Scotty Boladeras

As promised, the next few posts will be introducing you to the entire Yosemite Assault Crew 2011.

First in the line-up, we have Scotty Boladeras!

Scotty pictured in the foreground on our 'epic aid adventure' at West Cape Howe, January 2011

Scotty leading up one of his favourite ascents, Dancing the Deep Blue, Grade 26 at West Cape Howe

Scotty is the real thing when it comes to the 'Sensitive New Age Climber'. Everybody loves Scotty. He speaks and writes eloquently, is always around when you want to climb, genuinely likes 'Chick Flicks', carries a 'manbag' and most importantly, is clean!

Leaving no dependents behind, Scotty decided he'd go over to the 'Land of the free' a few months in advance and learn what all this 'crack climbing' is about. Last we heard, he was climbing hard and snowboarding somewhere in Arizona.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with climbing terms, "www.about.com" (the most trusted internet source in the world..) defines crack climbing as 'a technique of ascending various sized cracks or fissures that split rock faces. Progress is made by jamming or wedging a climber's fingers, hands, arms, feet and legs into the crack, depending on its width.' (in other words, jam whatever part of your body fits and hope for the best)

Most of the climbing in Yosemite is crack climbing.

Scotty about to jam his hands into some American 'crack'... no pun intended, he doesn't look too excited.

Scotty busting some moves up some nicer looking rock.

Scotty tells us that the faded white smear going up the rock is due to climber's asses rubbing and varnishing the wall as they jam their way up the corner crack.

From the pictures above, two things can be concluded:

Conclusion 1: Crack climbing looks hard!!

Conclusion 2: Scotty only owns 1 T-shirt...

Now, back to the bio:

To date, Scotty's greatest personal achievements are:

1. Falling off a slack-line at the local park onto a pile of dog poo which then got stuck to his shirt (confirmed by at least 2 others)
2. Being able to grow a full beard in 10 minutes! (I think everybody can confirm this)

But all jokes aside, Scotty is a very competent (and hairy) climber and no doubt by the time the rest of the team arrives in the USA, we'll be taking advice from him on how to attack the crack. In fact, the only fear Scotty has with this whole campaign is (in his own words), 'Having to do a No. 2 in front of all of us while we are 500m up the cliff'. He even suggested before he left that it would be worthwhile if we all got together one weekend at somebody's house and had some practice poo sessions... WTF!!! 

Scotty, I think I speak for the rest of the team when I say if you need to go, just tell us and we'll all look the other way. We're going to be seeing enough crack as it is, we definitely won't be missing out by not seeing yours!!  

If you want to follow Scotty on his adventures before we meet up in Yosemite, his blog is located at:

http://scottboladeras.blogspot.com/ 

For the single ladies (or gents) who might be thinking that Scotty is a bit of 'alright', drop him a line or a post on the blog. He's always up for a good time (in a gentlemanly way) and I'm sure he'd love to hear from you in any case...

Finally, it looks like the blog is gathering momentum with 100 hits in the past 3 days (I swear 99 of them are not from me!!!, maybe 98 were... hahaha) and 3 followers: 

Gold medal went to Tom Robbins;

Silver went to Dan Freeman; and 

Bronze to Logan Barber (You'll be hearing more about Logan in a later post)

 

My goal is to get more hits than Rebecca Black's 'Friday', only need another 126,759,469 hits!!! Yeah, totally do-able!!

Until next time people, when we'll introduce you to another of the team...