This week we’re hearing from John Giraldo of Anchorage. On most days John is working as a supervisor, but in his free time he’s an extreme alpinist.
GIRALDO: I’m John Giraldo and I do a lot of climbing with as little work as possible in between.
I love the adventure and the mental capacity that climbing requires. It’s a really neat marriage of physical and mental aspects.
You get like all tunnel vision and you’re just like ‘where are you going to put your hand? Where are you going to put your foot? Where are you going to put your gear?’ Then you get to the belay and you can clip off and just look around and you’re like, ‘Woah! I’m in a crazy place. This is awesome.’
Growing up as a subsistence farmer and gardener, we didn’t know about climbing shoes or ropes or anything like that. We were super poor but my dad found this really old REI ice ax from Value Village. With that ice ax I started going after some bigger objectives.
I’ve done climbing in the Central Alaska ranges; that’s kinda where I started out. And then I went over to the Eastern Alaska Range a couple seasons ago and did the first ascent on a new route on Mt. Hayes which was a pretty massive undertaking.
The Piolet d’Or, the golden ice ax is the translation, they nominate a bunch of ascents worldwide and they have a committee that selects out of those which one will get the golden ice ax of the year. It was a pretty big honor to get nominated. I didn’t even know. It’s not like you submit. Definitely the most difficult thing I have done so far. That was an adventure I’ll probably never forget. Of course the actual ice ax went to some crazy, mega alpinist doing some gnarly stuff but it was pretty cool to just be mentioned in the shortlist.
Kaysie Ellingson got her start as a video producer while attending the University of Southern California for her Master’s Degree in journalism. What started out as a pursuit to become an international reporter for papers became a desire to produce documentaries.
While at USC she took on many video projects ranging from various freelancing gigs to starting a web series, ClefCity, where viewers could catch interviews with popular (not mainstream) musicians. But it was her work at IMPACT, the university’s video newsmagazine, that had the heaviest hand in propelling her into video production. She graduated in May 2014 and having never been to Alaska, moved up in the winter of 2015 to work at Alaska Public Media as a video producer.
One random bit of information is that prior to graduate school Ellingson worked as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Kazakhstan. Some of her fondest memories involve drinking fermented horse milk, testing out how many people can actually fit into a car and of course entertaining her students with her horrible Kazakh speaking skills. She hopes to return someday soon. In the meantime she is enjoying the similar climate of Alaska.
kellingson (at) alaskapublic (dot) org | 907.550.8419 | About Kaysie
