Bears Don't Care About Your Problems by Brendan Leonard

Author:Brendan Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680512717
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

BIKE COP

•Is police officer

•Rides police-issue mountain bike

•Has gun

•Rides on sidewalk

•Is actually at work on bicycle, as opposed to riding to work

DUI GUY/GIRL

•Bikes only because of suspended license

•Flipped-up drop bars

•Sometimes smokes while riding

DRUNK GUY/GIRL

•Bikes only to/from bar

•Sometimes forgets bike at bar

•But isn’t DUI Guy/Girl, see, because not driving to bar

THE DAWN WALL AND THE IDEA OF “WASTING TIME”

In January 2015, two guys finished climbing an astronomically difficult 3,000-foot route on El Capitan as the world kept up via seemingly every mainstream news source: CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and all of the major news networks. Climbers and non-climbers followed the final pitches of Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell’s nineteen-day efforts on a live video feed, which was simultaneously kind of boring (as watching rock climbing from a distance usually is) and absolutely enthralling.

When Jorgeson joined Caldwell at the final anchor at the top of the final pitch, two tired guys hugged at the end of a monumental, multi-year effort, many of us rejoiced, and social media feeds blew up with everyone’s own version of “[insert exclamatory phrase here] Dawn Wall!”

Throughout the two weeks of media coverage, a few people seemed to not get the whole thing, calling the climbers adrenaline junkies, or accusing them of doing it for fame or attention or money, or saying that they should have spent their time doing something that would benefit humanity. I dug into the comments section on a New York Times story on the climb and found a gold mine of vitriol. I cringed, laughed, and collected it and put it all together in an Adventure Journal post.

It’s one thing to not understand climbing—it turns out it’s incredibly complicated to explain why the route, and the climb, was such a big deal. If you don’t climb, you might not get that the sport of climbing is statistically relatively safe (compared to driving on the freeway), relatively not harmful to the park (compared to the impact of thousands of park visitors every year), and that there are differences between aid climbing, free climbing, and free soloing. Likewise, many of us don’t understand the technicalities rules of lots of Olympic sports, or stock car racing, or the categories at the Oscars, and the idea of using or not using ropes in climbing was definitely lost on many people.

But there were also dozens of indignant comments from people who seemed to think the whole thing was a giant waste of time:

Robert Frodeman, Denton, TX

Strikes me as a dumb way to spend one’s time. Dangerous, and for what purpose? A thrill. One should devote such considerable energies to something more constructive.

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