With the face of a cherub, the body of a rock god, and the tendons of a titan, Alex Megos is one of the strongest freaks of nature to grace the cliffs in recent memory.
ROTPUNKT, a new film from Patagonia pays, captures Megos the phenom. Insofar as this promises to be damn good climbing porn, I’m quite excited to see this. This trailer also alludes to the fact that it attempts to draw a lineage from Wolfgang Gullich to Megos, which, aside from their Teutonic heritage, I’m not so convinced by at first blush, but I’ll reserve my judgements for when I actually see the film.
Anyway, no matter what it’s great that there’s a film about Alex Megos called the “Art of the Redpoint.” Has Megos ever redpointed a route that has taken him more than a few tries? Maybe this will be the moral of the story: the real art of redpointing is to simply never trying a route that takes you more than a weekend. …
Comparing the way Chris Sharma and his torch-bearing successor Adam Ondra have each uniquely approached their roles as world’s best rock climbers has been a fascinating exercise.
Sharma’s career is largely defined by pioneering a relatively smaller number of new, extremely aesthetic routes at the upper echelon of difficulty. Like Quentin Tarantino movies, each of those routes—those “King Lines,” to borrow the trope used in Sharma’s biopic—is a memorable, haunting, masterful work of climbing art. And like Tarantino films, each “release” was often separated by years.
Ondra’s career, however, has thus far been defined by mind-boggling numbers and stats. His contributions to climbing aren’t manifest in a trail of highly aesthetic FAs as much as they are found in extremely difficult movements on rock, no matter its quality or aesthetic merits. It’s in his fast repeats; his incomparable onsights and flashes. It’s in his sheer brilliance on every medium—boulder, big-wall, crack, comp, and sport. As one friend pointed out, he’s a phenomenon unto himself that might not be matched for generations.
Whereas Sharma has not focused on repeating test pieces from the past—I don’t believe Sharma has ever climbed Action Directe, for example—in order to instead focus on his own new routes, Ondra has taken a different track. He has shown a real interest in repeating obscure sport climbs from the mid-1990s that most of us have never heard of.
The result has been an enjoyable and surprising tour of important climbing history that might otherwise never have been told.
Ondra’s YouTube channel, which of course is worth subscribing to, recently posted Ondra’s most recent conquest, a second ascent of a route called Qui.
Qui was established in 1996 by Stefan Fürst at the Austrian crag Geisterschmiedwand. If you’re anything like me, there are at least two proper nouns in that sentence that you’ve probably never seen before. The route was originally rated 9a (5.14d), but Ondra has suggested it’s actually 9a+ (5.15a). Wow.
This isn’t the first time Ondra has upgraded a 9a from the 1990s to 9a+, which has retroactively changed much of our climbing history and how we understand grade progression. Without Ondra, we might never have known that so many people—that is to say, Europeans of or near the region of Tyrol, for the most part—have been climbing so much harder than we (Americans) ever really knew.
It’s understandable that our best athletes write history in real time, but it’s somewhat unique to see one who re-writes a history that took place before he was even born.
Lighter, softer, more supple, more sensitive. These words describe either the revolution of high-performance climbing shoes, or the war against toxic masculinity—perhaps both, I’m not sure.
The Furia Air meets those descriptions in spades. I received a pair of these impossibly light shoes a few weeks ago and have been tentatively carrying them to the crags in a hard-sided Pelican case lest I degrade any of its scant and precious rubber in transit.
Of course I’m kidding. But, holy hell, these shoes really feel like nothing—in a good, but almost too extreme way.
Furia Air Review (Ongoing …)
The Furia Air weigh just over 5 ounces, a significant reduction in weight compared to other climbing shoes. They’re quite literally rubber socks. The sensation of climbing in them brings you as close to climbing barefoot as possible—for those who wish to go as hard as Charles Albert, but aren’t quite comfortable with getting toe grease on all the footholds.
What’s been mind-bending about the Furia Air thus far is how this supple rubber slipper is maintaining its shape. If climbing shoes had skeletons, this one seems as if it has no bones at all. And yet it maintains its downturned structure. How?
So far, I’ve been happy with the performance of the Furia Air, but I must say, there are situations in which I actually do want a little more support. These shoes are not made for any kind of vertical edging unless you have bionic feet.
So far I’ve tested the Furia Air on some of the most slippery rock I can find: water polished cobble sandstone and greasy Rifle limestone. Where this shoe comes up short of being a solid edger, it really excels on slippery smears. I’d use this shoe for anything that requires blank, slippery smearing. The fact that you can really press all of the rubber onto the rock gives you purchase that you can’t get in shoes with traditional soles.
But does this make the Furia Air too specialized? Perhaps. I think with more testing I’ll be able to see whether if I end up missing having a little more support in my primary climbing shoe.
“Mustache Power!” yelled Miguel Riera when he saw me. The native Mallorcan climber has been working on growing out his very own power ‘stache, and it was looking mighty fine. I’d first met Miguel at Clark Mountain, California, during @Chris_Sharma’s campaign to do the FA of Jumbo Love. It was an odd place to meet the native Mallorcan but our paths would cross many times over the years, including when I visited him on his home turf. Standing atop the Diablo Wall, Miguel, always one to make you feel as if you’ve been friends for decades, slapped me on the back and said, laughing: “You are too white! You need some sun.”
Miguel passed away just recently from lung cancer. He was only 56.
In 1978 a teenage Miguel and his friends explored Mallorca for bouldering potential. Miguel’s passion for movement, flow, and difficulty landed him at the tiny beach-side boulders of Porto Pi. A curious progression then took place. Eventually, they found themselves traversing away the boulders and onto the adjacent cliffs hanging over the Mediterranean Sea. They had jumped off these very cliffs as kids, so why not climb them now? The “boulder problems” got bigger and more exciting.
What Miguel et al had discovered was a bridge between bouldering and route climbing—between a bit of risk and pure gymnastic difficulty. Ultimately, they created a new discipline in climbing: deep-water soloing.
Over the next two decades, Miguel raved about psicobloc to anyone who’d listen, but most climbers were preoccupied with other forms of ascent then in vogue. It wasn’t really until 2001 that deep-water soloing got the attention it deserved.
A deep-water soloing trip to Mallorca is something that every climber can and should do. It’s on par with bucket list adventures like climbing the Nose of El Cap. Mandatary experience.
If you’ve ever taken a trip here and felt yourself wild-eyed, heart-racing, fully alive and present above the walloping waves of the Mediterranean, take a moment to think of Miguel today for you likely wouldn’t have had that experience without him.
What a legend, what a loss. All my condolences to his friends who loved him dearly.
Earlier this year, an October expedition to Mount Everest encountered what is known as an “objective hazard.” Thanks to an aerial reconnaissance acquired by a drone, a Mountain Hardwear team spied a 300-foot-tall block of ice, detached and cantilevered out from a wall high on one of Everest’s lower flanks. The sight of this looming catastrophe, positioned above the already treacherous Khumbu Ice Fall, was enough to call off the entire expedition.
Would you climb under this? For the recent Everest expedition, the answer was no.
That decision was certainly tough for the climbers. You have to imagine that months of training and lots of money were spent to do basically little more than get a team to base camp to hang out for a couple of weeks.
Of course, such is the nature of mountaineering and every serious alpinist has a story about spending a summer camping in a tent on a faraway glacier and doing virtually no climbing at all.
Tim Emmett, one of the climbers on this trip, described lying awake all night, wrestling with the question of whether this large serac posed enough of a threat to call off the whole mission.
On Facebook, Tim wrote, ”For sure I am totally gutted to miss this chance to experience something I have been curious about for much of my life, but when you see a red flag, take note and make good choices.”
The team rightly received a lot of praise and status for this demonstration of prudence in the face of a major red flag.
The decision to Not Go was widely lauded in the climbing world. In an age in which literally no one cares if you summit Everest, the choice to not even risk trying to climb the Big E suddenly appeared to be interesting and worth celebrating. The team rightly received a lot of praise and status for this demonstration of prudence in the face of a major red flag.
I think the team made the right decision here. But I was also curious to see this story so widely applauded across the usual climbing sites and social media feeds. Specifically, I wondered whether this particular objective hazard was really categorically different from all the other objective hazards that Everest climbers normally, if begrudgingly, accept when choosing to climb through the Khumbu Ice Fall.
After all, isn’t being crushed by falling ice precisely the nature of the risk involved through this section of the South Col route? Whether that ice is 30 feet tall or 300 feet tall theoretically makes no difference if it all just comes down to the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, what is the argument for the decision? And what does that say about the decision to go through the Ice Fall under otherwise “normal” circumstances?
Mountains move when they want, and we have only our best guesses as to when and where those movements will appear next. Indeed, as far as we know, a month after this Everest expedition ended, that serac is still there.
This is true to some degree whether you’re looking at icy mountains or even climbs with loose rock. You could take this same argument to slower-moving rock formations as well.
Consider Boot Flake on the Nose of El Capitan. We know that, one day, Boot Flake will exfoliate off the mountain. Whether that happens today, tomorrow, or a million years from now, experts only have their best guesses. If someone walked up to the base of the Nose and decided not to climb it because Boot Flake represented an unjustifiable risk in their mind, would they receive the same round of applause?
Climate Change is Here
An important underlying context to this story is the fact that we’re in an era in which mountains are becoming even more volatile, dangerous, and less predictable due to climate change. Ever-increasing prudence might be a necessary new norm for climbers given that glaciers and seracs are melting off at frightening new levels.
At best, our climbing seasons will shift, and at worst, some classic routes have already become too risky to consider.
A recent meeting of the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation in Cyprus addressed this exact issue, presenting one example after another of how our mountain environments around the world are changing. The meeting raised concerns that, at best, our climbing seasons will shift. At worst, some classic routes are going to be too risky even to consider.
The nature of climbs from the Cascades to the Austrian Alps to New Zealand’s Southern Alps are changing. The entire Italian side of the Mont Blanc glacier is poised to collapse soon. We’ve already seen what can happen when a giant serac, like the one spotted by the recent Everest expedition, melts off and crashes through the Khumbu: in 2016, this exact scenario killed 16 Sherpas.
Falling seracs are only going to get more frequent. A falling serac was very likely the cause of the deaths of David Lama, Hansjorg Auer, and Jess Roskelley.
And yet, I wonder if this knowledge that mountains are getting more dangerous will fundamentally change anything for climbers going forward?
Rethinking Risk
On Everest, I think changes might be on the way. I foresee a scenario at some point in which no one even bothers going through the Khumbu Ice Fall anymore. Instead, people will just use helicopters to land at Camp 1 and begin their ascents from there.
If you’re relying on Ice Fall Doctors to pave the path for you, and in doing so expose themselves to upwards of 40x the risk that you are taking yourself, that’s unjustifiably unethical too.
The argument for making this transition becomes all the more urgent when you consider just how unethical the current situation is, in which the Sherpa “Ice Fall Doctors” spend 40x the amount of time exposed to objective hazards than paying clients simply because they are the ones who have to put up all the ropes and ladders for the hordes.
Climbing Everest through the Khumbu Ice Fall might already be unjustifiably risky … But if you also rely on the Ice Fall Doctors to pave the path for you, and, in doing so, watch them as they expose themselves to 40x the amount of risk that you are taking yourself, well, that’s unjustifiably unethical too.
Helicopters would easily solve this problem. (Though they might also create their own, new environmental problems.)
How we calculate risks in the mountains has always been complicated by our emotions, ignorance, ego, and all the clever stories we tell ourselves. Rational thinking sometimes makes a short-lived cameo, too (though if it hangs around too long, we might never climb in the first place).
To Go or Not to Go is always the crux question in mountain climbing. And so long as you don’t die, get hurt, or come back as enemies, it is widely believed that there are really no wrong answers to that perennial dichotomy.
But I wonder, are some answers better than others? And how will those answers fundamentally change going forward? I fear we remain deeply confused about our justifications for risk—and now that mountains are changing, those justifications are getting even more complicated too.
I’m not sure I have the answers to any of these questions, perhaps because climbers have never had good answers to these questions in the first place. But if this recent Everest trip is any indication of what’s to come, more and more it seems like the smarter choice will be to Not Go at all.
For many melting routes in the mountains, that choice has already been made for us.
I just finished watching the much-hyped “Rotpunkt” film and enjoyed it thoroughly.
The best parts of this flick may be the historical dive into the genesis of redpoint climbing, which began in the Frankenjura in the late 1970s and progressed throughout the 1980s. Some of the archival footage of Wolfang Gullich ripping off front levers with a half-boner bulging out of his tights are just too classic.
The way this section was edited calls to mind the style popularized by the Reel Rock Tour in such films as Valley Uprising. In fact, this whole era of climbing is one of the most important eras of our sport, but also one of the least mythologized. It really does deserve its own an homage on par with what Valley Uprising gave the StoneMasters. This film comes close to achieving that.
It’s never clear how any of this history really relates to Alex Megos, other than the fact he is German. But it’s pretty easy to get over that, not think too hard, and just enjoy all the climbing and training porn of Megos doing splits, levers, one-finger pull-ups, and ultimately, succeeding on the first ascent of Perfecto Mundo.
If nothing else, Megos is impressively strong … but you never get a real sense of how deep he is since his trainer does most of the philosophizing and projecting his thoughts on Megos’ behalf. Here, the trainer is an excellent observer and narrator of what makes sport climbing so fulfilling.
Check it out. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
I was having lunch at a restaurant on Black Friday when I heard a group of young people at an adjacent table talking about Brad Gobright’s fatal accident.
Later that day, I was at my mailbox when my neighbor—a Trump-loving, gun-toting, Fox News conspiracist who is nevertheless a very nice person—pulled up in his car and asked if I had heard about Brad’s death.
“Oh my gosh, did you know this guy Brad?” he asked. “It’s all over the news!”
“Yeah, I actually just wrote about his accident for Outside magazine,” I said.
“Oh my gosh, you wrote about it?” he said. “Oh my gosh, we’re so sorry. We’ve been thinking about you guys. What a horrible tragedy.”
We exchanged a few more words and he pulled away, again offering condolences.
Earlier that morning I’d been contacted by two different producers at the BBC asking me if I would be willing to come on various programs to be interviewed about Brad’s death. I didn’t respond to their requests. It’s not the first time I’ve been contacted by mainstream news stations requesting an appearance in the aftermath of a story I’ve written about some grim fatality. (My BASE jumping stories for National Geographic have also produced this situation.) I have an informal ethical line for myself of trying to not use the deaths of climbers to raise my own status as a writer. I’m OK with writing the story … but promoting it feels wrong, for some reason. It’s not about me.
A week before Gobright’s death, national news stations were dramatizing Emily Harrington’s fall on El Cap and subsequent “rescue” by Oscar-winning free soloist Alex Honnold. It was interesting, though hardly surprising, to see how this news got far more attention than Hazel Findlay’s contemporaneous redpoint of Magic Line (5.14c), one of the hardest trad ascents ever completed by a woman. Then, just a few days later, two more American climbers qualified for the 2020 Olympics—all in the space of a week.
Imagine reading any of the above sentences to yourself 10 years ago. Each of these scenarios would’ve seemed unbelievable in December of 2009. And yet, as we close out the past decade and head into a new one in 2020, together these examples construe a rather accurate rendering of what the sport of climbing has become.
Climbing is mainstream, folks, and within that context, core achievements will always be drowned out by what sells: sex and death. Climbing in the Olympics! Climbing at the Oscars! Everest is a garbage-heap-shit-show, littered with dead bodies! Climbers are dating celebrities! And so on …
And yet … just beneath this new facade, climbing’s core, its soul, seems to be enduring well enough if you know where to look for it. Climbing’s soul is dead? Far from it, friends … Indeed, the sport sees a healthy progression filled with incredible ascents by incredible people: humble, dedicated, brave, and strong.
The biggest climbing story of the past decade may not be Dawn Wall media frenzy, or even Alex Honnold’s mind-bending free solo of El Capitan—though I still insist this might be the greatest sporting achievement of all time. It may not be Adam Ondra’s 5.15d first ascent, Angie Eiter’s 5.15b redpoint, or Babsi Zangerl’s impressive El Cap free climbing bonanza, let alone the dozens of other incredible achievements by our sport’s best and brightest.
The biggest story in climbing of the last decade might be its exponential growth. It’s a rather boring story, if you think numbers are boring, but it’s hard to see how any of the above achievements could’ve had the U.S. not added 339 climbing gyms and 2.5 million climbers over the past decade. These ascents very well might not have had the same impact had climbing still been the niche, fringe activity that lives in our nostalgic imaginations.
At least 339 climbing gyms have been built in America since 2010, according to Scott Rennak at the Climbing Business Journal, who estimates that this industry has seen 200 percent growth since 2009.
Tracking actual participation numbers is perennially thorny, but the Outdoor Industry Association has the best metrics here. According to its 2018 report, the most recent one, one could surmise that an estimated 2.6 million people have entered the sport of climbing (indoor, gym, bouldering) since 2007.
I went back and looked at top climbing headlines for each year of the past decade, an interesting exercise, like looking through a yearbook and seeing people and events you’d never forget, and others you’d forgotten all about … A 13-year-old Jordan Romero climbs Everest. Tim Emmett and Will Gadd find Spray Ice. David Lama’s team adds bolts to Cerro Torre. Angie Payne climbs V13. Meru Sharks Fin sent. Sasha DiGiulian sends Pure Imagination. Kurt Albert dies. The New York Times presciently reports on bouldering’s increasing popularity in 2011. The 2012 conga line on Everest. Compressor Route chopped. Compressor Route freed. Patrick Edlinger dies. Chris Sharma does First Round, First Minute and Fight or Flight. Ondra onsights Pure Imagination, and downgrades it. He also onsights 5.14d, for real. Social media replaces magazines and blogs as the primary source of news and inspiration, for better and worse. Ondra does Change, world’s first 5.15c, then does La Dura Dura, world’s second 5.15c; later, so does Sharma. Honnold free solos Half Dome. Honnold is on 60 Minutes, and now everyone knows about climbing, and maybe thinks it means no rope. Dean Potter dies. John Bachar dies. David Lama, Hansjoer Auer, and Jess Roskelley die. Ashima Shiraishi climbs 5.14d/15a. Ashima climbs V16. Nalle climbs V17. Margo climbs 5.15a, and again, and again. Angie Eiter climbs 5.15b. Ondra climbs 5.15d with much effort and climbs the Dawn Wall not so much effort. Babsi is unstoppable on El Cap. The 2019 Everest conga line. Climbing prepares to be in the Olympics. Climbers are winning Oscars.
As the internet meme goes, everything happens so much …
One interesting thing I noticed may indicate that, whereas all forms of rock climbing are growing, there is some indication that alpine climbing, at least, is in decline. Looking at Climbing magazine’s Golden Piton award winners in the “alpine” category up to 2016, the last year in which they gave out the prestigious piton that their intern spray painted gold, at least half of the winners or honorable mentions are now dead. Ueli Steck, Alexander Ruchkin, Chad Kellog, Hayden Kennedy, Kyle Dempster, Scott Adams, Ryan Jennings, Marc-Andre Leclerc, Hansjoer Auer, David Lama, Jess Roseklley … all icons who pushed the limits of alpine climbing, all of them no longer with us.
The experience of going climbing has changed. Indoor climbers are a breed unto themselves. Crag parking lots are now filled entirely with Sprinter vans, not Subarus. Weekend warriors you’ve never heard of, and likely never will hear about, are climbing solid 5.14+ on the regs. You’ll find just as many people free climbing El Cap as aiding it on a typical weekend.
But for all these growing pains, the soul of our sport remains available to anyone who dreams about rock, and designs their lives around its pursuit; who can communicate perfectly fine with climbers, no matter what language they speak, through nothing more than beta hand gestures; who shares drinks at campfires; who gets psyched for the latest Reel Rock release or Adam Ondra banger on YouTube; who thinks about seasons in terms of locations where temps are perfect. Much has changed, but these core experiences remain. They’re still there and very much alive.
If you’re following Moonboard Instagram, you may have stumbled upon Hoseok Lee, a South Korean climber who has also known for his numerous Moonboard benchmarks. Hoseok has an impressive array of lock-off and one-arm party tricks that he occasionally posts to his IG feed, in addition to his steady stream of Moonboard problems. He’s got over 30K followers, last I checked.
I recently came across a YouTube video that describes a training routine Hoseok used to get him climbing V8 after a few short months in the sport. Four years in, he’s now climbing V12/13 and that’s impressive by any measure.
I wanted to share this video because there’s a certain simplicity to what is being described here that I found both interesting, useful, and motivating. Essentially Hoseok divides his week into two days of training (non-climbing exercises) and two days of performance climbing (Moonboard, gym, etc.). His regimen on training days is almost absurdly simple: essentially, it’s just a fuck-stack of pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups. In other words, tried-and-true bodyweight exercises that will build strength.
He says he doesn’t hangboard. His finger strength derives more or less from climbing on the Moonboard and bouldering. Another way to think of this is that he’s dividing half his week to building finger strength and climbing technique, and half his week to building full-body strength on his training days.
The big takeaway here is that training doesn’t need to be complicated. Indeed, for MOST climbers, especially those climbing under V8, this simple approach would be more effective than devising and tracking more complicated exercises and schedules.
Check it out and see what you think. Hoseok says he could do a one-arm pull-up after three months of this. See if you can get there too.
If you spend enough time on social media—and, I can’t say this enough, you shouldn’t—you might be forgiven for thinking that our digital lives are subject to a version of the rules outlined in The Purge, the crappy dystopian horror film in which society permits all crime, no matter how heinous, so long as it’s done throughout a single night.
Whereas the Purge takes place just once a year, there’s a sense that our online lives are at risk of being destroyed at any moment. You could go to bed one night laughing about the last cat video in your feed and wake up to find yourself utter-fucking-ly canceled for being a sexist, bully, liar, or worse—all because someone decides to CALL YOU OUT for something that may or may not warrant such serious accusations, let alone the ensuing guillotine that’s swiftly administered by an undiscerning social media mob.
A call-out could be based on hearsay, misunderstandings, or secret vendettas. But it doesn’t matter because the effect is the same. We now live in a world where any person with a large enough social media presence can weaponize their following to turn their enemy’s life into a clickbait vortex of pain and shit, whether it’s deserved or not.
And if you are the target of this kind of attack, the vortex will swallow you up and turn your life into a passion play to be performed on one of Zuckerberg’s platforms. Act one is making the mistake of reading—or, god forbid, responding to—the comments. It only gets worse from there.
You will find that every one of your friends, people who you thought might stick up for you, are now too afraid to say anything at all on your behalf for fear of getting sucked into the vortex themselves. Fair enough. Employers will want nothing to do with this, of course. Hell no. You’re fired. You’re gone. At the very least, you’ll find yourself in diminished standing.
And soon you will realize that you are now brutally alone, abandoned by a community you had thought might come to your defense. But no. Turns out you’re just a cheap bit of entertainment for everyone else, who might protest in private, but who in practice sits back, thumbs through their feeds, and renders themselves gifs who eat the popcorn at your expense.
The Call-out
Climbing’s latest call out concerns Said Belhaj, a Swedish climber who was accused by the German photographer Hannes Huch of not sending Action Direct.
I wrote a profile of Said a few years ago for Rock and Ice magazine. We have taken trips around the world together over the years, to places like Spain and China, as well as a memorable trip to the Grampians with Chris Sharma. Since then, Said has stayed at my house on several occasions as he was passing through Rifle.
It’s hard to describe Said as anything other than eclectic. His interests are eclectic and go well beyond just climbing. Our conversations are never dull. He likes to talk about art, culture, and music. He speaks six languages fluently. He plays several really rare African instruments and is a particularly great percussionist.
His friends are eclectic, too. In Australia, one night we had dinner with Margaret, a sweet elderly lady who lives alone out in the bush, who Said had met years ago and whom he has kept in touch with as a pen pal for over a decade. (Who does that?)
Said is funny. He’s intelligent. He’s interesting. He’s different. He’s eclectic. I like Said a lot.
Of course, it was painful to see these accusations, based on nothing more than hearsay and conjecture, arise. There’s nothing worse than being called a liar—especially if you’re telling the truth. My first reaction was that it seemed out of Said’s character to lie about something like climbing, for which I know he has so much respect and passion. After all, Said is a damn good climber. I’ve seen him, belayed him. It’s not preposterous to think he can climb as hard as he says he has climbed.
And yet, it strains one’s credulity to read Hannes’ damning blog post or hear the questions raised concerning some of his other ascents, or even read Said’s own dismissive, somewhat self-immolating response and come away feeling confident that Said sent Action Direct.
UPDATE: as soon as this post was published, a post on 8a.nu from Said’s belayer, Michael Fromm, appeared. He confirmed Said’s story and said that Said did, in fact, send Action Direct. Is this guy real, or a troll? I don’t know. He didn’t immediately respond to my email.Hopefully I hear back more compelling proof from him.
On Lying
Lying is a form of theft. It steals the truth from others. In climbing, lying not only robs us of the truth, it sometimes robs others of records they may hold. Mostly, liars rob everyone of their ability to be believed without question.
And yet, just as not all thefts are morally equivalent—e.g., being poor and stealing food vs. being rich and stealing because you’re greedy—not all lies in climbing are equally bad. Some lies are bigger than others. Underlying motivations matter, somehow. Does this impetus to lie spawn from a place of deep inadequacy? It’s hard to not feel sympathetic to a person like that.
I’ve often noticed that the biggest liars are often some of the most talented and best athletes—people who are perfectionists, who have achieved incredible things, but for whom their accomplishments are never quite enough. Their world-class abilities are their very alibis in the stories they tell. No one questions whether Ueli Steck, for example, could climb Annapurna’s South Face in 10 hours. But… did he?
Is the lying done to advance professional opportunities? It’s a bit harder to conjure sympathy here. In this situation, the liar is potentially taking a spot that someone else might deserve, who may be equally if not more deserving. People who lie often don’t see how their lies may hurt others. The worse liars are the ones who do and don’t care. There are certainly climbers like that.
I know that one of Said’s major sponsors stated something to the effect of, “We don’t even sponsor Said because of how hard he climbs.” In other words, Said is sponsored by this company not because he’s putting up 9c+ first ascents. It’s because of all of the other gifts he offers: his warm, interesting personality; his eclectic interests; his ability to inspire climbers of all backgrounds and diversities. It’s the whole package, not the singular ticklist.
Blowback
After Hannes Huch made his blog post and Instagram campaign raising questions about Said’s claimed ascent of Action Direct, media outlets began accurately describing his post as an accusation that Said was lying. Huch, however, took exception to this characterization and he posted a second Instagram with a felt-cute-might-delete-later smiley selfie in which he tried to characterize his call-out as being somehow more charitable and gracious than he was. That he didn’t actually just call Said a liar, and merely raised “reasonable doubts,” a distinction without a difference, if you ask me.
In other words, now that climbing media was reporting that Huch had accused Said of lying, Huch was somehow starting to feel uncomfortable being the guy who was willing to destroy someone’s reputation and career over what amounts to hearsay and conjecture.
This is bullshit of the highest order. When you decide to call someone out, you should stand by your accusation and not waffle and act as though you’re just gently and tenderly raising questions. Huch’s social media campaign to pose his “reasonable doubts” about Said’s ascents are nothing short of attacks on Said. He’s feeding the social media mob red meat, fanning the flames of doubt, and allowing the mob to do what it does best: destroy lives. That he seemingly wants to wash his hands of this and take no responsibility for the destruction of Said’s reputation and career is something I’m not willing to let go.
Because the bar for calling people out has never been lower, I think there maybe should be a consequence for the person who does the calling out, too. In this sordid mess, Huch reveals his character, too—as a guy who is willing to ruin someone’s life over conjecture and hearsay. Huch might be lauded for his courage to say what others have been thinking and whispering about over the past year, but perhaps in the long term, fewer pro climbers will want to work with him for fear that he could turn on them too.
Is this unfair and wrong? I don’t know. I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing that there isn’t some level of risk and blowback for a person making a call out. Due to the nature of social media today, in which an online mob often judges and sentences a person before they’ve even been given a chance to respond, and for whom no apology, however sincere, would ever even be enough to restore a reputation, having a higher bar for making an accusation might be a really good thing.
There are at least a few climbers out there who I can think of, with far bigger careers than Said, who are likely misrepresenting their accomplishments in unethical ways. Another way of saying this is that there are a lot of liars and bullshit in pro climbing. But these are just stories I hear, stories that other pro climbers tell me in whispers, in private.
People have suggested that I should be the guy who takes the leap and names these people publicly. But I’m not willing to do that because I don’t think hearsay, conjecture, and whispers are strong enough reasons to risk maligning someone’s character and career.
More than that, I want to live in a world where we take climbers at their words. Every time a lie is committed and even every time a call-out is made, it becomes a little harder to do that.
What’s Next
Daniel Woods and Carlo Traversi suggested on an 8a.nu forum that the bar for all professional climbers is set at uncut footage of any ascent—not just groundbreaking ones. It’s hard to argue with that, given that we all now carry 4K video cameras in our pockets. Perhaps team managers will demand that their athletes provide proof of their ascents as part of their sponsorships.
I really want to believe Said. In Australia, I belayed him on Punks in the Gym, the world’s first 5.14a. His first couple of times on the route, he hung all over it, and it looked like it wasn’t going to come together. Then, next go, he magically pulled an ascent off. It went from looking impossible to suddenly being done. There’s very good reason to believe that Said has sent every route he says he has sent.
But, if Said is lying about Action Direct or any other route, he should just say so, apologize to the climbing community, and go climb these routes with uncut footage of his ascent. He’s certainly capable of doing that.
I just wonder if the climbing world would be willing to accept an apology and offer a truly valuable member of our community a chance at redemption.
Perhaps the most crucial part of “AO,” Adam Ondra’s new book, arrives in the foreword, where he offers an important directive for how to orient your thinking as you pore through the gorgeous imagery and words in this coffee-table format.
“The book you are holding in your hands is about still pictures,” Ondra writes. “The adjective ‘still’ is very important to me. In my opinion, still pictures are underrated nowadays. We are used to seeing breathtaking pictures on social media all the time, but we rarely take time to really enjoy them. … Sit still and enjoy the stills.”
It’s an important, even necessary call to action in an era of frazzled attention spans, multitasking, and mindlessly thumbing through an Instagram feed filled with photographs that drown each other out.
“AO” features photography by Bernardo Giménez and Lukáš Bíba, capturing moments in Ondra’s relatively recent climbing life and career, including places like Norway, Yosemite, and Indian Creek, as well as bunch of areas in Eastern Europe that I’d never heard of.
It was obvious that it was one of the best climbing days of my life. One of the best days of my ENTIRE life actually. … I failed in my goal, but tried hard.
Interspersing the large format images are short essays by Ondra himself, who explains his love for climbing and training and pushing his limits. Though most of the essays approach topics generally from a 30,000-foot view, some of the essays give specific anecdotes from climbs and experiences. I loved his description of hope and defeat during his attempt to onsight the Salathé Wall, for example: “I was so angry and furious about my failure … We got to the top and I was disappointed, yet not entirely. It was obvious that it was one of the best climbing days of my life. One of the best days of my ENTIRE life actually. … I failed in my goal, but tried hard. It is hard to be disappointed about it if you take a look at it from the right perspective.”
Though these essays are never super deep or very revealing, all together they do impart Ondra’s searing passion. It’s inspiring, and it becomes infectious. Then, suddenly, all of that sitting still becomes quite hard. You just want to put the book down and go climbing yourself.
Whoa. Sharma’s YouTube channel just dropped this rough cut of him establishing Big Fish (5.14+), a first free ascent on the coast of Mallorca from a couple years back.
This crux looks bananas, and there is a LOT of air underneath him when he’s pulling through these bad side pulls. Homie looks pumped as fuck, too. Got my palms sweating for sure.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Sharma says, basking in the glory of a fine first ascent and the high of massive whack of adrenaline. Indeed it is, lad.
“If you lived in the U.K. in the 1970s/‘80s, you would think every top climber in the country had died in the Himalaya,” says Dougald MacDonald, editor of American Alpine Journal. Dougal Haston, Nick Estcourt, Alex McIntyre, Peter Boardman, and Joe Tasker were the best British alpinists of their time, and all of them died within a period of a few years in the mountains. “I would say a higher percentage of elite alpine climbers died in those days than today. But that’s just a gut feeling.”
I wonder if that’s true. Amid any tragedy, especially when a celebrity dies, it can be tough to see the big picture, objectively and dispassionately. My article last month reviewing the past decade of climbing alluded to just how many alpinists are now gone.
I was thinking about death after seeing the news of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and others. It’s interesting to observe how people in the mainstream—those who, unlike most climbers I know, aren’t as calloused to experiencing the sudden losses of our heroes—wrestled with what to make of death’s indiscriminate preferences.
I recognized many patterns of discourse, including token reminders to be “in the moment” and “tell people you love them,” to raging debates over what is or isn’t “appropriate” to talk about in the wake of death.
The more inured you become to death, however, the more dishonest those types of conversations begin to seem. They’re all words we say to fill a difficult space. They’re blue pills that we take that allow us to continue ignoring one of the most fundamental realities of life—that it will end, and can do so abruptly, senselessly, and without any higher meaning.
Last April, David Lama, Hansjoerg Auer, and Jess Roskelley—who, as Reinhold Messner told me, were alpinism’s “best young pioneers”—died on Howse Peak in Banff National Park when they were caught in an avalanche. The climbers had likely completed a significant one-day ascent of “M16,” one of the hardest and most dangerous alpine climbs in North America. The avalanche struck them on their descent. Had they survived, they would have been celebrated for their success. Instead, it’s a different conversation.
“There’s no amount of skill set that’s going to increase your ability to survive an avalanche like that,” Brian Webster, a Parks Canada spokesperson, told reporters. In other words, they died because they were unlucky and in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s interesting to consider how many of the best climbers find themselves in the wrong places at the wrong times, however. In the past six years, the mountains have taken away many wonderful souls such as Marc-Andre LeClerc, Ryan Johnson, Ueli Steck, Tomek Mackiewicz, Kyle Dempster, Scott Adamson, Inge Perkins, Alexander Ruchkin, Valery Rozov, Sergey Glazunov, Tom Ballard, Daniele Nardi, and others. They join such climbers as Alison Hargreaves, Jerzy Kukuzca, Erhard Loretan, Tomaz Humar, Mugs Stump, and Alex Lowe—all were considered among the best in the world when the mountains indiscriminately killed them.
These deaths always raise an extraordinary paradoxical question about whether this sport is even “worth it.” Indeed, is the very thing for which these climbers were known, celebrated, sometimes highly paid, and that they themselves loved to do, worth it?
“I spent my life building this athlete program, putting lives at risk just to sell raincoats,” Conrad Anker told me, being both macabre and glib, in the days following Lama, Auer, Roskelley’s deaths. That feeling of senselessness is particularly potent when bodies are still lying in the snow. And yet it strikes at the truth of the matter in a way that we seldom talk about unless it’s preceded by a painful, still raw event.
“When Mugs Stump died, it was so intense,” Anker said of his former mentor, who died in 1992 when he fell into a crevasse on Denali in Alaska. “I was 36 years old when Alex Lowe died. That was a bit more intense because I had not only the survivor’s guilt but the PTSD that went with it.”
Luck plays an enormous role in alpine climbing—and life. Skill, strength, and experience can only mitigate so many of the hazards that exist in dangerous environments such as mountains. When GOATs go down, we climbers experience shock (“How could it happen them?”), fear (“It could happen to me”), and even a sense of unfairness (“Look at the people who are less talented and cautious who ‘get away’ with bad decision making in the mountains”).
Shock, however, is not the same as surprise. And when the news spreads that a climber has died in the big mountains, “It’s hard to be surprised,” my friend Corey Rich says. “The older you get, the longer that list of friends and acquaintances who die gets.”
“I think climbers and mountaineers have a very open relationship toward risk and toward their fears,” Lama told me in the last interview I got to do with him. “We think about what can go wrong. Obviously, it’s really important to stay alive, but I also think it’d be really good if people, in general, think about the consequences of their actions as much as climbers do.”
Thinking about the consequences of our decisions is tough for climbers, too. I’m torn between two ideas when it comes to speaking honestly about death from climbing in the mountains. On the one hand, it’s somewhat insane to continue going to places filled with so many ghosts and expect that the same fate won’t happen this time, to us. The way we can talk about death in climbing sometimes strikes me as having a parallel to the gun-control debate in America. It’s almost as if we’ve begun regarding the deaths of our brothers and sisters a bit too fatalistically, as if they simply can’t be prevented—i.e., you can’t take away our guns just as you can’t take away our risky climbs. And yet the solution to this problem is as plain as day.
On the other hand, we must also honestly acknowledge that just living is a risky business; that no matter who you are or what you’re doing, it can all be torn away in the blink of an unlucky eye. And if that’s our unfair, scary predicament, doesn’t it follow that it only makes sense to live as boldly as possible … to make the most of our short and uncertain amount of time that we have here?
You can choose to think so, and even have moments where you act bravely and confidently as if it’s the only truth worth living … and yet, I wonder who among us wouldn’t trade that last, fatal ascent for another day, however mundane, of existence?
In December 2018, the media tuned in to a dramatic adventure story: Colin O’Brady, a 33-year-old American, was vying to achieve what he called “The Impossible First,” the first “solo, unsupported, unassisted” crossing of Antarctica. The fact that another guy was simultaneously trying to do the same thing via the same route raised the stakes and created the perfect made-for-mainstream adventure drama.
Ultimately, O’Brady finished two days before his competition and declared himself, in a post on Instagram, “the first person in history to traverse the continent of Antarctica coast to coast solo, unsupported and unaided.” He went on to enjoy all of the usual acclaim and media appearances that we’re now accustomed to seeing from today’s brand of adventurer, from magazine covers and TEDx talks to the lucrative world of corporate speaking gigs and glib appearances alongside the idiot hosts of Morning Shows.
Damien Gildea, an expert on Antarctic adventure, called bullshit on O’Brady within days, and subsequently wrote a lengthy, meticulously detailed, and well-researched piece for Explorer’s Web that essentially served O’Brady a healthy helping of Kendrick Lamar’s wonderful epigram, “Sit down, lil’ bitch. Be Humble.”
What O’Brady had achieved, impressive as it may be, could hardly be called unsupported, given that he followed a plowed road for much of his adventure, nor could it even be called a “first” given that Borge Ousland had already done something far more impressive in 1997, nor was it even “coast to coast” by every accepted definition of that word. O’Brady failed to mention these details, however, but many of the details he did reveal also “don’t stand up to scrutiny,” as Aaron Teasdale delicately put it in a new 7,000-word story for National Geographic that thoroughly lays waste to O’Brady’s reputation and perhaps career.
There’s no need to expend any more words describing all of the context-free embellishments and self-serving omissions committed by O’Brady—but you should definitely read Teasdale and Gildea’s stories to understand the scope of his numerous peccadillos, which, all together add up to something far more offensive. It is important to understand that it’s the cumulative nature of O’Brady’s transgressions that have landed him in deep shit. It’s not that being ignorant about the history of adventure in Antarctica is by itself so bad, but because he is so selectively ignorant it becomes inexcusable. It’s not so much that he outright lied, but that he was, if you’re to be generous, untruthful about just so many details of his crossing. It’s also that he so brazenly reshaped the “rules of adventure” to his own benefit, even though none of these rules are as of yet scribed in stone. And it’s that he leveraged his own PR team and allowed the hyperbolically predisposed writers and editors to do a lot of the work of over-glorifying his adventure for him.
The real “problem with Colin O’Brady,” as the NatGeo story frames it, beyond his embellishments, is that he is not alone in using these tactics. From polar crossings to our own climbing world, it feels quite commonplace to follow “adventure athletes” who are openly using these same gimmicks to varying degrees to build successful careers and create amazing opportunities for themselves.
In fact, isn’t this just how it’s done?
“For decades, adventurers have manipulated language and withheld information in order to present their journeys in the most flattering light,” writes Gildea. “Using subtle qualifiers that mean something to them and their competitors and not much to anyone else, they sought to gain sponsorship and enhance reputation.”
This is true, and I would only add that athletes aren’t always to blame for how these “subtle qualifiers” can become misconstrued. That said, there’s also an element of plausible deniability here that allows athletes like O’Brady to cast blame away from themselves.
As a writer who has written for many major news organizations, I’ve known that most editors have no knowledge about the rules dictating these niche sports nor do they understand their deep and important histories. The act of splitting hairs is not a game practiced by people most interested in generating clicks to a website—and oftentimes, writers don’t get to see or approve headlines before they run.
One recent example of this in the climbing world may be Sasha DiGiulian’s 2015 ascent of Magic Mushroom—a 600-meter 7c+ on the right flank of Eiger—which was inaccurately described by most of the news stories as a “first female ascent of the Eiger” when in fact was merely a first female ascent of the route Magic Mushroom, which is about 1/3 the height of the normal “North Face” as most of us think of it and also doesn’t even go to the summit. It’s easy to understand how editors and producers like the sound of “first female ascent of the Eiger” more than “first female ascent of Magic Mushroom,” but for Sasha, her sponsors and PR people, and the journalists who covered this story, for all of them to have let this headline go uncorrected or unquestioned and make it onto TV is bad for everyone in climbing—especially all of the other women who have climbed the Eiger’s North Face, whose ascents were effectively whitewashed by this kind of clickbait.
So what? It does beg the question of who really cares? Although geeks and armchair sticklers seem to most care about these kinds of points, in fact, we all have a stake in getting it right because these distinctions allow us to measure progress and value true greatness when it appears.
Let me take a stab at unbraiding the strands that seem to be contributing to this predicament.
The first thing is that “firsts” are getting harder and harder to come by. We like to say that “it’s all been done” … and it’s kind of true. In addition to having “been done,” it was also done in the past when everything was just harder—with less information, poorer gear, fewer resources, worse concepts about training, scarier questions, bigger unknowns. When any accomplishment today is placed within the history of what was done before, even if today’s iteration is technically harder, it often comes up short compared to what was achieved in the past with far fewer resources. (That said, I will make the notable exception of Alex Honnold’s El Cap free solo, which I still think is the greatest sporting achievement ever.)
Speaking of El Cap … that brings me to my second point, which is that the “rules of adventure” are so utterly indistinct and vague as to detract from everything that we should care about in climbing. The shenanigans that take place on El Capitan, for example, come to mind as the clearest example of how our sport suffers from a lack of clarity—and ultimately, a lack of vocabulary—around describing and evaluating one free ascent against another.
We use terms like “onsight” and “flash” to distinguish between how much prior knowledge about a route one has before a successful first-try send, but we have no real terms to describe the number of shenanigans that take place leading up to and even during the ultimate free ascent of a big-wall route. Clearly, a climber who spends months mini-Traxioning crux pitches on Freerider is not as rad as the climber who only works the route ground-up, but at the end of the day, once both climbers succeed, they get to share in an equal claim to have freed the route. Yet, style matters—or it should.
(Never mind the increasingly common tactic of falling and only lowering to a “no hands” stance partway up a pitch and then yo-yo-ing from there … whatever that’s called!)
I was talking about this with David Allfrey recently, and half-jokingly we decided that a “shenanigan point system” could be employed in which each type of shenanigan—from stashing gear or yo-yo-ing or egregious TR rehearsal—could be assigned a shenanigan point value added onto your tick, e.g.: Freerider (VI 5.13a with 7 shenanigans).
Even words like “team free” are prone to subjective usage, and I’ve heard this term used to describe everything from the “second doesn’t have to free the pitch” to both climbers free every pitch. In other words, almost complete opposites.
That we don’t have the vocabulary to describe these scenarios is one thing, but the fact that professional climbers/adventurers are taking advantage of this murkiness to cast their own accomplishments in the most flattering light possible is another. I wonder if they get away with this because no one really wants to be the inconvenient pettifogger who stands among a cheering audience of fans and with a wan finger in the air tries to stop the parade as it marches by.
The third issue is that the incentives for using these tools are quite high right now because, for the first time in history, we have an actual outdoor industry with actual money that is endlessly hungry to create new content around new athletes that dovetail with their new campaigns. If you’re not telling the biggest story, in the biggest way possible—never mind if a few details are omitted or selectively recast in favorable ways—then someone else who is willing to do this will take your spot.
And besides, I actually think that this is what people want. They don’t want to read about the fiftieth chucklehead to Do Some Thing. They don’t care about that person, but they do care about someone who is first, even if that person has to twist himself into a knot to meet that definition.
The last issue is that people today seem to be less and less interested in the history and achievements of those who came before them. There’s a real hubris that undergirds the behavior of guys like O’Brady, a Yale grad who spent a stint selling stocks, a guy who likes to say he’s been to the North Pole but who also doesn’t say he was guided there, and who apparently “denigrates” those around him. Magnanimity doesn’t come to mind in reading about this character. It’s no surprise that someone like this also probably doesn’t care much about some guy named Borge Ousland.
The questions that remain for me are why are companies sponsoring people like this? (I have no idea.)
Why do we continue to let them share their stories in their own contrived contexts? (Social media is largely to blame here.)
And will our desire for hearing about “firsts” continue to create these incentives that turn every adventure—even meaningful and important ones—into low-grade clickbait garbage? (The answer here, I think, is yes.)
In 2012, Hayden Kennedy, Kyle Dempster, and Josh Wharton took on one of the world’s most formidable mountains: Baintha Brakk (23,901 feet), AKA The Ogre.
This infamy was initially earned in 1977 when Chris Bonington and Doug Scott completed the first ascent of the craggy, steep mountain situated in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range. Things went awry for the Britons on the descent when Scott shattered both of his ankles in a rappelling accident.
“A quick examination revealed head and trunk OK, femurs and knees OK but—Oh! Oh!—my ankles cracked whenever I moved them,” wrote Scott in his seminal essay “A Crawl Down the Ogre.”
With Bonington’s help, Scott spent the next seven days literally crawling down the mountain on his knees through driving storms. The climbers ran out of food and resorted to eating rice scraps excavated from cigarette-laden garbage. Bonington contracted pneumonia. Then he had his own rappelling incident in which he broke his ribs. Toughness, mostly, and a bit of luck saw the climbers hobble into basecamp. Ultimately they survived.
It took 20 attempts over the next 24 years before the mountain was climbed again—by Thomas Huber, Urs Stöcker and Iwan Wolf in 2001.
In 2012, as Hayden, Kyle, and Josh vied for the Ogre’s third ascent, they found themselves creeping closer to that perilous edge. Josh battled altitude sickness and struggled to keep up. Josh was a veritable hero to Hayden, who once told me he considered Josh to be “the best 5.10 trad climber in the world”—fast, proficient, and unstoppable over that kind of alpine terrain.
But now Josh was ill, moving slower the higher they went.
“He just wasn’t moving like his normal self,” Hayden said.
Hayden, meanwhile, was on fire. He was 22. This wasn’t just his most impressive alpine climb, it was perhaps the best climbing year of his life. He blasted through pitch after pitch of unprotected climbing on sketchy shale. Sixty feet run out over a half-driven pin; blocks crumbling under his weight. With each heinous pitch dispatched, HK led the team higher into the Ogre’s grip.
Around 6,900 meters, the three climbers chopped a bivy ledge into the ice. Sitting in their tent, they hatched a plan of attack. The summit was within striking distance. Hayden and Kyle could taste it. They were feeling great, and the conditions couldn’t have been any better. They were in a rare position to seize one of the biggest prizes in climbing: the summit of the Ogre.
Josh, however, was now in no position to go any higher. They debated what to do, though each climber’s underlying aspirations were transparent enough to not need explicit stating.
Finally Josh said something to the effect of, “I don’t want to be the one who holds you back,” and that was enough of a blessing for Hayden and Kyle to spend the next day blasting off and tagging the summit while Wharton hung back in the tent, awaiting their return.
Hayden later wrote that his dad, the alpinist Michael Kennedy, had always told him, “When you make a choice in the mountains, you have to understand it fully and be ready for any of the outcomes.”
It wasn’t until Hayden and Kyle returned and saw just how sick Josh was—his face and hands swollen with edema; he was subsequently more or less unable even to thread his own rappel device—that Hayden realized that, in leaving Josh behind and going for the summit, perhaps he and Kyle had made a decision they didn’t fully understand.
Fortunately, all three climbers made it down and Hayden and Kyle were globally celebrated for their achievement. They won the prestigious Piolet d’Or for their ascent in 2013.
Three weeks before traveling to France to accept his Piolet d’Or, Hayden blew out his knee in a 3-foot fall bouldering in the gym and had surgery to repair his torn ACL. Oh, the irony of a young man in his prime, who had just survived the Ogre, now hobbled by the mildest gym falls.
The award was unwieldily. I seem to recall Hayden saying he was given some kind of a large wooden plaque that was difficult to carry on crutches through the airport.
The real burden of the award, however, was how it weighed on Hayden’s soul. HK ultimately concluded that leaving Josh behind to go for the summit was something close to an unethical decision. The What Ifs continued to haunt him long after returning from Pakistan. What if Josh hadn’t been strong enough to make it down? What if he died up there? For Hayden, to be celebrated for a climb that contained this element of uneasiness made him a little jaded about the climbing world as a whole. He felt as if everyone around him was in a perpetual trap of missing the point.
Social media was just then in its ascendency as it transformed climbing into a celebration of false idols who were being adored, sponsored, and promoted for mostly bad reasons. Where in this carnival of likes and #instatweetmyfacegrams was an honest conversation about what, exactly, we should be valuing in climbing? It can make you feel crazy when people, despite what they might say, actually seem to want climbers who demonstrate “summit-at-all-costs” mentality over a more respectful approach.
For HK, it took months for the lesson of the Ogre to reveal itself.
“I think the weakest member of a climbing team should be the one who makes the decisions,” he concluded.
This was a bit of a profound insight for HK, as well as being quite consequential given it would now mean that he would seldom be the one to make decisions. I saw how it manifested in all of the subsequent climbing days we spent together, in which I, the weaker climber, was consistently empowered by Hayden to lead, whether that meant going big on the rocks or deciding to have a low-energy day that was spent drinking coffee and sitting on a couch and talking about books and life.
Letting the weakest lead is a framing that places the value on substance over image, and humanity over summits. In some ways, this is a very countercultural position to take in America, where kicking ass and making fucktons of money and winning wars and experiencing endless economic growth and the fucking stock market are the metrics by which we evaluate our progress even though a majority of people in our country are being left behind. There is an enduring conversation in America about whether our weakest, sickest, and most vulnerable members are simply unwilling or unable to sufficiently pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or whether our society is structured in ways that make that all but impossible.
And yet this debate is also somehow an instance of just missing the point, which is that we could reframe this conversation to start measuring our progress by the degree to which we let our weakest members lead—because, as Hayden showed all of us, this is actually what true leadership means. After all, even the best among us are subject to being brought down by 3-foot falls in the gym.
As climbers, we tend to be in a rush to make progress. We’re all perpetually gunning for that next grade, new levels of performance, the next summit. But it’s worth considering how you might slow down, I think, if only to try going at the pace of your partners. Think about them as being integral to your progress as a climber. This is where the humanity in climbing lies. In the quality of our connections to each other, we might just find better metrics for our progress as climbers.
This is a pretty cool video insofar as you get to see how Jakob absolutely owns the notorious mono-dyno crux—perhaps because he gets a sneaky finger stack in the mono. Still, the battle isn’t over and Jakob punts higher and higher until, with the pressure on, the World Cup dominator fires the rig. This wall has to be one of the most glorious and aesthetic chunks of stone I’ve seen … Ahhhhh, Margalef.
Pay Your Dues, Buoux edition. Seb Bouin tours France’s most historic cliff, the immaculate crag Buoux. Very cool video that culminates in Seb ticking Agincourt, France’s first 8c, established by Ben Moon in 1989.
The phrase “only 8c” might be muttered by many of today’s best climbers, but it’s striking just how difficult that line looks–especially when it’s climbed by a guy who has climbed as hard as 9c.
One of the oddest episodes to emerge in pandemic times is how people caught the panic-shopping bug before ever catching covid-19. This particular sickness manifested as an inexplicable urge to buy butt-loads of toilet paper. It’s unclear why toilet paper became so coveted in covid. It’s not as though Hershey squirts and colon blows were symptoms of the virus, unless you were actually eating BBQ’d civet meat off the streets of Wuhan.
On the eve of covid-19’s arrival in Colorado, like many others I went out to stock up on supplies before hunkering down in my Western Slope bunker. Our family happened to be blessed with a half-full sack of toilet paper from a pre-pandemic Costco run, so I wasn’t worried about running out of shit tickets. Nor was I, the most rational person I know, concerned about catching the panic-shopping bug.
Upon entering the store, however, I suddenly felt myself descend into paranoia. I’m normally not a nervous person but, looking around to see what everyone else was doing and how everyone else was behaving, had the effect of instantly dissolving my baseline acumen. It was as if my brain had been replaced with that of a germaphobe. This virus is EVERYWHERE!, I thought, reeling in disgust.
The paranoia got worse once I saw how many pantry items were sold out. Flour, rice, oats, etc. Jesus Coronavirus Chris, what is the hell is going on? I wondered. My eyes bugged out. Panic crept in.
An insight I’d later have was how it’s a sign of actual privilege that we live in an era in which we never question whether we’ll be able to buy something as basic as flour at any store in America. Yet at the time, I wasn’t thinking so clearly. I just started just grabbing two of everything, running though the grocery store like I was on Supermarket Sweep.
OK, reader, it wasn’t THAT bad … but I was quite surprised to feel myself so susceptible to the effects of group-think. Since this influence was so stark and immediate—it took hold so easily—I wondered if there were other areas of my life in which I’ve been swayed by the whims of the masses without even realizing it. Surely so.
In normal, simpler times, when we all got to worry about things like grades and highpoints, one might observe how group-think manifests in climbers’ route preferences. I’ve always found it interesting how certain routes become popular—or fall out of favor. Why is it that one person’s ascent begets others? I always scratch my head when I see three-star choss piles getting ganged all season simply because they have draws, tick marks, and queues while five-star routes next door collect dust.
We are a social species, and we take cues from those around us. When you see one person climbing a route—particularly if that other person has some relatable trait (i.e., they’re the same height, size, build, or have similar levels of strength and flexibility, etc.)—that route suddenly becomes more appealing. Suddenly, you need to do it too.
Just like that, that route becomes proverbial toilet paper that everyone just can’t stop, won’t stop buying.
Beta is extremely prone to group-think. A sequence becomes “the way” to do something, and few people ever question the basis of that truth. We don’t like to stray too far from the group, lest we look dumb, weak, or crazy. I’ve seen climbers spend five minutes contorting themselves into terrible knee scum “rests,” simply because everyone else says you need to get that rest to send, instead of just climbing through.
It’s not just beta or routes—it’s crags and boulders. If enough photogenic pictures of one of the tiniest and most obscure crags in southern Utah get spread on social media, suddenly the parking lot will be filled with 50 cars and everyone lined up for the same soft 5.13a. Get your camera ready!
Our online lives aren’t immune to the group-think phenomenon. In fact, social media may be the greatest catalyst in creating this pandemic of group-think, spreading cultural memes through our climbing circles that shape everything from media and captions, to advertising and campaigns by outdoor companies.
Astute observers may notice how everyone’s Instagram captions all begin to sound kinda the same, at the same time, until some new meme gets spread, and the cultural discourse gets steered in that new direction.
People gripe about the same issues at the same time. They champion the same causes at the same time. Everyone and everything is toilet paper.
There are clearly both limits to and benefits of this phenomenon. We’re seeing the benefits insofar as everyone (or, at least, many of us) are choosing to #staythefuckhome. In pandemic times, group-think can be life saving as it paradoxically forces us to become more isolated from each other.
But whenever we emerge from this strange and sequestered moment, I will be reflecting on the ways in which I find myself susceptible to group-think, whether that’s in terms of the widely accepted climbing and training shibboleths to which I abide, or if my own personal preferences and ideas about the sport are merely an illusion of being “my own.”
Can you believe this shit? There were 50 cars at MY local spot this week! (I mean, I was one of them …) But, nevertheless … This is outrageous!
People, we all need to do our part to flatten the curve—and that means staying the fuck away from areas where I, a Local, climb. These days, I really ought to be able to go to my local area without seeing anyone except, perhaps, all my fellow locals who almost certainly don’t have coronavirus. I’m talking to you city people. Stay away the fuck away from our rocks!
Here’s a flow chart in case this isn’t fucking clear to you!
Look, I’m doing my part by climbing in areas where no one else goes. Or, at least, no one else should be going. Unless you’re a local, that is.
Locals have shown themselves to be especially resilient to covid-19. Our curve is hella flat. Scientists might want to start figuring out how to sequence locals’ DNA in order to engineer a propa vax. WU-TANG.
Every time I go out to my local spot, there are, like, 30 spring break Jakes spreading covid all over the warmups. These chuckleheads are coming to my zone and acting like they’re not asymptomatic. Hell no. They’re not locals!
Consider what would happen if you needed a rescue. Our small-town rural hospitals can’t handle the influx of non-locals. No offense. It’s not just that we can’t handle your presence at our crags at this current moment. It’s also that we don’t want you at our crags in general. After all, we’re locals and you’re not.
When we locals climb, we never put the rope in our mouths to clip. We also use liquid chalk that’s made from bleach. And we barely have to drive more than an hour or three to reach our “local” crags.
So, please. Listen to this local, who is begging you to stay the fuck home right now. Climbing just isn’t the most important thing right now … especially for you.
For as long as I’ve known her, that principle has guided the life of Steph Davis, a wonderful and inspiring person who I am very honored to call a friend. I really enjoyed this new portrait of Steph and her life in Moab, past and present.
As a public person, Steph has wrestled with some of the biggest life events imaginable. It’s not as though she has always taken these blows in stride or made it all look easy. Rather, she has maintained a certain equanimity among the roughest tides, holding fast to a thoughtful, grounded, and ethical clarity that is so rare to find in another person. She’s a source of strength and inspiration for reasons that have nothing to do with her climbing, jumping, or flying achievements. And after all, what is the real value of doing these extreme sports if not to prepare us to one day weather all the storms of life?
Enjoy this film about a true modern-day stoic, who embodied that way of living before that philosophy became trendy among tech bros optimizing their morning routines and snorting chaga-shots.
(@hoseok_lee93)
