Climbing Ascent 2022

I WISH I HAD KEPT IT, the first “climbing publication” I created, more for the laughs than anything. It was my junior year at Highland High in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and our composition-class teacher had tasked us with creating a ‘zine about some subject we cared about. My effort—all 30 staple-bound pages of it—detailed the latest climbing news in New Mexico, including my own lead of Monkey Lust, my first 5.10, at Cochiti Mesa in the Jemez Mountains. So convinced was I that the world needed to know the full details of my ascent that I’d drawn a topo of the four-bolt climb—you know, to go with my write-up about myself. My grade? An F: I’d turned my work in late because I’d ditched class to climb the day it was due,…

LAST SEPTEMBER, the French photographer Jan Novak journeyed to Minas Gerais, a vast state in southeast Brazil that by itself is larger than all of his native France, to see whether the whispers of a land brimming with crags and boulderfields still in their infancy were true. For four weeks, Novak roamed, often under the tutelage of Luca Portilho, area protagonist and proprietor of the climber’s hostel Milho Ventura, in the tiny hamlet of Milho Verde just minutes from much of the main climbing action. Novak found the rumors substantiated, with over 50 climbing areas in Minas Gerais. Development began around Milho Verde in 2017. In just five years, Milho Verde has exploded into one of Brazil’s most important climbing areas, now with over 2,000 lines, including boulders up to V14, sport…

CLIMBING HISTORY IS REPLETE with certain events that everyone knows to be “true” yet that upon closer inspection reveal a more complex narrative. Some of these “facts” are debatable, some are downright inaccurate, and many have interesting pre-histories or side stories. My hope is that the following anecdotes, spanning nearly 150 years of our sport, will offer deeper insight into a few famous moments in climbing. Many of these vignettes come from being personally involved with the stories or knowing the people who were involved, over the last 60 years. As sources, I’ve also consulted memoirs, biographies, guidebooks, and climbing-history books, not to mention the “infallible” internet. I do not claim to be the final arbiter on these events, so hopefully others will research some of these stories even more assiduously. Cancel…

NOT A BREATH OF WIND. MY BROTHER, Jim, and I waited at the bottom of the crag, watching the cool, tannin-colored waters of the Saint Croix River swirl and sweep silently between walls of dark basalt. The air smelled of rock baking in the sun. The two of us sat in silence, only broken by the soft buzzing of insects. My brother and I hadn’t lived together for 12 years, since he’d gone off to school and his own life. I was enjoying the moment, just being with Jim; I had always looked up to him. The dog days of August 1974 had found us at our local crag. Perched on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Taylors Falls is a narrow gorge of billion-year-old basalt, 40-foot cliffs carved 10,000 years…

I IN JULY 2006, the summer before our senior year in high school, my friend Scottie and I spent five days climbing—or, in my case, falling off—Rifle, Colorado’s easiest climbs. Scottie was one of those preternaturally developed high-schoolers, big shouldered, red-bearded, an Ivy-bound acer of the SAT who’d just been elected student-body president of our rheumy New Hampshire boarding school. For those five days in Rifle Mountain Park, I watched him climb more and better than he’d ever climbed, while I—his short, plump foil—whipped off everything. We stayed at the La Quinta down by the highway in town, chaperoned by my mother. On our last day in Rifle, after I’d punted yet again off my warm-up, Eighty Feet of Meat (5.11b), and my project, Pinchfest (5.12b), and my sub-project, Choss Family Robinson (5.11c),…

SEVEN DAYS IN, we had a routine. One of us would scrape frost from the inside walls of the tent, and then light the stove to melt snow, while the other dragged our sleeping bags outside to dry. But this morning on Mount Steele, deep in the Saint Elias Mountains of the Yukon—and an obstacle on the approach to our objective, Mount Lucania, Canada’s third highest peak—the wind had pounded our tent so hard it blasted frost onto our faces. When I stood outside, the gusts nearly bowled me off my feet. Spindrift hit my face like a thousand needles. I braced and looked east to the first hints of light. Around us, the wind had sculpted sastrugi snow into sharp anvil shapes. I crawled back inside. Pascale and I were…