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Highball boulder problems are kinda a thing into themselves. Sure, they are just a really tall boulder problem (or a really short route), but the head games are all different.
First, unless you set up a toprope, there is no way to suss out the top moves. Every time you have to start from the ground up, working your way as you go (I believe this was/is John Gill’s moto as well). Similarly, because you are not roped in, but easily getting off the deck, the mental component of the route really comes into play.
Yesterday Tara and I went to try out a really nice highball problem that I had noted last fall. Located on the backside of Green Mountain in the Boulder Flatirons, this problem is really a classic.
A recent article published in Ethos by Naomi Adelson brings up several important points concerning indigenous peoples and mental health. Specifically, she highlights some of the disjunctions between Euroamerican mental health categories such as stress, and Cree First Nation Women’s understanding of this category and its place in their lives.
The Abstract
Allan Young’s classic thesis on stress discourse underscores the way in which the biomedical discourse of “stress” reflects and legitimizes existing social inequalities even as it removes the language of stress to the decontextualized domain of the clinic. In this article, I address the way in which the “stress discourse” of a group of young adult Cree women who live in a remote northern Canadian village reflects and reinscribes the social, cultural, and historical conditions of inequality as part and parcel of community life. This study, as a reflection of Young’s thesis, reveals that sometimes one is bound to replicate inequities because it is necessary to do so. The women with whom I spoke are entangled in an historical and social reality that they are wholly aware of such that the paths of inequity that are expressed in a rationale of “stress” cannot readily be challenged or changed.
Read more about Stress, Mental Health, and Cree First Nation peoples here.
North American archaeology has been going through major revisions and paradigm changes over the last two decades. No place has this been more evidence then in theories and long held beliefs concerning the peopling of the Americas: genetic evidence has pushed back the hypothetical initial peopling date; new archaeological sites such as the Gault Site in Texas have questioned the Clovis model; and ideas surrounding culture groups and technological affiliation have been revisited. New evidence from across the Plains and Rocky Mountain region has contributed to this overhauling of North American archaeological theories and our understanding of the peopling of the Americas. Work by Brian N. Andrews, Jason M. Labelle, and John D. Srebach (2008) has shed new light on the Folsom lithic technology and prehistoric Native American subsistence and migration patterns during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene transition.
Folsom is an archaeological complex of sites and isolated finds associated with prehistoric Native American hunter-gatherer groups inhabiting the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest regions of North America. First defined at the Folsom type site in New Mexico and further refined at the Lindenmeier site, the complex contains a number of temporally diagnostic lithic artifacts (projectile points, channel flakes, ultrathin bifaces). Spanning 800 radiocarbon years, from approximately 10,900 to 10,100 radiocarbon years before present, documenting the longevity and regional success of the Folsom technological complex is clearly documented.
It is generally well accepted that Folsom adaptation was characterized by small groups of cyclically mobile, specialized bison hunters moving from kill to kill, often covering large areas of land in relatively short periods, with the efficiently designed Folsom toolkit seen as a key technological adaptation of this cyclical lifestyle.
Read more about Prehistoric Native Americans and Folsom Technology: New Evidence from the Plains here.
