Clif. The name is synonymous with climbing (perhaps it’s the logo?). If you’re like me, then you’ve always enjoyed Clif Bars, but rarely buy them because frankly, you’re a cheapskate. Nutritious? Yep. All natural? Absolutely. Tasty? You betcha! In fact, it’s amazing that anyone can successfully sell any product to a bunch of jobless, dirtbag climbers like ourselves, right? We’d rather just eat the dust of last weeks trail mix!

In recent years, Clif has been on a tear to diversify and expand their product line, releasing 9 new food products since 2004. However, since I’m rather oblivious to that sort of thing, and haven’t spent much time in climbing gyms recently (traditional Clif strongholds), I failed to notice…well…ALL of them. A recent sample of Clif Shot Bloks at an ultimate frisbee tournament piqued my curiosity, inspiring a flurry of research (read: tasting).

Today, we discuss: Clif Kid Organic ZBar.

My first thought? Clif has a line of kids products? Well, they do now, having released a second item, Clif Kid Twisted Fruit, last year.

I eat local, organic, non-processed food almost exclusively, so I’m always a bit skeptical of anything in a package, and generally that means foods with as few ingredients as possible (especially those ingredients that sound like they came from a laboratory: monogluxysodiobenzoate?). However, it’s hard to argue with the ingredients of the Peanut Butter ZBar:

Organic Peanut Butter (Organic Peanuts, Salt), Organic Evaporated Cane Juice Syrup, Organic Rolled Oats, Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Organic Tapioca Syrup, Organic Fig Paste, Organic Peanuts, Organic Oat Flour, Organic Milled Flaxseed, Organic Oat Fiber, Natural Flavors, Organic Chocolate (Organic Unsweetened Chocolate, Organic Evaporated Cane Juice, Organic Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin), Salt, Baking Soda.

Let’s just call it: a bunch of whole food ingredients pressed together.

What do they taste like? Basically ZBars are smaller, less dense (more bread-like) versions of Clif Bars, with a little drizzle of frosting on top. And tasty! Yes, I’m an adult, but there is nothing wrong with enjoying food aimed at children. Right?

My thoughts on the 6 different flavors, listed in order of preference:

• Peanut Butter - My favorite! I don’t like peanut butter cookies, but love any peanut butter & chocolate combo. This tastes more like the latter.
• Chocolate Chip - Reminiscent of Quaker Oats Chewy Chocolate Chip Granola Bars. Or even the S’more flavor. That’s a good thing!
• Blueberry - Tastes like a dense, chewy blueberry muffin.
• Apple Cinnamon - Surprisingly good considering I generally don’t enjoy this flavor.
• Chocolate Brownie - Still decent, basically a chocolate-chocolate chip taste. Though somehow less chocolaty than the Chocolate Chip?
• Honey Graham - My least favorite, and the “least strong” in terms of flavoring. It also happens to have the least amount of sugar.

Again, I try to eat local, organic food whenever possible and usually make my own goodies from scratch, but I realize that isn’t always possible. Clif has similar beliefs, expressed right there on the packaging: “In raising our family, we always wish to find organic snacks to nourish our kids as they compete in sports, study or just play with friends. We prefer to make them food from scratch, but life gets busy, so it’s not always possible. That’s why we created Clif Kid Organic ZBar - a baked energy bar made with whole oats..”. You get the picture. They do a great job with consistent, healthy, authentic products.

(Photo missing. Next time I’ll remember to take a picture BEFORE eating!)

Although I was a little saddened that the bars are frosted (just a snaking drizzle across the top), they still serve as a huge step up from most food products aimed at children in terms of healthfulness (no high fructose corn syrup!), organicness, and environmental responsible…ness. The real selling point is that they retail for roughly half the cost of a Clif Bar. So grab one for yourself…er, I mean your kid.

Thanks to Ryan for the guest post. If you enjoyed this, please check out his other posts at The Reluctant Eater, where he writes about eating local, organic food, and promoting a healthier relationship with food. Ryan also has a best of The Reluctant Eater collection.

like a condom for your gear: a prophylactic to prevent that expensive piece from walking away, accidentally or otherwise. Just mix the two ingredients and have about a 30 minute working time to apply to gear. 24 hours later it’s bombproof. literally: there may be some chemical to get it off but there’s no way mechanical friction or impact will do it.

Looks much better than the colored electrical tape I’ve been using for years that keeps falling off.

The Mark comes in four colors, has enough for making 250 marks, and retails for $14.95.

Entering its fifth year, the 2008 Adventure Film Festival starts today and ends November 11 in Boulder, Colorado. Focusing on all types of adventure, the festival bills itself as an international venue for independent films.

“I’ve been exposed to an incredible world of adventure through years of expeditions and work in outdoor media,” said founder Jonny Copp, a photographer, writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Climbing Magazine and Men’s Journal. “We created this film festival because there is powerful medicine within these stories. … (They) have the power to change us and change the world.”

Here are the festival’s “official selections” and the major award winners this year:

• People’s Choice - Living With Grizzlies by Jeff Turner
• Best Cultural Documentary - Recycled Life by Leslie Iwerks and Mike Glad
• Best Action Film - Seasons by The Collective
• Best Climbing Film - The Sharp End by Sender Films
• Activism Through Adventure - Sharkwater by Rob Stewart
• Best Surfing Film - Sliding Liberia by Britton Caillouette & Nicholai Lidow
• Intrepid Travel Award - A Map For Saturday by Brook Silva-Braga
• Best Whitewater Film - Source by Young Gun Productions
• Make Your Own Legends Award - Klunkerz by Billy Savage

Unfortunately, I’m out of town this weekend and will not be able to provide a review. If anyone attends, please leave a comment and let us know how the festival went.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of the sites I thought I had saved, so I did a bit of searching and discovered a site I hadn’t seen before called BooneBoulders.com.

They have an excellent summary of each of the main areas including Grandmother Mountain, Blowing Rock, Lost Cove, and the 221 Boulders.

Each area description provides a detailed summary, directions to the boulders, and has a list of the classic problems.

You’ll still need to beg the locals for specific problem locations and beta, but BooneBoulders.com is a great start for visitors.

I attended the Mt. Washington Valley Ice Festival numerous times and had a blast. The ice climbing there was fantastic, with opportunities for superb multi-pitch routes, mixed climbs, and even top-roping.

When I moved to southwest Virginia to be closer to the New River Gorge, the one thing I missed was the availability of ice climbing in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Hampshire. It has now been years since I’ve climbed ice.

Now that I’m in Colorado I’m anxiously awaiting the upcoming ice season, though I think I’ll need to upgrade most of my gear (I hope my wife is not reading this!)

As a preview to the upcoming season, Splitter Choss has a post up on the status of some of the Colorado ice climbing areas including Crested Butte, Ouray, and Rocky Mountain National Park.

If you’re looking forward to ice climbing this year, there are several resources to update you on the winter climbing conditions. Mountain Project has conditions reports that can be tailored to areas you choose. NEice.com provides conditions via a user forum for most of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Eastern Canada. For both US and international climbing area conditions, the American Alpine Institute blog provides a weekly post on updated conditions. For Colorado specific conditions, you can check iceclimbingcolorado.com’s current condition reports. Finally, Chauvin Guides provides a detailed look at conditions in New Hampshire with pictures and descriptions.

Image via Wikipedia

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on John Muir, his first ascent of Cathedral Peak in 1869, and the recent exhibit in the Yosemite Museum called “Granite Frontiers: A Century of Yosemite Climbing.”

Muir was Yosemite’s first climbing bum — a rara avis then, but a species that is not at all endangered today. Witness the queue to get a tent site in the park’s Camp Four, where bedraggled climbers with duct tape holding their down jackets together mass early every morning hours before the ranger station opens. And those are the orderly ones, not the so-called dirtbags who sleep illegally in the bushes, ignoring the regulations and spending months at a time in the park pursuing their passion. It’s not uncommon, moreover, to find climbers lined up to scale popular routes such as Cathedral Peak, although most use a rope to protect themselves from falling off the summit — unlike Muir, who trusted all to his hands and feet and steady nerves.

Chris Sharma is coming to the New River Gorge on Saturday, October 25th, 2008. He’ll be there for a slide show and the Dead Point Magazine Launch.
From the New River Mountain Guides:

Come down for the weekend and climb and have the opportunity to meet him in person and watch his amazing slideshow.

Chris’s life has allowed him countless experiences during his travels from one edge of the globe to the other and you can experience them with him as he recounts these moments LIVE! Moments such as sending Necessary Evil (14c) at 14 years old, his groundbreaking ascent of the Mandala, solidifying the first ascent of a 5.15 with Realization, the first ascent of Dreamcatcher and the monumental send Pontas Arch!

This is the first slideshow tour Chris has ever given in the dirty South, and it’s exclusively available only to Evolv and Sterling Rope dealers. Chris is going to be showcasing his Sharma Signature Series, his personal line of climbing shoes he developed with Evolv Footwear.

Show starts @ 8:00pm with the Dead Point Magazine party with a hip-hop
performance with Odub and a live DJ after the show.

More info on the Chris Sharma slide show can be found here.

Many of those improvements have been implemented and today we’re launching a new release that features the following:

• easier voting - logged in users can now vote on either the home page or on individual pages
• easier to see what you’ve voted on - each post is highlighted with up or down blue arrows if you’ve voted
• easier access to comments and permalinks
• most popular posts by number of votes received
• RSS feed for most popular posts
• updates to WYSIWYG editor for better posting
• various improvements to the design
• various minor bug fixes

If you haven’t visited ClimbingVibe yet, please try it out and vote on some of the best climbing articles on the web.

As always, please let us know what aspects of the site can be improved.

The Nose, which celebrates its 50 anniversary this year, is one of the world’s most famous rock climbs and was first ascended over a five week period by Warren Harding, Wayne Merry and George Whitmore. The first free ascent was carried out by none other than Lynn Hill in 1993 in what is hailed as one of the most significant free climbing achievements ever. The route had to wait a further 12 years for its first repeat, at the hands of the extremely talented American Tommy Caldwell.

The American Alpine Institute has posted a great video illustrating the prusik knot.

Alpinists keep a variety of technical tools in their back-pockets. One of the most important tools is the prusik hitch. The prusik hitch is most commonly used for crevasse rescue systems on a glacier, for rock rescue systems, and for climbing fixed lines.

In addition to their stated uses, I would add that my two most common uses have been to back up a rappel and to ascend a rope after a sketchy (and usually ill-advised) rappel.

Trust me, make sure you learn it!

The following is a trailer of the film due late October 2008:

Honestly, I was hoping some of the book’s most vocal detractors would show up for an open debate (hopefully more entertaining than the VP debate happening simultaneously), but there was a relatively small turnout of about 20 people and no visible outrage.

The slideshow was nicely prepared and ran about 1.5 hours consisting of photos (mostly of Bob) with some occasional video footage. Many Colorado bouldering areas were covered with an obvious heavy focus on Front Range bouldering. Included were a few areas in the slideshow that Bob said were actually not in the book (Rabbit Mountain near Lyons was one I asked about).

After the show I spoke with Bob and specifically asked him his thoughts on the issues brought up by some respected Colorado boulders like Peter Beal and Jamie Emerson. As a new resident to the area, I had no agenda other than to get some response from Bob in person as opposed to his not exactly tactful response on his Falcon blog.

He was very accommodating and made the following comments regarding the issues:

• The original draft of the manuscript was double what was actually printed for the final book.
• The manuscript was done about two years ago.
• He said that the only ones complaining were the few elite climbers that had the opportunity to comment, but never spoke to him or provided input. (This is highly debatable though as it’s unclear whether these climbers were actually aware of the project.)
• Bob said that there will always be mistakes and issues with any guidebook.
• He also stated that the vast majority of climbers will benefit from the book.

While I disagree with how this entire situation was handled, Bob appeared to be genuinely concerned about writing a high quality guidebook. He made it clear to me that he was open to correcting any mistakes for future editions, but it’s still unclear why this wasn’t done more prior to publication as opposed to after it.

In a nutshell, I think this is what bothers most critics of the book and offers a learning lesson for other guidebook authors. As much as possible, guidebook publishers and authors need to provide an open forum to discuss a new work especially one with previously unpublished areas and those with questionable access. This would go a long way to getting the support of the local climbing community which in turn is the best free marketing you can get.

While Bob mentions this was done, there’s no excuse to not distribute this information well in advance to climbing site and prominent bloggers. I know if contacted, many of us would have been happy to publish information regarding the book years ago. Reading Bob’s most recent post on the subject, I really start to wonder how much blame lies on Falcon as well. Bob discusses how interacting with blogs and Internet media is new to him. But it is most definitely not out of the question to think that Falcon understands how publishing and marketing via Internet channels works.

To me, that is the biggest surprise of this whole issue. Regardless of the possible errors and judgement calls on including certain areas, at the ending of the day they are marketing a book. And a book we can only assume that they’d like to make a profit. Word of mouth and reviews (both print and Internet) will most definitely influence the sales of a guidebook when there are alternative options. With respect to bouldering in Colorado, this is most definitely the case.

As for the book itself, I have only skimmmed it and once I obtain a copy will write a full review after having time to thoroughly examine it. The one striking feature I will mention, and likely reason for the high cost, is the number of full color pictures of problems throughout the book. No one will argue the quality production value of Bouldering Colorado.

I know this issue has been discussed elsewhere, but I invite comments on this especially ones that help us all look to the future of how a situation like this can be avoided.

ClimbingVibe quickly lets you find the most relevant and interesting climbing content. When I started blogging on All Climbing, there were surprisingly few climbing blogs. Now there are hundreds and it’s tough to read them all (and believe me, I am trying). And that doesn’t include the various other climbing sites, portals, forums, and online magazines.

The main goals of ClimbingVibe are to make it easier for climbers to find quality posts and to promote the best climbing writing on the internet. I’ve been posting interesting climbing links and news in short “Quick Sends” posts, but there is simply too much good stuff to always get them in these. ClimbingVibe will hopefully fill this need.

Composed of short posts, ClimbingVibe items typically highlight a single link. Posts and comments on these items can be made by anyone (even anonymously), but to reduce spam numerous protections have been built in.

New visitors to the site are also encouraged to register. Registering, while not required to read or comment on posts, provides the following benefits:

• Ability to vote on posted climbing items.
• Posts and comments include the full URL to your website or blog.
• CAPTCHAs on posts and comments disappear when you’re logged in.

The site initially has a minimalist layout by design, but this will likely change quickly as the site grows.

There are some exciting features that will be released in the upcoming months as development continues. The major ones will be mentioned briefly here on All Climbing and the rest will be posted to ClimbingVibe itself.

I’m very interested in what you think. Please comment your thoughts on this and leave any suggestions to improving the site.

From Climbing Narcissist:

Jumbo Love begins with 60 ft. of 5.12d climbing followed by 100 ft of steep and bouldery 5.14c. THEN you get to the hard part which is followed by some easier 5.13+ climbing that takes you to the top of the cliff (literally!). Just think about that for a second. You have to navigate 160 ft of 5.14c climbing just to get to the hardest parts of Jumbo Love!

More details on Chris Sharma’s send of Jumbo Love can be found on the Big UP blog, Climbing Narcissist, Rock & Ice, the Petzl blog, Climbing magazine, and Alpinist.

The night was divided into two parts. The first half of the evening showed the filmmaking contest winners followed by relatively short segments from Grand Canyon Walls, Dosage: South Africa, The Aerialist, and On Sight. After an intermission that went on entirely too long with a pull-up contest and gear giveaway on stage, the premier of The Sharp End was shown.

The first four films were simply amazing. Maybe it was because they sliced them down to the best bits to show us, but the video definitely highlighted some of the exciting climbing that is happening across the globe.

At the Boulder Theater last night, the entire crowd gasped as they watched Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden, and Chris McNamara climbing in the Grand Canyon. I’m sure the reaction stemmed from the fact that most, if not all of us, had never realized there was that much climbing there.

In Dosage: South Africa, Paul Robinson, Tommy Caldwell, and Daniel Woods take the viewers on a tour of the bouldering in South Africa. Again, there was some simply amazing footage here. It’s always enjoyable to watch elite climbers work though their methodology for successfully achieving their projects.

After the intermission, it was on to the big show. In what was probably one of the most visually stunning climbing films I’ve seen, The Sharp End delivered breathtaking footage and cinematography. Starting with climbing in Boulder, Colorado traversing the world before ending in Europe with Dean Potter’s free solo / base jump, The Sharp End provided the viewer a glimpse of how some climbers are pushing the edge of the sport.

There was a heavy dose of the historical throughout the film which I thoroughly enjoyed. While not a documentary, the transposing of old photos in classic areas like Eldorado contrasted the footage of climbers like Hank Caylor pushing themselves on X rated routes.

One aspect of The Sharp End that I was not so sure about was the heavy focus on base jumping. Not that it wasn’t enjoyable to watch, but initially it felt disjointed as in “hey, I’m watching a climbing flick why so much of this?” Granted it was climbers like Dean Potter, Chris McNamara, and Steph Davis performing the base jumping, but it was a good portion of the film nonetheless.

By the end, I understood why the filmmakers included the non-climbing aspects because of how it helps tell their overall story. Overall though, I found the slack lining, tower jumping and base jumping a little bit too much. Was it interesting? Yes, but I’d always prefer more climbing when possible. But while many climbing films simply show footage of climbing, The Sharp End tells a story and a good one at that.

While The Shard End isn’t a film I’d likely buy and watch over and over for the climbing; it was an excellent movie overall. An interesting story line combined with outstanding visuals make Sender Films’ The Shard End a must see.

This year there is also a filmmaking competition, where anyone could submit their best three minute climbing film.

I’ve already bought my tickets and will be attending the premier in Boulder. Check their calendar to see if the tour is coming to your city.