Portraits from the Triple Crown Bouldering Series
Over the course of three months every winter, rock climbers from all over the world come to test themselves - without ropes or protective gear - on the house-sized boulders of Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. The Triple Crown Bouldering Series is a collection of outdoor climbing competitions drawing thousands overall and culminating in cash prizes. It’s a gathering of the community with the single objective of climbing as hard and high as you dare on what is considered some of the best stone in the world.
Among the sandstone and granite: local legends, traveling dirtbags, professional climbers and first-timers, entrepreneurs, hangers-on, curious spectators.
I photographed them over a single season in 2014.