Ascent Annual Special Edition 2022

In New York City, mentees and mentors boost one another to become climbers and leaders.

A photographer's journey reveals unimaginable climbing wealth and beauty, and barely scratches the surface of possibilities.

What does it mean to become a “real climber”—and do you need to risk your life in the process? Seeking an answer, the author revisits the folly of his youthful climbs in the White Mountains, New Hampshire.

Climbing legend Jim Erickson pulls the curtain back to reveal what really happened ... or didn't happen.

Climbers venture into the desert to test ourselves, but beneath or even among the heights we seek, migrants may risk their lives looking for safe passage. High on the flanks of Baboquivari Peak, near a militarized border, the author finds two clashing realities.

Heinz Mariacher has spent four decades creating rock shoes. As a cutting-edge climber of the 1970s and ‘80s, he’s used both his experience on rock and his eye as an artist to catapult footwear from clunkers to the precision tools we use today.

Never again will there be anywhere like Sibleyville, outside Eldorado Canyon, Colorado, where for 50 years climbers came to crash—and when they crashed.

What do you get when you give two inept teenagers two huge boxes of Snickers bars, drench them in protestant work ethic, and plop them down in a sport climbing crucible like Rifle, Colorado? (Hint: it’s a less successful formula than it sounds.)

Mount Lucania in the Yukon was seldom climbed. There were reasons why.

The fist raised in victory; the bright lights; the roaring crowd—from the outside, competition climbing seems to be all glitz and glamour. But what is it like on the inside, from the lived experience of a onetime competitor?

The UK-based artist Ali Mulroy became a climber literally by accident—she stumbled into a rock gym, sparking a passion now at the core of her art.

The author lost his father in an accident at the crag nearly 50 years ago. He’s taken that long to be able to write about it.