Obe Carrion

Obe Carrion features alongside Chris Sharma in Rampage (1999), an early Lowell production that documents a road trip through the American West on a search for bouldering lines. The film records an eighteen-year-old Sharma and his companions—loading into a battered RV, moving between desert boulders, and treating the landscape like a rolling project list—while Obe is part of the crew establishing new problems along the way.

More road movie than polished climbing documentary, Rampage places emphasis on the scene-forming aspects of those tours: crashpads piled at the base of problems, desert light and evening conversations, and the feeling of a community inventing itself as it travels. Josh and Brett Lowell’s early filmmaking style is present in the rawness and immediacy of the footage, and the film is frequently cited for its role in documenting an emergent American bouldering movement.

Seen now, the film is both a record of hard problems and a social snapshot—how a small group of climbers, including Obe Carrion, traveled, developed problems, and shaped the culture around bouldering at the close of the 1990s.