I usually don't sign up for something I don't think I can do.

I waited for a long time to try to bolt until I knew I was ready, until I had done enough

hard roots that I felt prepared enough to try it,

and enough hard roots at Smith Rock, especially.

This is climber and photographer Tara Kersner.

Here's also a filmmaker. I also love the fact that Tobolk or Not To Be keeps showing up coincidentally.

I might remember J.B. Chabot, Frenchman, first 514 in America. No woman would ever climb 514. I wonder if when he said that,

he would realize that he would be continually lampooned on some podcast 30 years later.

Anyway, I feel like I'm repeating myself. Will you describe Tobolte or not to be?

When you look up at Tobolts or not to be, you feel like you're looking up,

and I'm going to use Paige Clausen's words here, at a giant blank parking lot that's turned up on

its side. And it climbs in an incredibly stressful way. You feel like you're climbing the features

that might be on a parking lot. In fact, the features on a parking lot might be bigger than the features you're climbing onto bolt. You know, you tie in and you start climbing and from the moment you start until the, probably the 11th or 12th bolt, you are stressed.

Unless you're French and then I think you're just climbing it very gracefully and it's being, you know, it's easy.

So I grew up in Bend, Oregon, and I was going to Smith Rock my whole life, but I didn't climb.

Smith Rock State Park is an Oregon, and it's a classic sport climbing area. It's really the, it was the birth of sport climbing in America.

And Tara grew up going

to Smith even before she was a climber. Smith Rock was just this incredible landscape with this

river running through it. And I always thought of it as, or in my younger days, wrote like, you know,

angsty teenage poetry about it being like a bunch of cardboard cutouts that are up against the sky.

And I only say that because the volcanic tough that makes up the rock that you climb on there is

really interesting looking and it creates all these like very distinct ridgelines.

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