Okay, chalk this up to a proud-big-sister kind of post.
My bitty brother Alex is a professional climber. Which is pretty cool in its own right, but not exactly why I’m proud.
Perhaps you recall that last summer Alex and his friend Cedar Wright biked to and then climbed all the 14,000-foot peaks in California, and I got to tag along on my own bike for the last few peaks of their adventure. Especially since climbing is often such a car-centric sport–drive with all your gear to wherever far-flung place you want to climb and then do your thing–I was super psyched that they were opting to travel via bike. (And even more psyched to be able to meet up with them:)
They weren’t always so excited about it. After their adventure, Cedar made a video about their experience called Sufferfest–which should tell you something about how awesome they felt about biking and climbing exclusively for three weeks. Though if you read the article they co-wrote for Climbing Magazine, they admit that it wasn’t all bad. I even make a cameo appearance in that article as the ridiculously exuberant “unfamous but equally badass female hippy Honnold who doesn’t own a car and is a vegetarian philanthropist.” heh.
So that adventure and its carfreeness was pretty rad of them.
(that’s right, I’m recycling this picture from my initial post about them:)
But the best part is that eight months later now, the two of them are on another bike adventure, this time combining biking and climbing with work installing solar panels in Arizona.
Grist has an article about it here, but the basic idea is that the two of them will bike through Utah climbing all sorts of rad towers in the desert, then end up in Navajo land to help install solar power on 30 homes and 5 schools. I love not only that my bitty bro is biking to do all this stuff–again eschewing the car, although they won’t be totally self-supported this time–but also that he’s using his adventure as a venue to do right by the world.
As a relatively well-known athlete, it’s rad that Alex can use his much-larger-than-mine voice as well as shit-tons of his own money and effort for making the world a better place. (Check out more of his work at the Honnold Foundation!:)
So I’m a proud big sister.
And in another funny feat of planning (how do we always do this?), Alex and I concurrently designed almost exactly the same adventures for ourselves. That bike adventure I’ve been talking about? Going to Utah? Alex and Cedar are biking almost exactly where I plan to be–in part because it doesn’t seem like there are really that many roads in SW Utah, but also because it turns out the places I want to see are also the places they want to climb. They’re already out–they started on Friday–but hopefully I’ll catch up to them somewhere around Canyonlands. Or who knows where. But I’m psyched for the potential of more family adventure–which, I discovered last time, is the most wholesome of all adventures:)