Climbing

“It was a highlight of my life!” —Mark Hudon, after he and Jordan Cannon delivered the keynote speech at this year’s American Alpine Club Gala. In 2019, Cannon, then 25, supported Hudon, 63, who in the 1970s had formed a visionary El Capitan partnership with Max Jones, in undertaking a free ascent of Freerider (VI, 5.13a). Hudon then supported Cannon in his own journey in coming out as his true self (see the 2020 film Free As Can Be, directed by Samuel Crossley). A mountainproject.com list of “Most Legendary Duos” cites “Hudon & Jones;” one person added, “Modern reboot: Hudon & Cannon.” BY THE NUMBERS 80 —Women from 25 countries to climb the Breithorn (4,164 meters) on June 17, as part of Switzerland Tourism’s “100% Women Peak Challenge,” with Caroline George, mountain guide, as…

Climbing has always been a landing pad for outsiders. So when a small blue wall popped up in an abandoned field on the margins of Vulcan, Romania, it may have been out of place, but not out of character. Nonetheless, the crowd that had gathered was witnessing something new. Music was pumping. Freshly set boulders stood ready to spit would-be crushers onto the mats. Nerves ran high, excitement ran higher, but no competitors sat in isolation. IFSC commentator Matt Groom wasn’t there to lob jokes and Janja Garnbret wouldn’t be collecting another crown by day’s end. This was a climbing competition, sure, but more than that it was a celebration. The spectators hadn’t come to see winners; instead, they’d simply come to see past the 14 barren apartment blocks looming in…

IN FADING LIGHT WALTER BONATTI scanned the rocks above, looking for the tent. Somewhere up there, at over 26,500 feet on the steep southeast face of K2, was Camp IX. Bonatti, age 24, and the Hunza porter Amir Mehdi were carrying 40-pound oxygen sets, critical equipment if the 1954 Italian expedition was to make the first ascent of the world’s second-highest mountain. But neither the tent nor the summit team, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, were anywhere to be seen. Perplexed, Bonatti shouted, over and over, “Lino, Achille! Where are you? Answer!” Only silence. The camp wasn’t there. It was soon too dark to climb either up or down the icy slopes. With no tent or sleeping bags, Bonatti and Mehdi faced an unplanned bivouac, something never before attempted at this altitude. The…

Adam Ondra has yet to visit Rifle Mountain Park. In an interview with Climbing, while speaking of the rock in the United States, Ondra said: “Shitty limestone. But in the end, the shittier, weirder rock you have, the more interesting movements you can have. You know, shitty rock can never be monotonous.” Shitty rock. Weird and usually interesting movement—that’s Rifle Mountain Park, Colorado, for you. If you’ve never been, here’s Rifle in a nutshell: deep, sometimes dark limestone caves, swells, and bulges, flanked by unbroken vertical walls, all in a narrow, verdant canyon at just over 7,000 feet on the Western Slope of Colorado. The rock quality has wild variability, from the bullet-hard, streaked stone of the Anti-Phil Wall, Project Wall, and Wasteland to the blocky, scalier rock of the Wicked…

Someone once told me that age 33 is your Jesus year, a time of renewal and great productivity, such as presaged the leader’s death. Last year I realized with a start that Kyle Dempster had been gone for five years. He was 33. Dempster had done hard routes all over the world, winning the Piolet D’Or not once but twice, first for the first ascent of the north face of Xuelian West in the Tien Chan, China, with Jed Brown, Bruce Normand, and Jared Vilhauer, in 2009; then the alpine-style FA of the South Face of the Ogre I in the Karakoram, Pakistan, with Hayden Kennedy and Josh Wharton, in 2012. Dempster, of Salt Lake City, and Scott Adamson, age 34, of Provo, Utah, who was also exceedingly skilled, had started up…

It was the kind of day when low-bear ing clouds covered the flattop mountains. Mist weaved through the forests and nestled in the boulder fields, dampening the blocks with a fine layer of dew. My firstever outdoor boulder ing trip was a shutdown because of a Southeastern story as old as time. (Cue the rain…) I’d been climbing at the gym in my college town of Athens, Georgia, for several months when a fellow gym member asked if I wanted to climb outside. “There’s climbing outside around here?” I’d asked. At the time, my knowledge of “rock climbing” was limited to Himalayan peaks and El Capitan. Surely there was nothing to summit this side of the Mississippi… We met in a Kroger parking lot on the outskirts of Athens at 5 a.m.…