I am not, and I don’t think you should be either. If you and I have met before, and interact more than five times a year via any social media avenue or e-mail, I am very likely going to go in for the bro hug next time I see you (instead of a handshake). If you invite me to stay at your house when I’m in town, or when I’m talking with someone else about you and I say “Isn’t that dude awesome?”, or you are a generally likeable person whose contact info is in my cell phone, the bro hug is a very real possibility. Unless you want to keep it professional or something like that.

Sometimes, when dudes are happy to see each other but don’t really know what the parameters are, they will do that awkward handshake-into-half-hug thing, which is rather unsatisfactory unless that’s really what you mean, and usually it’s not. It is about as rad as an almost-cold beer or a kind-of-soggy sandwich. It is OK, but lacks authenticity and meaning.

It looks like this:

“Oh, are we going to do that … you know, the handshake thing but … oh, you’re kind of doing the hug with the one arm … OK …”

Avoid this. Get comfortable with the hug. This is the 21st century. It’s OK. The best strategy to avoid awkwardness is to communicate with proper body language as soon as possible — when you recognize your bro, you open up your arms, signifying Dude, You Are About To Get Hugged.

The proper way to bro hug is to approach your bro with one hand high and the other low — not 10 and 2 in clock positions, but say 7 and 2. That way your bro will be able to come in with his arms in opposite positions. Like Chris’s hands in this photo, as he approaches for the bro hug (note enthusiastic expression):

Then, boom:

One pat on the back is the limit here. Two is excusable, but any more than that and you just look like you’re really uncomfortable/nervous to be hugging another man in public, which should not be the case.

Don’ t — DO NOT — go in for the hug with your arms at the same level, low or high. This forces your bro to take the opposite arm position, and you end up in a very strange hug, one dude’s arms up high, the other dude’s around his bro’s waist, somewhat like junior high dancing (without the nervous armpit sweat and the strange, new tightness in your pants). It also makes it really difficult to avoid your bro’s face with your face, and you get dangerously close to kissing each other. Which is of course totally fine, but maybe awkward in a lot of bro/brah relationships.

Other tips:

• Note the acceptable distance between Chris’s crotch and my crotch in the above photo.
• Duration: A typical bro hug lasts at most three to four seconds. It’s OK to have multiple bro hugs, just not all at once. Say you’re parting ways after a climbing trip and won’t see each other again for a while, so you bro hug, but then you get started talking about some future climb you’re going to plan, and then suddenly 10 minutes have gone by since the original bro hug. Then you’re like OK, I’m really leaving this time, and you’re both going to your respective cars. At this point it is OK to have one more bro hug.
• If you want to add a little more bro-love communication to the hug, like if you’re not going to see someone again for a few months, it’s acceptable to touch heads mid-hug — but not cheeks.

And, you know, if you see me somewhere, and you need a hug, that’s cool. Come on in for it. Remember, 7 and 2.

(Thanks to the talented and charming Joe Penacoli for the photos!)

-Brendan

I showed up to meet my friend Becca at the bouldering gym in Seattle on a Monday afternoon. When we discussed what time to meet, she said something about needing an hour’s notice with the baby and all. I figured she meant that she had to arrange things so her husband could watch the baby while she left the house. But then I walked around the corner of one of the walls, and there he was in his car seat on the floor of the climbing gym, all of 3½ months old, chilling and content as the Buddha.

“Bouldering is just easier with him,” Becca says, you know, as opposed to roping up and climbing 40-foot routes. If he starts crying, Becca says, she can just downclimb or hop off whatever problem she’s on and take care of it. Indeed, I say. Becca and her husband weren’t exactly slowed down by the baby’s birth back in December, taking him for ski weekends in their travel trailer almost immediately, one watching him while the other went out and got in some turns.

Two women playfully giggled at Becca’s son in the car seat as she worked her way up another problem. When she came over to chat, one of them said That’s so great that you bring him here, all the colors must be great for his development, a lot of mothers would be overwhelmed at the idea of taking a baby somewhere like a climbing gym. Becca just shrugged and said Yeah it’s not too bad, then ran laps on a bunch of other problems in between feeding her son, changing his diaper, and watching me awkwardly try to keep him from crying as she walked up a slab route.

I don’t really know anything about parenting, other than what I see from my friends and family. Besides the fact that it’s a big deal, and you know, it completely changes your life. But I have met quite a few women who loved the outdoors before they had their first child, and have learned how to raise their children and not lose that connection in the process. Which I think is inspiring.

A week after I started working with my friend Hillary back in 2008, I ran into her at the Twin Owls trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park. She and some friends were walking into The Pear to get in a few pitches of climbing before a wedding that afternoon. One of their friends had volunteered to haul in a Pack and Play for her then one-year-old daughter. A year later, Hillary was on a charity climb up Mount Hood, packing nursing pumps to the summit. Then she would bring them to the crag, as we flaked out the rope, saying, “Well guys, I have to go … pump. So I’ll be back in a couple minutes.” In 2010, she was just finished nursing her second child in time to train for, and climb, Mt. Rainier in August. The next summer, she and I were racing back into Denver from Eldorado Canyon, late getting down from a climb, and in a rush to pick up the kids from day care.

I have found that early in the morning, when I’m grinding out unmotivated laps on a run around a park in Denver, nothing puts me in my place like getting passed by a lady pushing a running stroller uphill. And it is easy to take more of the group backpacking load when a six-months-pregnant woman (Becca) is trying to cram more food and gear into her backpack at the trailhead. You know what’s tough? Carrying a 40-pound pack uphill. You know what’s tougher than that? Carrying a 40-pound pack and a developing baby in your belly. Or making time to exercise when you’ve got one, two, or three kids who need you. Or mountaineering trips when you have to do all the stuff everyone else does, and, oh yeah, pump breast milk every few hours. And never saying things like, “Oh, before I had kids I could _________. But not now.”

My friend Amy and I spent a few minutes trying to nail down a photo of both of us jumping in the thin air on the summit of Mt. Whitney a couple weeks ago. It was her fourth big-name summit – in addition to Mt. Shasta (twice), the Grand Teton, and Mt. Rainier – since discovering charity mountain climbs when her two kids were finishing high school, and raising more than $18,000 for a nonprofit.

My high school football teammates in my small town used to say, I saw your mom out running again yesterday, in the rain. I would say Yeah, she loves to run. Because I didn’t really get it, how inertia takes over a lot of folks in middle age and they stop moving. A few years later, after running 20 to 25 miles a week for 20 years, busted knees forced Mom to stop running. So she just walked. At I think a pace of 4-5 mph, by my best guess when I’m with her. And she went to spin classes and met a group of ladies on the weekends to crush out 25 miles on her commuter bike (she can’t ride a road bike due to a broken wrist a few years ago). And started going to the climbing gym an hour away.

People ask me What’s your mom like, and I tell them that she’s a ball of energy, running on caffeine and chocolate, kind of like … me sometimes. She’s a stubborn lady. I remember her saying one time when we were out for a 4-mph walk, Oh, I wish I could still run. She never makes excuses, never stopped moving because of this injury or that injury, Oh I have a bad back/bad knees/don’t have time. She just makes time.

So when she says she wants to go down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon sometime, I know she’ll be fine, and I can plan a two-day trip, one day down, one night at the Bright Angel Campground, and one day to walk back up the 8 miles and 4,400 feet of elevation to the South Rim. I told her a couple weeks ago, Let’s plan on that next year, in October, for your 63^rd birthday. And she said, Oh good, that will give me something to train for.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And moms.

-Brendan

A handful of Saturday mornings, I have driven out of Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood juggling a bowl of granola on my lap, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes and asking myself if I packed everything in my pack – harness, shoes, rack or rope, headlamp, food, water. It’s 2 a.m., and people are spilling out of bars, Sancho’s, Gabor’s, The Park Tavern, almost ready to say goodbye to Friday after their last beer. I’m sipping coffee, exactly 95 minutes away from the Bear Lake trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park but still 3 hours from seeing the sun. Sometimes I wonder if anyone in any other major city in America does this.

Denver never gets any press for being a rad “adventure town,” or even a rad town, I don’t think. We’re out on the plains, and the mountains are there, but so far from downtown, you can go days without seeing them (unless you’re biking through that one turn by the fountains on the road through Cheesman Park, or on the lawn in front of the museum in City Park, or a couple places on 11^th Avenue).

We don’t have the bike culture of Portland, we have the skiing but way more ski traffic than Salt Lake City, we don’t have the music culture (or culture) of Seattle, our mountains are choss piles compared to the Cascades and the Sierras, we’re not Boulder, Aspen, Moab, Jackson, Bishop, Boise, Bozeman, Missoula, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Hood River, or any of those places, but damn.

I want to climb mountains and ride my bike to work year-round, and if I quit my job, I want to be able to get another one that doesn’t involve washing dishes. Are there many places where you can work all day in a 50-story steel and glass building, leave work early and climb on thousands of granite and gneiss sport routes a half-hour from your office? Or mountain bike, or trail run, or mash out a road bike ride with 1000-plus feet of climbing? And still have time to roll into a Major League Baseball game afterward, on a weeknight?

Jack Kerouac spends a good part of the beginning of On the Road talking excitedly about how he can’t wait to get to Denver, and I think maybe some of his over-romanticizing of the town is buried somewhere in me ever since I read that book when I was 15. I love Denver like you love your girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife – I look at it and see great things you don’t see, and it’s a part of who I am now, another member of my family. And although they’re not the same as they were 40 years ago, I still see the mountains in my backyard as John Denver’s Rocky Mountains. Sometimes I joke that Denver is so full of former Midwesterners because we start heading west, get to Denver and say, You know, this is pretty great. Then we stop.

I know there’s better coffee in Seattle, better mountains in other places, and better food and culture in Portland and San Francisco, but give me rock climbing in Eldorado Canyon in a t-shirt on my birthday in January, and ’80s movies under the open sky in Red Rocks with 5,000 friends during the summer, and looking up at the lit-up downtown skyline from the Cherry Creek bike path at 10 p.m. on a July night when it’s no one but me and the homeless folks sleeping under the overpasses down there, and Devotchka and Paper Bird and Trout Steak Revival and Salvagetti and tempeh chorizo tacos at WaterCourse and giant bowls of Cocoa Puffs at The Shoppe and pho on Federal, and smog but no mosquitoes ever, and 300 days of sunshine, and snow that falls but never stays around too long, and 3 million other people whose company I don’t mind all that much.

I’ve spent time in plenty of mountain towns and western cities, and think lots of them are great for all kinds of different reasons. But if I can have mountains, I still want the grit of a city like Denver with all the hard-luck folks hanging out on Colfax Avenue running right through its heart. A magazine writer years ago called Colfax “the longest, wickedest street in America,” and it’s cleaned up a bit, but it’s still seedy as hell in a lot of spots, in a way that’s entertaining but not really that dangerous, just a bunch of day-laborers, a few small-time dope dealers, and some fast talkers and panhandlers trying to survive one day. I ran almost its entire length on the original Colfax Marathon course back in 2006, about 24 miles in a straight line, and I love that street, because I think it reminds all of us that yeah, I’ve been a little down before, too, and have had a couple days or weeks or months of life feeling like all those folks on Colfax feel today.

I used to eat those orange Keebler peanut-butter-and-cheese cracker sandwiches religiously in the mountains – for a long time, they were the only thing that tasted even OK when I lost my appetite above 12,000 feet. One summer morning a couple years ago, I was walking to work, waiting for the signal so I could cross Colfax at Franklin, and I felt this homeless guy next to me looking at me. I glanced over at him, and he smiled big and said nothing, holding out his hand with a package of orange cracker sandwiches in it. I grabbed them, nodded, took one iPod earbud out and said Thank You and smiled. Then we both crossed the street, and I looked between the cathedral and the capitol building 14 blocks away, where I can usually get a one-second glance at the mountains.

-Brendan

I picked up these sweet-ass rigs after I finally wore out my last pair of trail running shoes after 2 ½ years (the tread was gone and one of the laces finally snapped). As you can see, there’s all sorts of technology and shit in them – there’s some plastic stuff on the side, and there are different things to run the laces through, and there’s a kind of stretchy thing near the top of the laces. Overall, they’re pretty sweet.

I read this book called Born to Run in 2010. You may have heard of it. Author Christopher McDougall investigates the idea that humans are built to run long distances. Among his findings, and you may have heard this, is the idea that we don’t need running shoes to be all that fancy. Some people read the book and bought a pair of barefoot running shoes. I read the same book, but took some of the information as a license to just buy old, cheap shoes and fix the way I ran – which could maybe have previously been described as “Clydesdale,” but is now more like “gazelle, shuffling in slow motion.”

These shoes are circa 2009, I believe – I bought them used at Wilderness Exchange in Denver in 2010 for $40. I believe they are “trail running shoes,” although I also wear them on approach hikes to rock climbs, hiking, backpacking, and anything else that doesn’t require mountaineering boots. Sometimes I end up downclimbing snow slopes in them. They’re not waterproof, but that’s OK, because I don’t think they were designed to be.

Late last summer, the outer mesh stuff kind of gradually sprung a leak over the course of a 30-mile backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, which ended up being just fine as there was no real structural damage.

Of course, since there was kind of a big hole in the outside, I thought maybe I’d get a new pair of shoes before my pal Greg and I did a one-day Rim-to-Rim run in the Grand Canyon last October. I didn’t make time to go shoe shopping, so instead of new shoes, I just brought a couple feet of duct tape in my pack in case something catastrophic happened to them and the sole ripped off or something. They made it fine, but later part of something in the toe section was peeling away and got kind of annoying, so I ended up cutting it off with a scissors.

Based on my research and testing, I believe the ideal use for these shoes is running on trails, or running on other surfaces, or I guess walking too. But also based on my research, you can do basically whatever the hell you want in them. I wore them to hike into a backcountry ski run once, have bicycled up to about five miles at a time, and I think I played my dad in pool once in them too. I also noted that they performed well when I wore them to eat ice cream cones, including this one time I ate two ice cream cones at once because I thought they were really small for $3.50. Essentially, you can count on these shoes.

Or, I guess, you can count on most shoes. I don’t really have too many problems with running shoes. I’ve never been out on a run and said, “Man, I can’t go on. These shoes are just not high-quality enough.” Usually I get about six or eight miles done, and I’m like, “Man, I’m tired,” or “I should call my friend and go smash the breakfast tacos at WaterCourse,” or “I better get back to my phone so I can type in this pithy and witty Facebook status that is bouncing around in my head right now.” It’s really not the shoes that present obstacles to my running.

I have run several 10Ks in these shoes – not 10K races where you register and get a number and stuff; I just like to run for about 60 or so minutes when I go out and I figure that’s about six miles or so, which is roughly 10 kilometers. But, you know, these will “go the distance,” so to speak, if the distance is like 6 miles. Like if you want to run the Bolder Boulder or something like that. Actually, now that I think of it, I’ve run about 10 miles in one stretch, too. So go ahead and max them out. I mean, hell, if they can go 10 miles, I imagine they can go 20 or so. I just get bored running that long unless there’s food or coffee in the middle somewhere.

Anyway, you should get a pair. Of shoes. Not necessarily these, although I can’t complain so far. I think the company that made them in 2009 or whatever still makes them. They’re not super-flashy right now, but I noticed if you throw them in the washing machine and get some of the dirt out, they look brighter for a few days.

-Brendan

There are many good strategies to use when running the New York City Marathon. Throwing up at the start is probably not one of them. My friend Syd was in for a long day after he puked early in the 2011 race last November. He never got back the nutrients and water he’d lost, but kept running until Mile 18, around 96th Street on the course, when he felt like a bag of garbage. Then he started walking. It wasn’t his first marathon – it was his sixth, interspersed with 23 half-marathons – but it was maybe the hardest.

Syd’s dad, in his 70s, met him with a cold, wet towel, and they walked together, to mile 19. It was a 14-minute mile. After mile 19, he told his dad he’d see him at mile 22, and then he started running 11-minute miles. I know this because I was sitting in a coffee shop in Monterey, California, tracking him and texting his wife Debi updates every time he hit another mile marker, remembering how he had said he was worried about the race in the weeks leading up to it. Debi texted back, “His calf injury is killing him.”

When we had talked on the phone a couple weeks earlier, I said to Syd, The thing I like about all this stuff we do – running, climbing, mountaineering, cycling, all this suffer-filled, sometimes painful stuff – is that it’s just a way of repeatedly asking ourselves the question, “Am I tough enough?” And the answer is almost always yes.

I think what I like about toughness is that it’s not quantifiable, other than in the form of a story. Lots of people can have a faster race time, climb a couple letter- or number-grades harder than you, stand on the next-higher place on the podium. But nobody has a measurement system for toughness. Usually, when you talk about how tough someone is, you start out with,

“This one time …”

and then you tell a story.

A guy breaks his leg descending a 20,000-foot mountain in the Andes and when his partner cuts the rope, he crawls all the way down. Someone is paralyzed in an accident, then decides they’re going to walk again, then bicycle again, across the country. Maybe you’ve never chopped off your own arm off in order to walk out of the desert alive, but you have probably had one or half a dozen moments on a trail or a rope or a bike somewhere, where you experience an overwhelming feeling of doubt.

Then, usually what happens is you give yourself an out. You tell yourself, I could stop running right now, sit down and have a beer. I could get off my bike and call my significant other to drive the car over and pick me up. I could lower off this bolt/cam just below the crux without even trying the move because I’m scared, or I could have my partner continue to lead all the hard pitches. When you don’t take the out, though, something happens and your threshold moves a little, or a lot. You collect enough of those times not letting yourself off the hook, and words like “can’t” disappear from your vocabulary, and you replace them with “won’t” or “haven’t yet.”

Maybe you have a habit of finding your way into those moments, because maybe you tend to collect them when you spend your weekends getting cold, tired, scared, and far enough away from your car that it takes all you’ve got (or what you think is all you’ve got) just to get back safely. I feel like I do. When I was driving the Outdoor Research truck a couple weeks ago through rural Nevada, some folks who were unfamiliar with the company asked, “What kind of research do you guys do?” I joked, “Pain and fear. I research pain and fear.”

My friend Syd ended up finishing the 2011 NYC Marathon, proudly in 21,500th place (as he jokes). But it doesn’t really matter where he finished, and he knows that. What matters is that he finished. And he said in an e-mail a couple days ago:

“I also really do remember thinking of your ‘Are you tough enough?’ question when I was out there trying to finish last year’s marathon. No lie.”

Of course, I knew he was tough enough, the whole time. His entry in the 2011 marathon was deferred from 2010, when he had to cancel because of a stress fracture in his foot. So instead of running the NYC Marathon that year, he ran the 2010 Denver Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon, five weeks after his broken foot was diagnosed. I still remember him saying, “It doesn’t really start hurting until after about 10 miles …”

(photo by the talented and handsome Lee Smith)

-Brendan

-Brendan

Then there’s another feeling when you say to your mother, “Well, Mom, I had this weird feeling about meeting women and telling them I live in a van full of climbing gear, but then I realized I really only am interested in women who could be interested in a guy who lives in a van full of climbing gear. If that makes any sense.” I think my mom is really proud.

There are some interesting things about dating people who love the outdoors, aren’t there? Like you fantasize about dating someone who loves to go backpacking, and then you find out that it’s really hard to spoon when you’re each zipped up in a sleeping bag and it’s too cold to put your arms outside of it. And even though you think it would be rad to have a significant other who climbs, you go on a climbing date and are sure your partner/potential girlfriend or boyfriend has lost all respect for you when you get Elvis leg and start whining as you freak out on the crux move a few feet off the belay. Or you want them to live their dreams and you want to live your dreams, but it kind of sucks when they’re gone leading a wilderness trip for a month, or you’re gone for a two-month bike tour and you have to get out your phone and look at photos of them to remember what they look like.

But then of course, you get all those sunsets and sunrises together, and maybe you get to hold hands during that last wide part of the trail walking to the car, and instead of sitting on a rock somewhere looking over an alpine lake wondering about girls, you get to sit on that same rock with a girl and talk to her about hip hop and books and what she was like in high school and all that.

But is it unromantic to buy your girlfriend an avalanche beacon for Valentine’s Day? Because I did that once, and what I thought it said was, “Here’s something that means we can spend time together in the backcountry.” But I could definitely see someone taking it the wrong way, especially because it came with a shovel.

I mean, I want to open doors for a girl. Give you my jacket when we go to a movie and you’re cold walking home. Cook you breakfast when you’re sleeping in on a Saturday. But it begins to get fuzzy at the trailhead. Although I’m a gentleman and you’re a lady, you will be carrying either the rope, or the rack. Take the tent, or the stove and fuel and pots. If I am cooking us dinner over a camp stove, you are setting up the tent, or vice versa. Right?

My friend Teresa went on a couple dates with this guy in Seattle, and thought it was going pretty well. The third date, she invited him over to barbecue, and they met at a grocery store to pick up a couple things before riding to her house. Which, at the time was at the top of 8^th Avenue, a 30-block steadily uphill ride into a headwind. He had told her he did some cycling, and had finished a handful of races and road rides. So she was surprised when he stayed behind her for the entire ride up the hill. Into a headwind. The entire ride. “I mean, are you fucking kidding me?” she said when she re-told me the story a couple weeks ago. Either the guy didn’t know anything about cycling etiquette and had lied about his experience, or he was a jerk. Either way, that was their last date.

My friend Sara told me last year she was done dating climbers, for a number of reasons — a lot of men she dated seemed to like the idea of being with someone who was a climber, but didn’t like the reality; or she found herself having more fun climbing with her girlfriends and platonic male friends than a romantic partner; or the dating pool was just too small if she limited herself to only climbers. Now she’s happy with a guy whose main thing is paragliding, and he’s remembering how to belay and they’re climbing together and actually having fun doing it.

Teresa said one time, I just feel like men at the climbing gym are so focused on climbing that they don’t notice women. I said Are you shitting me? Of course we do. At least I do. As a man, I will tell you there is nothing we are so focused on that we don’t notice women. Nothing. We may be too dumb to notice when you are interested, but we never fail to notice. If I speak for other dudes who are dirtbags, we are especially in tune when we see a woman who exhibits characteristics that suggest she likes to wear backpacks, or sleep in the dirt, or do pullups.

Sometimes I say there is no better sound in the world than a beautiful woman laughing, except the sound of a beautiful woman laughing at something I said. But then I think the sound of a beautiful woman yelling “On belay!” from 120 feet above me is better. Especially if it’s after she led the crux pitch on the route.

-Brendan

Proof: Remember the movie Cold, about Cory Richards’ winter climb of Gasherbrum II with Simone Moro and Denis Urubko? Yes, the most talked-about adventure film of 2011. That one. That film might not have happened at all without Julie’s vision — she brought together Richards, writer Kelly Cordes, and filmmaker Anson Fogel to produce the brutal, honest 19-minute film just in time to premiere at last year’s 5Point festival. And then it of course blew up, racking awards everywhere.

So if last year’s 5Point Festival brought us Cold, you can imagine being excited for this year’s lineup of films. Five trailers of films that will be at this year’s festival (info and schedule here):

The Old Breed: Veteran alpinists Mark Richey and Steve Swenson are lured to the Karakoram one last time in pursuit of the first ascent of Saser Kangri II, the second-highest unclimbed mountain in the world. The story is both a grand adventure and probing inquiry into the psychology of risk-taking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last of the Great Unknown: The Grand Canyon is immense, almost unfathomable in scale. Deep within this vast wilderness, intimate tributaries hide some of the Canyon’s most remarkable features — the last of the great unknown. This is the story of these slots, the canyoneers who systematically explored them and the secrets hidden deep within their walls.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jane’s Journey: More than 20 years ago, Dr. Jane Goodall, decided to give up her career as a primatologist, as well as her private life, in order to devote her entire energy to saving our endangered planet. Directed by Lorenz Knauer and joined by an all-star crew, Jane’s Journey is an intimate portrait of the private person behind the world-famous icon — an exceptional woman, possibly the most fascinating woman of our time, whose scientific breakthroughs are considered to be among the most important of the past 100 years.

Kadoma: World-renowned kayakers Hendri Coetzee, Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic attempt a 1,000-mile first descent in the mighty Congo River Basin. Kadoma is the story of an incredible journey through the heart of Africa that ends in tragedy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 Wild Love with Timmy O’Neill: Timmy O’Neill is a fast and funny climber, a world-class slackliner and class 5+ kayaker. But more than that, he’s smart, kind and passionate about his life and the lives of others. Wild Love illustrates his dedication to helping people, exploring and his insatiable love for living life, right now—before it’s gone. A second film from the Wild Love series featuring Renan Ozturk and his partner Amee Hinkley will also premiere at the festival.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s one more — not a trailer, but the full film A Desert Life from filmmaker Austin Siadak. It’s his first film, and it’s in 5Point. Expect to see more from this guy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Brendan

I’m hanging sideways from the rope going through my belay device, body completely parallel to the ground, one Chacoed foot pushing on a knob out to my left as I reach a full body length trying to flick the rope free all the way out to my right. All I want is for the rope to drop all the way to the ground, which I can’t see below in the darkness. That’s all I want. And a sandwich, and a hug, and a pillow.

Several hours ago, my friend Teresa and I were walking in to the base of the Mescalito, cracking jokes in the afternoon sun, light packs, not at all concerned about getting to the summit and back down the involved descent before dark. I believe it was my idea to not take a tag line to rappel the route, and instead just romp up the “several hundred feet” of “3rd and 4th class with a few moves of 5th class” to the top of the Mescalito. I think I read a few sentences about the descent while I was sitting at a coffee shop in Vegas earlier that day, but all I really remembered about it was “hike west.”

Then we climbed the three pitches of The Cookie Monster, and I combined the last two pitches of Cat in the Hat to keep us moving. Then. Oh, by the way, there’s kind of an exposed traverse just below the summit, and then a roped pitch up a dirty, sandy, loose chimney with questionable rock, under a roof, might be nice if you have a big piece to protect it if you didn’t leave it in the car. Then it was dark, and we weren’t on the summit yet. So we squinted, fumbling down slabs and gullies looking for cairns all the way down the north side of the peak.

Now, all I can think is I Am Out Of Adrenaline. I flick the rope free, and watch over my right shoulder as it swings down. As I lower myself slowly, my headlamp beam finally reaches the end of the rope, almost, is it, yes, touching the sandbar on the side of Pine Creek. Then I look over my left shoulder and my light bounces off of two eyes looking straight up at me from the creek. For one second, I am sure it is a mountain lion, and for a full minute, I believe I can take it if it comes after me. My feet finally finally finally touch the ground, I’m sure it’s probably just a coyote, but I pick up a rock the size of a softball and chuck it over there just in case. A mere 10 hours after we started, we get back to the truck and deliriously mumble and giggle as we drive the last 2.5 miles of the loop road out of Red Rock NCA.

Would You Call That An Epic, Teresa says in the truck. I say I don’t think so, it was just a long day. I mean, neither of us were injured, besides a few cuts and bruises. We didn’t spend an unplanned night out. We didn’t need a rescue. But yeah. That was kind of huge. Like I will not be exercising tomorrow. At all.

Ever have a day out like this? Bite off a little more than you can chew, make a couple bad decisions, forget a headlamp, or just realize about halfway into it that wow, this was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be?

I have a lot of them. They’re what some people would call Type 2 Fun — fun that is really not that fun. There is something about surviving a big, big day out that makes the rest of your life better – the next day when you can’t figure out why you have cuts on your hands, or why your hip feels like someone hit it with a hammer, or you have that creaky, still-dehydrated feeling in your body well into the next evening, or you have to eat 5,000 calories the follwing day just to catch up with everything you burned on your climb, bike ride, run or ski tour. Maybe the best way I’ve heard it said is “I don’t really like it, but I love it.” Which is paraphrasing Jason Wood in this film — “I don’t really like riding in the rain, but I love it. It’s kind of like a bad relationship.”

I don’t really like rappelling in the dark, and I don’t like stumbling down the trail for hours after my reserves have long run out and I got lazy re-packing my pack and now all kinds of stuff is poking me in the back or causing everything to lean to one side. I don’t like running out of water and then getting so dehydrated that I start coughing every few minutes, and my contacts dry out and I can’t really see.

But I love standing in a convenience store at midnight, looking down at my blistered, dirty toes in my sandals, stalking the beverage cooler and already eating a bag of potato chips I haven’t paid for yet, hands are black with rope dust, holding an ice cream bar under my arm, wondering where that blood stain on my jacket came from. And then dumping $12 worth of junk food on the counter and feeling like I need to explain to the cashier that I’m not high – I just had a long day out climbing. And descending. In the dark.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about.

-Brendan

I asked my friend Nick to drive from Denver to Seattle with me a couple weekends ago, since we hadn’t spent several hours alone in a car together since 2008. After 21 hours in the van, I think we got sufficiently caught up. Basically four years later, neither of us have much of anything figured out, especially women, although he must be a little closer because a really great girl is living with him. And it makes me happy that we can spend 21 hours staring out the windshield of an automobile trying to figure things out. Punctuated, of course, every 17 minutes or so by me saying, “Oh man, this song is fucking amazing” and then turning the stereo up loud enough to rattle unsecured objects off the dashboard.

In a society where you can have almost anything, it’s nice to know what you need sometimes. Like really need. The piece that fits in the space that’s empty. And a lot of times for me lately, that has been some time rolling down the road at 60 mph or so, watching open country roll by outside the windows. Most of us have a hard time finding places without distraction anywhere anymore. We have TV and computer screens everywhere, smartphones that we whip out of our pockets every time we’re unoccupied for more than 25 seconds, and more media to consume than ever. There is hardly anything that holds our attention and focus so much that we will ignore a cell phone vibration or the 200-times-a-day thought, “I wonder if anyone’s interacted with me on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Instagram in the last 6 minutes?”

Except, hopefully, driving. If you’re obeying the law in most states, you’re not on your cell phone when you’re driving, and when you’re not in a city and not stopping every five blocks at a stop sign or traffic light, you can just hum along in your car at 60 mph. You have to focus enough on keeping your speed reasonable, keeping your car between the lines, and not hitting anything, but on an open road, most of us don’t use that much brain power doing those things. And that leaves your mind to do something our increasingly technology-distracted lives don’t allow: Wander.

It hasn’t changed in the 50-some years since John Steinbeck wrote about it in Travels With Charley:

“If one has driven a car over many years, as I have, all reactions have become automatic. One does not think about what to do. Nearly all the driving technique is deeply buried in a machine-like unconscious. This being so, a large area of the conscious mind is left free for thinking. And what do people think of when they drive? On short trips perhaps of arrival at a destination or memory of events at the place of departure. But there is left, particularly on very long trips, a large area for daydreaming or even, God help us, for thought. … Driving, I have created turtle traps in my mind, have written long, detailed letters never to be put to paper, much less sent. When the radio was on, music has stimulated memory of times and places, complete with characters and stage sets, memories so exact that every word of dialogue is recreated.”

And if you can get some company on a road trip, you might be in one of the last best places to have a conversation with a friend. Men can get together to do things like climb, play pool, hunt, fish, watch sports, drink beer, eat wings — but we have a hard time inviting each other to just go sit somewhere and talk. But in a car, that’s what you do. You sit next to each other and find stuff to talk about. Looking out the windshield, there’s no football game on, no movie, and no real legitimate excuse not to have an actual conversation.

So you talk about the real shit, life, love, getting older, what you’re doing with your lives, what does it mean, what’s the point, the things you have space to talk about when you’re done catching up with the normal stuff like How’s Work, How’s Your Lady, What Did You Do Last Weekend, and maybe Who Won The Game or Did You Hear What X Politician Said The Other Day. And I don’t know many places where you can make that happen anymore.

If you’re not by yourself on a road trip, multiples of two are ideal. Two means catching up with a good friend, four means two people can have a separate conversation in the back seat and you can switch out at gas stops. Three means someone is constantly leaning up to the front seat to try to hear what you’re saying, and every time you turn the stereo up, they can’t hear anything. And that’s a bad deal for everyone, because music is as important to a road trip as gas is. You can spend thousands of dollars on a stereo for your home, theater/surround sound/all that stuff, but the best stereo you will ever own is the one in your car, and its performance peaks when your car is on a road going somewhere other than to your office. It provides a soundtrack to a short movie of part of your life called Let’s Go Somewhere And Make Some Memories. And when you’re going Somewhere, life tends to be a little more memorable.

-Brendan