Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Category Archives: Climbing
Radical Reels 2014: Filmmaker Celin Serbo brings stills to life
With his first feature-length adventure film — “feature length” in the adventure genre meaning more than four minutes — Celin Serbo admits he didn’t have much of a plan going in.
“It was definitely thrown together,” says the Boulder, Colo.-based adventure photographer and cinematographer. “We had no detailed story board. We just wanted to see what we could get.”
What emerged was 2011’s “Cyclocross Colorado Front Range,” a mix of race footage and interviews that looks like it did indeed set out with a purpose: to explain the allure of this quirky cycling hybrid that involves carrying one’s bike as much as riding it. The five-minute video includes footage from about a half dozen races shot in a local amateur cyclocross series.
“These were people doing whatever they were doing during the week, then coming out there to hammer it out on the weekend,” Serbo says.
Rainy day options
The weekend forecast, no matter where you live in North Carolina, is essentially this: daytime high of 80, a good chance of rain.
We’ve had a fair amount of rain this year: in the Triangle, 31.58 inches of rain have fallen at Raleigh-Durham International Airport since the first of the year, more than six inches above the normal. Fortunately, though, much of that rain has come during the week.
Not, apparently, the case this weekend.
So what are your rainy day options?
There’s always the climbing gym, and with 14 across the state, odds are there’s one near you. Check out your options at our list of climbing gyms in North Carolina.
One of our favorite outdoor options in the rain: a hike. If you’ve got even the basic gear to keep dry, a hike in the rain can be a revelatory experience. First, though, you need that basic gear; this post from March 2012 gives you that direction.
Then, because some hikes are better hiked wet that others, here’s a rundown of seven of our favorite wet hikes near the state’s urban centers.
90 Second Escape: Going up (55′)
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Going Up the wall
Triangle Rock Club raises the roof in Morrisville
Saturday you’ll be able to get high in Morrisville.
Really high.
Saturday is the grand reveal for the Triangle Rock Club’s Morrisville expansion, an additional 17,000 square feet of climbing surface, some of which reaches as high as 55 feet. That’s more than twice as high as the walls in the existing gym, which opened in 2007. The original gym, which will focus on youth programs and classes, has 9,000 square feet of climbing space.
Last September, TRC opened a gym in North Raleigh with 13,000 square feet of climbing space. Combined the two gyms offer 39,000 square feet of indoor climbing.
“We’re excited about people getting to see the gym,” Managing Partner Joel Graybeal (Andrew Kratz and Luis Jauregui round out the management troika) said on a preview tour this morning.
The expanded gym reflects how far the TRC has expanded the concept of indoor climbing in the Triangle. Before entering the market seven years ago, indoor climbing here was done in converted warehouses with holds bolted into plywood. Amenities? Bathrooms.