Joshua Tree

Finally. Out of the city. Our first stop was the Joshua Tree National Park. It is a three hours drive to the east of LA. Passing Palm Springs the small city Joshua Tree is not far away. We were heading for the Hidden Valley Campground.

The Joshua Tree NP is a dessert more or less. That means you have to take all your water with you. Although it looks pretty dead the dessert is full of life and you can see it everywhere. Squirrels, coyotes, colorful birds, rabbits and many more. You just have to walk a bit and you will see them all. Here are some impressions.

Oh yes … and there is rockclimbing. Thousands of routes and more boulders you can imagine. The climbing here is one of the best I know. Crackclimbing is what Joshua Tree is all about … and that can be very hard. You get scared all the time, when you have just one cam in the right size and the crack continous for another 10m with the same size … funny moments where you ask yourself: Why am I doing this?! In the end it is always the same. You forget how scared you were and think about the next perfect crack you just saw.

Joshua Tree is definitely a place to be, where I want to come back some day.

Greetings from Hell A

Two days in LA and I have enough of it. The last two days were the days of organizing. It is hard to get along in a city you have never been, especially when it is a different way of life. People want to sell you drugs. Cars way too big almost run you over. And enormous bush fires around the city.
But now I got a car were I will live in the next months and luckily tomorrow I am heading to Joshua Tree NP. Out of this city.
Here are some random pictures I took the last two days between running around in this huge city.

Here we go

in the airSo here we go. A lot of pictures will be coming the next several month. So stayed tuned, lie back, relax and enjoy the show.

Padani 2013

Petrohrad is a small town in the Czech Republic near Prague. Rolling hills are covered with more than a thousand granite marbles hiding in the forests. Boars, deer and rabbits running everywhere. It is a really nice place to be. Thats why I was there every year for the last 6 years.

Forest 1 Forest 2 Forest 3 Forest 4

The locals organize a festival called Padani every year. It is a nice event with a funny competition for everyone and and music in the evening.

Band 1 Band 2

The boulders there are very rough on your skin and you can climb there just two days in a row before your skin is through. The bad thing for good climbing photography with such an event is, that a lot of people are running through your pictures and stuff is lying everywhere. But nevertheless here are some pictures.

Boulder 1
Sněžná fréza Fb 6a
Boulder 2
Němý svědek Fb 7a
Boulder 3
Zadní zoubek Fb 6b+
Boulder 4
Nehoupej se na dveřích! Fb 5b
Boulder 5
Kryton na skříni Fb 7a

 

Some sunny days in Ticino

The last weeks had been dry but really, really cold here in Nuernberg. So I decided to go for a short trip to Ticino, Swiss. It is one of my favorite places for climbing, bouldering and of course photography. This time there are almost no climbing pictures, because there were just two of us.

unnamed boulderproblem, Chironico
unnamed boulderproblem, Chironico

When we were hiking around one side of Valle Leventina we found some really old chestnut trees. The whole valley is covered with these trees. We talked with an farmer who told us, that many of the trees are older than 800 years, some maybe older than a thousand. Once he counted the rings of a chopped tree and he lost counting when he traced back the years to the french revolution and far beyond. Luckily the trees are protected now for ten years and here and there you’ll find some of the old fellows. Pretty amazing. Here are some of the trees we found and some more pictures I took.

Tree 1
Between the rocks
Gras
Dew in the morning
Tree 2
Hollow Tree
Tree 3
One of the biggest … maybe two to three meter in diameter, and hollow, too.
Fern
Fern preparing for the night cold

 

Monkee Shoot 2013

Last year I helped out with the Monkee Shoot for their 2013 collection. I was filming the making of and here it is:

Monkee is a small company based in Nuernberg, Germany. Check out their site: http://monkeeclothing.com. They are producing really nice clothing by fair trade.

You can find the final photos on Frank’s website: funst-projects.de