Wholistic Fitness

i guess you could say, that your ol’ coach is absolutely, utterly DAFT about mountains…there are karmic reasons for this…above photo: taken this morning; Father Sky splashes His Radiance across the Sacred Peak…

Never Trust A Teacher Who Doesn’t Love and Is UTTERLY DEVOTED TO; Climbing UP…

the Highest Source, the Purest Source is all-Ways going to involve Ascent; be it overcoming obstacles in Practice, climbing over personal hurdles, or raising the Kundalini UP the spine…Growth – should it be genuine – is all-Ways about CLIMBING UP! my earliest decades were consumed by professional sponsorship based upon climbing UP the most difficult, beautiful Mountains, Rocks, and Ice that i could find here on “Turtle Island.” {a 1987 advertisement in a Boulder, Colorado newspaper from one of my climbing sponsors. click on photo to read my ‘sworn statement’.}

My spiritual training from my Teachers included long, solo pilgrimages to remote, High Places to practice mountain yogic internal arts. These spiritual and physical lessons from the Rocky Heights have transferred flawlessly, auspiciously, joyfully, and oh so powerfully into the later ashramas (stages) of my spiritual life and is the main reason why WF is so potent of a Transformative Path: she comes through a Mountain Yogi, myself, whose dedication to raw, white, windy Presences of Infinity found upon High Peaks stabilizes and grounds Wholistic Fitness� like no other Path of body/mind fitness available.

***

OLD ROCKS, OLD DHARMASPORTS

Hey Coach,
i thought you might enjoy this pic!
– Yogi Nat, LA

COACH EXPLODES:
Dear Nat!
i do! i do! i do!!!! oh, there goes my Anahata Chakra!!!!!! a surge of hormones cascades through my cells whenever i see pictures of one of my most treasured “HP Yoga Mats”…the 3,000′ NW Face of my beloved Half Dome in Yosemite!

i first fell in absolute, total, unconditional LOVE, LUST, and OBSESSION with Half Dome the very moment i cast my eyes upon her in climbing books and magazines. I HAD to have her!!! More than any woman, more than any amount of money, fame, or attachment of life…ANYTHING…i HAD to free climb her! i HAD to apply my strength, endurance, and spirit upon Her…i NEEDED to Dance, hand in hand with her…i had to climb into the folds of her and suck from this gorgeous, sensual mile high nipple of Mother Earth! i did not care about anything else. i wanted Her BAAAAD!!!!! i did not know how long it would take me to finally acquire the skills and fortitude to achieve my granite dreams.

back then, you could drive right through the Park into Camp Curry. Ben Greene and i did just that on our first trip to Yosemite after school ended in our sophomore year in high school. we drove straight through to Yosemite from Boulder in “Vince”…my Sport Pickup with a shell. We had two five gallon containers of baked potatoes and a big wall sack of Harvest Bread and Ramen Noodles thanks to one of my sponsors (see above photo #2). We sang out of tune across the southwest deserts, ate sunflower seeds to stay awake while driving yet still fell asleep at the wheel, howled at the moon on Tioga Pass, dropped into Yosemite Valley, and parked beneath that monolithic cliff that loomed over us like God’s own Granite Sombrero!{coach, at age 17 in Yosemite, climbing the Big Walls during the “Golden Era” of American free climbing. photo/ilg archives} Ben and i were both, since children, absolutely devoted to free climbing Half Dome…however, our first REAL glance up, up, up her enormous glaciated face pretty much paralyzed us both that night beneath the starlight sky. When we could finally move, it was only to pee our pants…. it would take me five years, three attempts, three different partners, and several ounces of blood, yet with Rob Woolf in 1989, i finally free climbed the classic Northwest Face Route over the course of three days. i do not know if Ben ever climbed her. He got really, really hurt in a freak landslide, ironically, in Yosemite several years later. Rob and i free climbed all but a 25′ section, rated 5.12c on one of the higher pitches above the “Zig Zags” (see the movie; FREE CLIMB). This section, featureless, blank vertical granite nearly 3,000′ above the canyon floor, repulsed our every attempt. tired, bloody, with only tatters of skin on our hands and fingers and in hallucinations from severe dehydration and heat exhaustion…we finally looked at each other in our bloodied Bardo state and said, “fuck it,” and used a few points of aid to easily climb the section.

Our route – the NW Face – can be easily seen in this photo…just drop a plumb line from the topmost feature on Half Dome’s left most summit edge, known as, “The Visor.” See the somewhat fractured gulley at the bottom of the face? That is the start. I would like to go back one day and do it again. However, compared to the days when i could just drive “Vince” up to the base of the various crags in Yosemite, today’s expensive, militant like entry fiascos and permit-for-everything-attitude keeps me climbing in the wide open spaces of the American Southwest Desert Crags..

thanks for sending in the pic. obviously, it touched a spiritual chord within this feeble mountain yogi….

see you in LA soon,
love,
coach