Wide Boys hit America....

14th Sep 2011

Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker, Wild Country's sponsored heroes with a penchant for the wide weird and wonderful have hit the USA and have their sights set on a host of the maddest and baddest cracks.

Fully armed with Wild Country's big Friends as well as a training regime to make the Pope blush they have three months to make and break the grade stateside...

Tom Randall fully rigged with 10 size 5's and 6 size 6 friends for his epic adventures...

Tom takes up the story:

"On Sept 13th (unlucky for some) me and Pete are headed off to America to complete our wide crack odyssey. We’ve pretty much climbed all the hardest stuff we can lay our chicken wings on in the UK and Europe and I suppose it’s time that we finally get down with the big boys in the USA! This trip for us is a culmination of all our experiences and it’ll probably be a bit of a make or break scenario when it comes to a certain offwidth perversion…

 

We’re splitting the 2 month trip into 3 sections, to take advantage of conditions and projecting time. The first part of the journey will be a harsh start as it’s straight off to Vedauwoo in Wyoming for us. From reputation, it seems to the ultimate sandbag destination in the US and to make things worse it’s at 8000ft! Classics such as Lucille (America’s first 5.13 offwidth?), Spatial Relations (5.13a invert roof crack), Eight Ounces to Freedom (5.13 offwidth corner) are on the agenda. After that we’re heading down to Zion for a week to try and repeat Gabriel, which is reputed to be the world’s hardest chimney – somewhere around the range of 5.13, put up by the awesome Pamela Pack, who won the Golden Piton award for this upside down adventure.

 

Once we’ve lost a wheelbarrow full of skin, we’re planning to head back to the crack Mecca of Indian Creek to repeat a load of classics and get stuck in to some first ascent projects. Stuff that’s on our radar are things like Belly Full of Bad Berries 5.13, Price of Evil 5.13- and Army of Darkness 5.13d and some other gnarly looking routes. Basically, there’s not a single day without some form of hideous pain!

 

The top it all off, we’re going to capture all our misery on film with Paul Diffley from Hotaches and Chris Alstrin, from Alstrin Films. Alex Ekins will also be travelling around with us taking some weird, wide and wonderful pics. I know I’ve fully trained up my worst gurns over the last 2 years, but Pete…. well, he’s got some more to go I reckon!

Some links of routes we’re going to do: Lucille http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/pamela_varco_onsights_lucille_offwidth/

Gabriel http://www.climbing.com/exclusive/features/2009/index2.html

Belly Full of Bad Berries http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2dIZt4FCeE

Price of Evil http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Pm7wOWuD3IM/TSYOYnYD2SI/AAAAAAAAABo/TxtSY36EVe4/s1600/_DSC4393-15-8.jpg

Army of Darkness http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/pizem_completes_513_roof_crack/