On frozen Karakoram peaks, fierce alpine faces, and crags around the world, climbers killed it last year. Here, Climbing presents the 10th annual Golden Piton Awards for top performances in six disciplines: mountaineering, big wall, traditional climbing, crack climbing, sport climbing, and breakaway success.
Hardest, highest, fastest, best--it's human nature to submit our "ests" to the test. Is it an ego thing? A crude exercise in nationalism? A magazine scam for commercial interests? You could play it that way. But how boring. And futile. In the end, we appraise others' achievements and compare them to our own weekend-warrior world for one reason: to be inspired.
2009 has been a year of hardship and strife. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that the "recession" (OK, full-blown depression) continues. Still, climbers will climb, and it's nice to see that -- at least on the rocks and in the hills -- the movement hasn't been retrograde. In fact, it's been a damn good year for climbing.
Climbing magazine presents its annual Golden Piton Awards for the top climbers in bouldering, sport climbing, competition climbing, alpine climbing, and more.
Tommy Caldwell’'s incredibly sustained Dihedral Wall on El Capitan stands as the hardest long free line in the universe—the biggest tick in an outstanding year for big-wall free climbing.
When Sean Patrick was told she had four to six weeks to live due to ovarian cancer, her climbing friends distracted her by helping plan a little climbing-based project called HERA: Health, Empowerment, Research, and Advocacy.
Ines Papert of Germany set a new standard for women’s mixed climbing in 2003 when she repeated Mission Impossible (M11), near Courmayeur, Italy, a route that just two years earlier was thought to be the hardest in the world.
Our vote for best effort of the year goes to Dean Potter and Steph Davis, for Epitaph, a 450-foot route on the Tombstone, near Moab, Utah.
While a list of revered, veteran North American climbers is long, the roll of those who’ve reached true iconic status is short. Near the top of that brief list is Fred Beckey.
Steve House climbed in pure alpine style on a nearly 7000-meter peak that had been climbed only once before, in 1984, by a Japanese team that placed thousands of feet of fixed rope and 450 bolts or pins.
Peter Metcalf, and the OIA membership that supported him, changed the face of negotiations involving primitive recreation on public lands, showing that leaving wild lands wild is green in more ways than one.
The one 5.15a from 2003 that meets all criteria is the extension to La Rambla (8c+, 5.14c) at Siurana, Spain. It has loomed over aspirants at Siurana, one of Europe’s mega-crags, since Alex Huber climbed it in 1994.
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