In his mid-20’s and already a prolific face in sport climbing and bouldering for nearly 20 years, Chris Lindner visits the Mountain Shop after the Fort Collins Outdoor Social Hour tonight for a multimedia presentation. I caught up with Chris from his new home in Gunnison, Colorado to talk about his climbing life and the show he’ll put on tonight.
See the event details here.
Themountainshop.com: Give me the rough outline as your life as a climber and otherwise.
Chris Lindner: My parents are rock climbers. They got together, they had me and they started climbing. I started going to the cliffs when I was two weeks old in the little baby carriage and they took me climbing every weekend until I was able to climb for myself. When I was three I was doing 5.10’s on toprope and when I was four placing four. That was when I first got noticed.
I got sponsored by John Bachar working for Boreal when I was six years old. At that time I was redpointing 5.12’s sport climbing. When I was nine years old, I did my first 5.13 and when I was 14 I did my first 5.14.
I’ve been climbing for pretty much my entire life. When I was 16 was when I started getting paid to rock climb and when I was 19 or 20 I sort of quit working and school and I’ve just been climbing for five years or so. I’ve worked a couple little side jobs here and there, but I’ve pretty much just been rock climbing.
TMS.com: What have those last five years looked like?
CL: I primarily went sport climbing when I was growing up and then in my later teens I was doing a bunch of bouldering, going around southern California finding new areas and putting up a lot of new bouldering.
In the past couple years I’ve been really stoked to find new routes to bolt. I’ve been traveling around and driving out a lot of dirt roads and trying to find cool cliffs to climb. I’ve put up some cool stuff – some of the stuff I’ll show in the slideshow is what I’ve put up on the Lost Coast up in the Humboldt area near Oregon. There’s another route that I bolted in Ibex that is really cool and some stuff around Vegas. I’ve been bolting a couple of new cliffs around Vegas in the last year.
Now that I’ve moved out to Gunnison I haven’t really bolted anything new, but I’m definitely looking. I’ve been driving around looking for something new and I’d like to try and maybe put up some new stuff in the Black Canyon and Fortress. I’ve been eying up some lines at the Fortress and trying Kryptonite right now – that’s where I’m going this weekend – that’s what I’m working on right now.
TMS.com: What does climbing mean to you?
CL: In one sentence, it’s all I know how to do. It’s something that’s really been part of my life. I wouldn’t know what to do without it. You know, I have other interests – I like to surf and I like to snowboard and other things would keep me happy in life – but for some reason being out in the middle of nowhere and kind of outside of society and appreciating the mountains and the rocks and just finding cool stuff to do is really what motivates me.
It’s finding really beautiful rocks more than anything. The difficulty is probably second, but just beauty and coolness is first and trying to put up routes of a difficulty level along with that is the goal. It’s hard traveling around finding new stuff to rock climb. You find a lot of cool stuff but it might not be that hard and then you find stuff that might be too hard or hard and not that cool. Searching for that next one that’s going to yield that beauty and that difficulty is what keeps me going.
