Climber: Dan Mirsky
Whip: 2000 Toyota Tacoma
- Manuel transmission, 4WD, V6 engine
- Gets less than 20 mpg
- 174,000 miles
- Purchased for $20,000 with 30,000 miles
About the Whip: The Toyota Tacoma was introduced to the market in 1995, and this mid-size truck has been known for ride quality and comfort over ruggedness. The 2005 Tacoma was named Truck of the Year by Motor Trend magazine. This particular whip, a 2000 Tacoma, has been Dan Mirsky’s reliable (“just change the oil”) partner for the last 10 years—not coincidentally, the same number of years that Dan has been rock climbing. In fact, here, reified in this maroon-colored rig, one will find a singular chronicle of Dan’s irony-laden, misadventurous, amazing life as a rock climber.
Pimped out: With the help of an elevated cap, there is room for a wooden platform bed to sleep upon, while creating storage space for food, gear, water and propane beneath. There is a hinged trap door at the head of the bed to reach items buried deep inside; however, despite being stoked on the idea when originally designing the bed, Mirsky says he never uses the door.
Found Items: Water jug, cooler, stove. ThermaRest Dream Time mat. Case of hard-to-find specialty beers. Crocodile Hunter. Health tonics. KT Tape. “Same Rock” (a rock that looks the same no matter which way you turn it).
Map Quest: Rifle, Colorado, is the Tacoma’s home, but it has been all over the country, including surviving a year on the road, from fall 2007 to fall 2008, when Dan solely chased good rock conditions. It has been to Rumney, Gunks, the Red River Gorge, all over Southeast, Hueco, St. George, Ibex, Clark Mountain (or Mount Clark?) and even across the Border to El Potrero Chico, Mexico.
Any Good Stories? In a word, tons.
The first time I met Dan Mirsky, he was a student at Colorado College, and just beginning to cut his teeth on the 5.12 and 5.13a routes of Rifle.
“The Tacoma barely survived Colorado College,” Mirsky says now, “As a result of my friends.”
That posse included Mason Baker, Alex Lowther and Andy “Poopy Doop” Newman. Unlike many of the uber-elite, ultra-serious, anorexic redpoint dweebs that were there in Rifle at the time, these four kids were loud, drank a lot of beer, didn’t take themselves seriously and were fun to be around. We instantly became friends.
Newman, a lovable guy but hardly a master of the universe, had a dog named Holden. As one might expect of a mutt with an owner possessing such a cavalier moral code, Holden was a terribly misbehaving 3-month-old mutt. You often wondered who owned who.
The first time I hung out with the four CC kids, we all rode in Mirsky’s truck back to New Castle, with Newman and Holden lying on the bed in the back. We stopped at Subway to get some dinner, putting Holden in the front seat. After eating foot longs, we came outside to find all the doors locked, with the keys in the center console. Holden had stepped on the automatic door lock. We peered into the window and saw Holden gnawing on the seat leather, happily tearing chunks out of it.
“Nooo!” Mirsky cried. “Your dog’s eating my truck!”
Fortunately, the bed was open, and we crawled in and opened a little window peering into the main cabin. I forgot whose idea this was, but we spent a long, long time tediously trying to use a stick clip to push down the auto lock button on the driver’s side door, while Newman yelled at Holden to cease and desist.
ASIDE FROM BEING a dog chew toy, the Tacoma has suffered its fair share of scrapes, crashes, bumps and bruises. The window of the truck cap has been broken twice—both times as a result of friends leaving the window open while they ride in the truck bed, and not telling Mirsky he is about to back up into something—it should be mentioned that the second time the window broke was Newman’s fault. That said, Newman did a great job fixing it himself, and even Mirsky admits that the window is “almost water tight.”
The inside of the cap has some burns from when Dan tried to make coffee with a propane stove next to his bed while camping at Rumney.
Bullet wound
There are three bullet wounds in the right rear side panel. “Rest days in Hueco can be boring,” Dan begins this recount. He and John Wallace were driving around looking for a place to shoot guns. They stopped by their mutual friend Eric Vining’s empty trailer. “The sight of this trailer just so happens to anger John,” Dan explains. So they decided to shoot up the walls inside Vining’s trailer. Unbeknown to them, their bullets were actually piercing right through the trailer’s thin aluminum walls and firing directly into the Tacoma. They didn’t realize what they had done until they walked outside and found three mere “flesh wounds … luckily we had missed the gas tank and the truck didn’t blow up.”
Last weekend, Dan’s mom, visiting from New York, got into a small accident, putting a large dent in the right side panel—but didn’t tell Dan, apparently hoping that he wouldn’t notice before she flew back to New York.
“I had to call her on the phone like some kind of parent busting their teenage kid, and accuse her of crashing my truck!” says Dan. “She finally admitted to it.”
ONE THING DAN wants you to know: putting a cap on the truck changes its center of gravity. To him, this will explain why, five years ago, with me riding shotgun, Dan unintentionally executed a perfect 540 around that sharp hairpin bend between Miguel’s Pizza and the Beer Trailer. We sat in that eerie silence that you experience anytime you’re in an out-of-control vehicle, ultimately coming back in control and going 20 mph the opposite direction we had just been driving in. Whether the cap was to blame (or whether he was just driving way too fast on wet, slick roads), it has been blamed on the “Speed Wobble.”
With new tires and struts, the Speed Wobble is minimal, but there was a period of time recently when going over 65 mph would cause the truck to wobble back and forth, like a bobble head doll, a building momentum that would become so violent that drivers and passengers of the truck have had their heads smashed into the side doors. Once Dan loaned his truck out to his friends Tony Yao and Jen Herling, but forgot to tell them about the Speed Wobble. Of course, 10 minutes down the highway, they became completely freaked out, thinking the truck was possessed and trying to throw itself off the road. They called Dan, and he talked them through what kind of finesse is needed to properly drive the Tacoma.
“The Speed Wobble can get out of control,” says Dan. “Unless you know how to ride her right ….”
Dan’s first 5.14 was Zulu, and that was in the fall of 2006. I remember that day well, because it was late October, the season was about to end, and the next day we two were driving to the Red. Dan sent his project (Zulu), while I broke a hold off of my project (Bone Machine), which completely ruined a 5-star route and crushed my morale, and that was that. We packed up the Tacoma and drove to Kentucky.
Though Dan didn’t actually start climbing seriously until fall 2001 as a freshman at Colorado College, he can say that his first climbing shoes were hand-me-downs from none other than Lynn Hill. Dan grew up just outside of New Paltz, New York, and the home of the Gunks. His mom was a mountaineer and rock climber who became friends with Lynn Hill in the 1980s when Lynn was living in New Paltz, at that point one of the hotbeds of American rock climbing. When Dan was 8 years old, he and Lynn wore the same size shoe (U.S. boys size 4), and Lynn gave him a pair of her purple Scarpas.
After getting psyched on climbing at CC, Dan returned to New York and, because his sister had recently killed his Honda Civic, he bought the Tacoma.
“This was sort of before the era of Sprinter vans,” Dan says, “so getting a truck with a bed in the back was about the coolest thing you could do.
Over the years, Dan has ticked some of the most iconic hard sport and trad climbs and boulder problems. He is the only person I know who routinely runs laps on Living in Fear and Simply Read (two sandbagged 5.13d’s in Rifle) before lunch. He calls his hardest redpoint Stockboy’s Revenge (5.14b) at Rifle, but qualifies that statement with the fact that other routes with easier ratings have felt harder due to what his abilities were at the time (for example, he says the 7 P.M. Show was the one that took him the most effort). He has onsighted such trad routes as the Rainbow Wall at Red Rocks and Jules Verne (with a hangover) in Eldo, and fell only once on an onsight attempt of Moonlight Buttress in Zion. But really, his allegiance lies with sport climbing and bouldering—and this fall, he is close to sending Girl Talk and Lung Fish, and is also hoping to clip the chains on the rarely repeated Vogue. Overall, he has climbed about a dozen 5.14s.
One thing that’s cool about Dan is that he isn’t as motivated by ratings as are many young strong climbers. The quality of the line and the type of movement inform his sense of aesthetics and determine his motivation. I find that more impressive and inspiring than his ticklist—it’s an approach to be emulated, no matter what your level. For example, when I was working on sending Sprayathon, which would eventually become my first 5.13c redpoint, Dan convinced me to climb the route as straight on as possible—no kneebars, no weird rests. He changed my perspective on the route from looking at it merely as another notch to put in my belt (easy to do when you’re gunning for any “first-of-the-grade” climb) to seeing the line in its totality: a fun, thuggy, pumpy challenge with cool uninterrupted movement; something that just flows. It took me longer, probably, to send Sprayathon in this style, but I think of it as one of those threshold experiences that took me to the next level. That type of perspective shift is one of the greatest gifts a climbing partner can give.
Master of mixology, at The Pinyon
Right now, Dan is focusing on new challenges. He has been working as a bartender for the past four years, and is currently the bar/beverage manager at an awesome new American restaurant in Boulder called The Pinyon. Being responsible for opening and running a nice bar has definitely taken its toll, and Mirsky and I just talked about how hard it is to actually send and perform in rock climbing when you have a full-time job. The days you feel best are farer and fewer in between, and don’t necessarily ever line up with good conditions and a day off. But such is life, and a challenge we all face (well, most of us).
If you’re ever in town, be sure to stop by and order one of Dan’s specialty drinks, such as “The Mirsk.”
Cheers, dude!
Awesome article. Weekend whip is a hilarious name for the series too. Theme song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GqMPuk5A-U
Dan’s a boss!
W0000oooT! Miss you guys…great story AB.
First off its Neuman, second I claim at most 50% responsibility for the window breaking, third during the subway incident the damage was two minor abrasions to the armrest and lastly, Holden at almost 8 now is a perfect gentlemen as far mutts go.
uh, last I checked your dog was still racist.
Mirsky! How are you 3.2% body fat with all that beer!