Trevor Roosen
Primary Outdoor Sports: Climbing
Job: Co-Owner of Boardworks Climbing Gym
Favorite Beverage: Arnold Palmer
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Go-To Climbing Snack: Gummy Worms
Favorite Season: Fall
Fun Fact: I held the highest batting average in my Little League
Book Recommendation: The Alchemist
Three Words to Describe You: Stubborn, Easy-Going, & Logical
“I feel pretty lucky because I found climbing when I was seven or eight years old. I was your typical kid that did every sport. My parents had me in baseball, soccer, all of that stuff. But, when I was seven or eight, I started on a climbing team and did ten seasons straight of competition. I got the opportunity to work and live in Yosemite when I was 14 and 15 years old and I've just been climbing my entire life that I can remember.”
“There's so much that gets me excited. I think climbing in general, the coolest part about it is the aesthetics. I like pretty rocks and so I want to go do the things that are the most aesthetic lines. I don't care about the grade. I'll go climb something that's V1, but it's the most beautiful looking thing ever.
I recently had an experience like that when I was in South Africa. Some friends were climbing on a boulder problem. It was hard V10. I just knew I wasn't gonna go do it so I found some cool V5 that arguably, in my opinion, looked better. I climbed that one while they were trying the harder boulder.
That, I think, is the thing that gets me most excited about climbing. Bouldering, big walls, sport climbing, all that stuff, I just want to climb the most aesthetic pitches or the most aesthetic boulder problems.”
“I think I'm probably one of the few people that climbs relatively hard that also doesn't give a shit if they climb relatively hard. The best climbers in the world right now have a very specific mindset. They're thinking about bedtime and their exact warm-up to get on the climb to have to execute X thing. And I think that is awesome.
But, the majority of the time, I'm the person that is like, ‘Sick. I did a bunch of mods today and I feel great.’ If it happens that I do something of a hard grade, cool. But I have not found something in climbing, a specific route or boulder or something, that's given me that drive to really be like, ‘I'm not doing anything else until I send this one.’”
“I grew up in the Tahoe area and my proximity to outdoor climbing was actually closer than the gym. I just had a lot of opportunity to go outside, which I think helped me to want to continue to go outside.
The gym that I climbed at closed down when I was fifteen. So I had three years of competition climbing where all that I did was train outside because the gym closed. I think I inherently wanted to climb outside more just because that was what I could do.
I think the biggest thing is I always wanted to travel and I always wanted to go to other climbing areas. I saw a lot of my friends that really stuck to competition climbing, didn't get to go outside, didn't get to go do what I quote unquote would call the real thing.”
“I think my proudest moment in climbing was when my friend Justin and I did the Northwest Face of Half Dome. I was 16. He was 27 or something like that.
He'd climbed a few walls before, and is a pretty avid aid climber. He showed up in the valley and was like, ‘Let's go do the Northwest Face of Half Dome.’
We did it in a push. It took us 25 hours. I took a probably 40 foot whipper in the middle of it and got scared shitless. He led the rest of the route after that. It was an epic for sure. We ran out of water with two pitches to climb and eight miles to walk off. It was a full on adventure. It was nuts.
We started at 11 at night knowing our goal was to do it in 16 hours so we would still be able to walk off in somewhat of light. But, we way overshot that. We topped out at midnight, shivered on top for two hours, and then we were like, ‘Fuck it, we have to walk off.’”
“A friend of mine and I had this conversation about a year ago. We're getting real in depth into it and my point of view with the conversation was, ‘If everybody had to climb in their life, the world would be a different place.’ And, he had some really good points about there being lots of other things, not just climbing that give people the same feeling that I'm talking about.
But, I do genuinely believe that outdoor sports make better humans. I think because of the struggles and the hardships and situations that it puts us into, you have to actually think. There's so much of the world today where you don't have to think and it's kind of boring.”
“When I wake up in the morning, if I want something specific, I can come out here three days a week and try to do something. And, I probably will if I put that effort into it.
It's the same as if I'm wanting to change the brakes on my car. I just recently did that. I've never changed brakes before, but I can figure it out if I put the effort in. I think that's the biggest thing.
Whether it be skiing or climbing, if you put the effort into it, you will probably succeed at that thing. I think that's the biggest translation into the real world.”
“If the hardest thing to think about is playing with an inanimate object, life's pretty easy. You know? If my biggest struggle all day is, ‘Can I hold this hold today?’ I don't have a tough life at all.
If I can take that thought process to the more mainstream world, then it makes things so easy. It cracks me up when people are in a rush at the grocery store or just hammer on the gas out of the parking lot.
It's just like, ‘I don't have anything to worry about.’ All that I care about is like, ‘Is the rock dry today?’ ‘Can I go try again?’ Or, ‘Can I go try something new?’ ‘Can I go see something new?’
All that I really worry about is the conditions and do I feel good enough to do X movement. I think it keeps everything in perspective because if you're angry that the line at the grocery store isn't moving, it's like, ‘Where do you got to be?’ ‘What do you got to do?’ ‘Why are you angry?’
That's what climbing teaches me.”
“It should be fun.
When I was younger, I would talk about how climbing is my biggest stress relief, but it's also my biggest stress. And, that doesn't cancel itself. It's not like you have one and one and now there's zero kind of thing. It only heightens the two of them.
Nowadays, I really keep it as my passion. Yeah, I want to go try hard, but trying hard is a relative term. V12 is hard and V12 gets flashed by people. It's not hard for people, and that's totally okay.
V4 also gets flashed by people. There might be more that do one or the other, but climbing harder doesn't make it more fun. Those two things don't correlate because it being a V10 doesn't mean it's better than that V9 or that V8.
I think that's the thing that I've learned the most. I would rather be able to still do something and have fun with it. If I'm not having fun doing the one thing that I pretty much ever do, I probably shouldn't do that thing anymore.
So exploring, going to new areas, seeing new things, all of that is my main focus because I would rather die having done 50,000 boulder problems instead of 500 V14s. I just got to do more.”
