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[caption id="attachment_486" align="aligncenter" width="610"] Ryan Cerf crushing Crime of the Century (5.11c)[/caption] I was pleasantly surprised this morning to check the notifications on my instagram and have the American Alpine Club feature my photo of Ryan Cerf cranking on Crime of the Century (5.11c) in Squamish.   Regram from @tsherrygeo of "Ryan Cerf cranking and crushing his first 5.11." Crime of the Century in Squamish. #aacgram A photo posted by American Alpine Club (@americanalpine) on Feb 18, 2015 at 5:50am PST Taking this photo was a lot of fun. Matt Macatee and I climbed up Penny Lane and then made our way over to where we could rap to the Crime of the Century Anchors. He continued down to the ground and I stayed on the ledge, set an anchor and safetyed in. I pulled up and coiled my rope so that it would be out of the photo. Ryan led up the pitch, cranking away while I fired off tons of photos. I was using my Nikon D-7000 and...

We pulled up to the farmyard and stopped at the fence causing the cloud of dust to catch up and swirl past the gate towards the house. We got out, research permit from the Namibian Geologic Survey in hand, walked to the fence and waited. After a couple minutes passed a white farmer with a shaven head and sporty sunglasses stepped out of the house and approached us. We explained we were geologists from McGill University in Canada  and asked permission to hike to the tufa, pointing across the graded dirt road which acted as Namibia's highway system. I don't remember the farmer saying much, if anything. He nodded, and went back into the farm house. Recently, I started the gargantuan task of reorganizing and backing up all of my photos. This led me to dig through some archives and to revisit photos that I have not shared with many people. When we visited this tufa I had not yet been introduced to the sport of rock climbing. Looking at these tufa photos now, I see lines, unclimbed, ...