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 The Wanker 101
A 1,500-foot day - The blood pulsing in your fingertips matches the beat of your racing heart. Your toes scream after climbing for eight hours nonstop, and as you pull onto the final summit, your arms have entered a state not unlike tetanus. Or rigor mortis. A feeling of pride and elation washes over your lactic-acid-tripped-out soul. Congratulations. You have just completed Hueco Tanks’ Wanker 101.  Half Life
You could define an old-school climber as one who remembers a time “before Sharma.” From his boy-wonder teenage days to his meditative 20s, Chris Sharma has captured our imaginations, inspiring us not only with his routes— Necessary Evil, The Mandala, Realization, Witness the Fitness, Dreamcatcher, Es Pontas, Jumbo Love—but also with his humility.  10 Things You Didn't Know about Camming Devices
In the three decades since spring-loaded camming devices were invented, they’ve radically transformed the notion of what climbs can be led safely. Here’s a little lore about modern climbing’s most revolutionary piece of protection. The essential brilliance of spring-loaded camming devices (SLCDs) is their lobes’ shape, which is described mathematically as a logarithmic spiral. The same curving lines are found naturally in seashells, pine cones, flower heads, and even in the basic form of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.  Bolting for Tomorrow
Re-creating climbing and self in East Africa - Some dreams die hard. Take Ethiopian rock, for example: It shimmers with the promise of high quality. Ribbons of ruddy sandstone arc high and cleave into precise cracks, and convex buttresses offer singular summits. But I’ll be the first person to tell you that, despite its appearance, Ethiopian stone is mostly rubbish—and I’ll be the last to listen.  Steep Ice! Skills Special
Seven experts show you how to lead with confidence - I've been climbing ice for more than 30 years, and I still get chills before starting up a column of steep ice. Sure, modern ice tools and crampons, warm gloves, and easy-to-place screws have made ice climbing much easier than it used to be. These days, a new ice climber can follow short sections of near-vertical ice on her first day out.  Diamonds in the Dust
Two weeks in the sultanate of Oman - A crowd is forming below me—men in long white robes and billowing pants lean against their cars and bicycles. Someone lays on a horn, waving a hand out a car window. Arabic pop music blares from another vehicle. “Be careful up there!” calls an Indian man pulling on a cigarette, his singsong tone expressing no real concern.  Soft Kor
Seven can-do classics courtesy of Layton Kor - Climbing is one of the few disciplines in which you can literally walk (well, climb) in the footsteps of the masters. If you brought your own paintbrush into Spain’s Reina Sofía Museum and started tracing Picasso’s “Guernica,” you’d be arrested. But as climbers, we can pull on the same holds John Bachar used on the Bachar- Yerian or do Sharma’s heroic full-body dyno on Es Pontas—theoretically, anyway.  10 Things You Didn't Know about Sport Climbing's Early Days
You know those shiny gadgets, techy techniques, and bizzled training facilities we use to hone our sport climbing? Well, guess what: they weren’t invented in a vacuum. A few eureka moments, plus years of refinement, led to the tricks, tools, and techniques we take for granted when we’re out bolt-wrasslin’ today.  Sporting Life: The Power of the Anti-Psych
Without yin, there can be no yank - In my early twenties, I kicked around Rifle, Colorado, in my beige Toyota Tercel “turd wagon,” bolting unseemly choss and then overpowering it with Jersey Shore biceps and remedial footwork. I was a sour, angry young man, prone—like many of the era’s Rifle rats—to eardrum-shattering wobblers and unfettered slander. One day at the Arsenal, a visiting Austrian asked my age. “Twenty-one,” I told him. “Hah!” he said. “I thought you were 29.” Crap.  Trouble With Me
A Day at Gogarth - Hunched conspiratorially around the old oak table, Tim Neill, Phil Dowthwaite, and I whispered over the Gogarth guidebook. Phil pulled the cork from a third bottle of wine. Squeezed into the dark corner of the kitchen, I felt small. Tim and Phil towered above me, and a spiral staircase covered with hanging ivy towered over us all. Shelves full of climbing guidebooks and climbing magazines lined the room. The stove roared. John Redhead, the previous owner of this place, the Old Schoolhouse, would have rejoiced in our bacchanal.  Reader Epics 2010
Mountaineering Winner: TALKEETNA. “It’s fine, don’t worry about me. You guys have done enough. It is just a couple of blisters.” I stared at the tips of Walter’s black fingers. They looked like lollipops from a science-fiction movie. “Frostbite, not blisters, Walter. You froze them.” My work partner, another guide, attempted to reason with him. “You need to get it checked out. There’s a clinic here in Talkeetna.” Walter was stubborn, though. After seeing heavy combat in two wars, he might have had enough demons inside that the cold of Denali felt insignificant.  Wing and a Prayer
The Curious Case of Maurice Wilson and his Doomed Quest for Mt. Everest - In 1933, two decades before Mt. Everest was first climbed (by a huge British-led expedition), Maurice Wilson, a 34-year-old Englishman, declared to the world that he would climb the peak—alone. Moreover, he would travel to its base by a solo flight from England. Before his death on Everest’s icy slopes in the summer of 1934, Wilson had become one of the most controversial figures in mountaineering history.  Angels of Mont Blanc
Inside the world's busiest alpine-rescue service - Francis Claudon, of the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne (PGHM) in Chamonix, France, was on second call that July evening. With one team already out on a rescue, he was kitted up and ready for the next mission, boots on and rucksack packed. When the alert came, he was relaxing in the Dropzone lounge next to the helipad with his rescue partner. The room was spacious but sparsely decorated, with a TV, two sofas, and a coffee machine.  10 Things You Didn't Know about YOSAR
Yosemite Search and Rescue is one of the most well-oiled SAR machines in the world. Along with world-class technical rescues—many existing helicopter rescue techniques were developed in Yosemite—YOSAR boasts top-notch swift-water rescue capability and even has a canine search team. Here, a few more things you may not know about Yosemite’s elite rescue squad.  Opportunity Lost
My misguided effort to shortcut the learning curve - I'm back on the sharp end. Kind of. After six months of healing, following two back surgeries and complications, it might be more accurate to say I am on the dull, blunted end. It’s not a place I have spent much time in my climbing career—not because I am so good at climbing, but because, back in the day, I was determined to forego the clumsy stages of vertical apprenticeship and shoot straight for a skewed version of grace.  The Colossus
After two decades of tower-bagging, a desert rat faces an existential question on an unclimbed pinnacle: Is it still rock climbing if the stuff you’re climbing can’t be called rock? "Andy Donson had started it, showing me a photo of a mysterious rock formation lit by a fiery sunset.The lower half was familiar terrain, healthy pink stuff with vertical furrows that probably contained cracks. Entrada shale, fickle, soft—standard desert choss. The upper half? It looked sick, anemic, a bleached joke. Was it even rock? How did it stay in place? It wore a fuzzy coat of dribbled… well, dribbled what?"  Stoney Point: Portrait of an American Crag
In late 2005, when I was a senior at the University of Southern California, new to rock climbing and greener than Gumby, those words would have meant nothing to me. Royal Robbins? Bob Kamps? Who are those guys? If you told me that Robbins climbed the first 5.9 in the country, or that Kamps put up some of the first 5.11s, I might have retorted, “5.11? Big deal. everyone climbs that grade.” Chouinard? He was that surfer guy who started Patagonia in my hometown of Ventura—was he a climber?  10 Things You Didn't Know about the Third Flatiron
One of the most iconic crags in the country, the Third Flatiron rises majestically just to the west of Boulder, Colorado. When it’s not closed by winter weather or to protect nesting falcons, the eight-pitch Standard East Face (5.4) is among the busiest multi-pitch routes in the world. In addition to its popularity, the Third is rich in history and has seen some madcap antics.  Hollywood Hideout
The soulless headlines jumped from the cover of Us Weekly, their Hollywood glamour only driving home the fact that I was having a bad day. I was at Oakland’s Great Western Power climbing gym on a rainy Sunday, leafing through old magazines while I rested between flail attempts on my project: pink-and-green tape. So far that day, my then-boyfriend had spanked me yet again at Texas Hold ’Em, Happy Donuts on San Pablo was out of my favorite rainbow-sprinkle cake doughnuts, and the proj wasn’t giving an inch. I was whipped.  Wind, Sand, and Scars
When the mushroom cloud dissipated over Japan that fateful day in 1945, Moab was still a sleepy cattle town, doing a small side business in uranium. Soon, however, the fallout from the atomic bomb would forever change the desert canyons in the town’s backyard. A post-war arms race broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sped along by a new government agency called the Atomic Energy Commission. The uranium boom was on. Moab’s population swelled to 4,600. |
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