, I just read Tina's book, which was a damn good read, despite its hot pink cover. Things you should know about Tina Basich are: Her family lived in a teepee for several months while building a new house; she was a local at GoSkate in Sacremento, she started snowboarding waaaaay early, in 1986; she dated snowboarder Andy Hetzel and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, she's a damn good big mountain rider who loves powder runs; and she was the first woman to bust a backside 720 over a kicker jump.

Tina Basich and the Chaka Bra Yeti

I just read Tina's book, Pretty Good For a Girl. I'm confident enough in my manhood to walk around with a hot pink book. It was kinda tween angsty at the begining, but once she got talking about snowboarding it was really interesting. she mentioned this video in the book, and having met Paul way back in my Vision days, I had to check it out. Tina, Julius the monkey, and friends meet the Chaka Bra Yeti. Gotta love the demented mind of Paul Frank.

The Insiders gym climbing video

I wanted to find one more good climbing video of a woman I hadn't heard of before. The name Sasha Digiulian's name kept coming up. So here's a young woman climber and a bunch of her friends rockin' (pun intended) in the climbing gym. This was filmed at Central Rock Gym, worcester Massashusetts. This is a cool video.

bouldering explained

This chick is kinda goofy. Well, actually I'm just an old loser so she seems goofy to me. But she gives a pretty good explanation of bouldering, indoor gym, social butterfly style. Get your skinny ass out to some real rocks, woman!

Catherine Desitvelle free solo climb in Mali

This looks like the 1980's, judging by her outfit. At first, this doesn't look all that difficult, just really high and exposed. But as she gets higher, she's doing some intense climbing, especially since she doesn't have ropes.

Lynn Hill and Katie Brown in Yosemite

In this clip we have Lynn Hill, one of America's best climbers, period. Lynn is one of the most experienced climbers around, she was the first to free climb The Nose at Yosemite, one of it's most famous routes. Katie Brown was a teenage wonder kid in climbing in the 1990's, and excelled at the shorter, intense, overhanging routes in competitions. Here the two work together up an overhanging, but "short" big wall at Yosemite. Katie pushes her limits in climbing endurance and Lynn shows her the tenacity it takes to tackle the long routes of multi-pitch climbing. Good stuff.

Lynn Hill bouldering at Hueco Tanks

This is a beautiful little video about a magical place. And an amazing climber, Lynn Hill. In 1990, I was on a short skateboard tour as driver/team manager. We stopped for our last show in El Paso, Texas, and had a day off. Buck Smith had the idea that we should find some Indian ruins to go check out. The other members of the team, Mark Oblow, Chris Gentry, and Mike Crum, said that sounded like a good idea. We asked the hotel front desk guy what was around, and he told us about a place called Hueco Tanks. It wasn't Indian ruins, but it was a state park that had old Indian pictographs. We packed up in the 110 degree heat and headed out there. Out in the middle of the Texas desert, in the middle of freakin' nowhere, is this big clump of rocks. That's Hueco Tanks.

We'd been cooped up in a dually pickup for three weeks, we needed to just walk around for a day. Since it was so hot, and since we were all in good shape, the Hueco Tanks ranger decided to give us the bonus guided tour, and led us into this amazingly shaped mass of rocks. Over millions of years, the desert wind had carved holes, or "huecos" out of the rocks everywhere. The whole place looked like a sculpture. The ranger led us into open-ended caverns, many of which had natural basins of water in them. Those were the tanks. For thousands of years, traveling Indians, and then white men, stopped at Hueco Tanks to fill up on water in the inhospitable desert. While hanging out, many of them, both Indians and settlers, left graffiti in the for of pictographs and wagon axle grease names and dates. We wandered and climbed around, and checked out pictographs all morning.

We had a great day at Hueco Tanks, and finished up our last demo the next day. A couple years later I got into rock climbing and learned that the weird rock formation I'd found on a skateboard tour was renowned in the climbing community. I never made it back to Hueco, but someday I will. By the way, those routes Lynn makes look so easy...are insanely hard. There are very few people on the planet that could make those moves.