You would think a movie about a plane crash with three pounds of Mexican weed onboard, two fatalities, a run-in with the Drug Enforcement Agency, and a classic climbers vs. park rangers clash would be filled with bad guys. A lot of bad guys. But as it turns out, it is possible to make a feel good movie about the “legend of dope lake.” Aside from the death of two pilots, could the drug plane crash of 1976 actually have had a positive ripple effect through Yosemite Valley?

In a time when we’re all sorely in need of feel-good stories, the new documentary High Ground—the first full-length film about this storied incident—manages to deliver a dose of optimism. How can the tale of a Howard 500 aircraft with three tons (over 6,000 lbs) of weed on board crashing into Lower Merced Pass Lake be uplifting? Just ask one of the climbers who scored a bale of Mexican weed for himself.

How the first Yosemite plane crash documentary came to be

Produced by British film production company Dash Pictures, the one-and-a-half hour doc sheds ample new light on the legend through in-depth interviews with park rangers, a widow of one of the pilots, a U.S. customs agent, the former head of Yosemite Search and Rescue, and climbers who fetched bales of wet marijuana from the lake over the course of a few months.

One of those climbers, Ken Yager, is the founder and president of the Yosemite Climbing Association, which runs a small museum in the park. Today, the museum displays seven pieces of airplane debris from the crash. For Yager and several other climbers interviewed for High Ground, this is the first time they’ve come public with their stories from the drug rush of ’77 (the plane crashed on December 8, 1976, but wasn’t discovered until January 27, 1977).

“People have talked about doing this story for a long time,” Yager told Climbing, adding that several production companies have inquired with him about filming documentaries.

So how did a bunch of non-climbing Brits end up being the first to produce a feature-length film on the subject? In short, Leo Houlding. Director Daniel Sharp met the pro climber a decade ago through a mutual friend. When Sharp moved to California in 2016, Houlding relayed the tale. The first person Sharp met in Yosemite was climbing photographer Dean Fidelman, who shared his account of what went down in ‘77. Fidelman’s report led to more people, more sides of the story, ultimately convincing Sharp that a proper doc was in order.

Related: The Untold Story Behind the 1977 Yosemite Plane Crash—and the 6,000 Pounds of Weed On Board by John Long

Who went on record on the weed plane?

Sharp calls Yager “the single most key” person when it came to finding other sources and getting “a sense for the project.” Most climbers and rangers involved, including Yager, had decided that 50 years was enough time passed to come out of the woodwork.

Only two sources were still unwilling to talk, according to Sharp. “We did a lot of work to reassure people the statute has long since passed,” he told Climbing. One declined involvement because they were still employed with the park. “We also did a lot of work to reassure people from all sides that we wouldn’t make them look silly, that we wanted to tell a balanced and true story, and that we deal with what’s fact, what’s rumor and what’s memory, and how that changes over time.”

Sadly, some of the interviewees have passed away since filming. Dale Bard, a talented climber who established Sea of Dreams (5.9 A4; 2,400 ft) on El Capitan, passed away almost a year ago, on October 1, 2025. (You can read a heartbreaking posthumous letter to him from a former climbing partner here.) And ranger Rick Smith passed away last July. “We wanted to capture this generation of Yosemite climbers and rangers while they could still tell the story themselves, contradictions and all,” says Sharp.

Another less-discussed fatality related to the Yosemite plane crash incident (besides the pilots) is the climber Jack Dorn—a thread that High Ground explores, but doesn’t resolve. Dorn allegedly became enmeshed in a dark web of contacts found in the pilot’s recovered “black book.” Soon after, he dies in a fall from a hiking trail at night. But some, including Bard, speculated that he may have been pushed.

We sat down with Ken Yager to find out why he finally felt ready to come forward with his account. He also revealed whether that frozen plane weed was any good, and how he thinks the plane crash inadvertently may have shaped Yosemite climbing history.

Our interview with Ken Yager, one of the climbers who visited the Yosemite dope plane crash

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Maya Silver: Why did you choose to remain quiet about your participation in the Yosemite plane crash incident until now?

Ken Yager: I’ve talked about it before, but always with an alias. The first time I talked about it publicly, I did an interview with Men’s Journal and it’s called “The Legend of Dope Lake.” My alias was Chuck Strader; I didn’t make it up, they made it up.

I didn’t talk about it before using my name for a couple reasons: One, I had a young daughter who wasn’t 18 yet. In case there was any blowback or repercussions, I didn’t want to embarrass her. The other reason was that I was still pushing hard to get a permitted space in the park for the museum.

Silver: What made you decide to come forward as a source after all these years?

Yager: First of all, I’ve done everything I wanted to do. I got the park partnership and the museum. I started all these things that have been big dreams of mine for 35 years or more.

Then I realized something two years ago, when I opened the museum. The park service interpretive teams and law enforcement came down and got tours. The thing they were most interested in was seeing the airplane parts. They’re buying airplane shirts. I said, “You used to chase us for the silliest little things. Were you guys bored or what?”

They pretty much said, “Oh yeah, we were bored and you were a challenge.” It was like a game for them. Now I’m friends with them—sort of. I mean we don’t hang out or anything. Enough time has passed that we can talk about it and chuckle about it and go, “Wow, times have really changed.”

Silver: How do you feel about the film, now that it’s premiered?

Yager: I really like everything about it—how Daniel with Dash Productions is releasing it, how he’s respectful to everyone. It’s Daniel’s 33rd documentary and he said this is the one he’s most excited about. An American director would have had an antagonist. To me, it was a really relatable human story about everyone involved. Nobody looks bad.

The plane crashed three days after I showed up in the Valley. It’s like it crashed just for me [laughs]. The whole thing is bizarre, but it helped a lot of people.

Silver: In your perspective, is that sentiment that the film portrays—no antagonists—accurate? Everyone was a “good guy”?

Yager: With the park service, the thing fell in their lap and they did the best they could. It’s more just a set of circumstances where everyone was trying to do their thing. For the climbing community, they couldn’t resist. Some people did it for the money, some did it for the thrill. And some did it just to get weed because it was highly illegal back then in every state, let alone on federal property.

It was a whole different world back then. It’s still illegal federally in the park. It was a crazy time and nobody knew what to do. We were all in over our heads. I had just turned 18 and I would be tried as an adult. I just wanted some weed! The turn of events just got more and more serious. I lucked out and realized I never wanted to be involved in that business.

I just really like the fact that he [Daniel Sharp] didn’t make anybody bad. Nobody wanted it to escalate.

Silver: What did you buy with your plane weed profits? How much cash did you walk away with?

Yager: Some of the weed, I didn’t know what to do with. I gave it to a friend of mine from high school who did. I did buy a $500 VW. Then I traded a bunch for all the climbing gear I needed that I didn’t have. I used it to climb El Cap. I climbed El Cap four times that year with hip belays and no cams. Those were the days! Just stoppers, hexes, and pitons—it’s a trip.

I did ascents of Tangerine Trip (5.9 C3+ VI) and Zodiac (5.7 C3 VI). I was the first nobody to do them. They became trade routes. If that hippie can do them, then we can do them! A year or two later, they got done all the time.

Silver: I have to ask: Was the weed any good? I had a hard time picturing the marijuana being in decent condition after soaking in a lake filled with plane debris and dead bodies—and covered in jet fuel.

Yager: I remember well. First of all, as I mentioned, weed was highly illegal back then. Most American weed was horrible. Back then, the best weed were Thai sticks and stuff from Mexico—Acupulco Gold, Panama Red, or whatever. They were all high-end, south-of-border pots.

The bags were burlap sacks with three layers of plastic around them that of course didn’t work. They all had a label on them. Mexico, the weight … the one I found was 27 kilos before it got wet. The one I had was Double A Grade Mexican (it goes up to triple grade).

It dried out and it was still very, very potent. Some of the bales were worse than others. There were bales really close to where the fuel puddle was under the ice. If you peeled off an inch or two out of the bales, the center of the bales were damn good. Just wet. For us, it was a great thing. A little smell of airplane fuel, but most of it evaporated off.

Silver: The film portrays the lake as quite a scene, by turns spooky, weird, fun, and legitimately dangerous. What was the vibe like at the lake in your experience?

Yager: I was scared shitless. When I went up there, I got in and out in 22 hours. My mom and her husband were visiting with my stepbrothers and sisters. I was supposed to be spending time with them. So I told them I was going to be climbing at Mt. Starr King. My brothers and sisters all knew what was going on.

As you’re going up to the lake, wading through icy rivers, you arrive soaking wet. I remember it being windy, cold. You could see planes flying over, not down low, but you’re thinking they’re just watching you up there. I was super paranoid. When I walked up on the shore, you could see insulation, fuel lines, metal wrapped around the trees. And you could smell the oil and hydraulics and fuel, too. It’s super spooky. You know there’s death there.

Silver: Are there any notable milestones in climbing history that you would correlate with the plane crash? For example, a first ascent that happened because a climber made enough money to linger in Yosemite longer or afford more gear?

Yager: I would say a lot of people did. People did climbing trips to Colorado, went up in the Cirque of the Unclimbables, or they went to Europe. A lot of people went on to climb in other areas they might not have been able to make it to because it involved plane fare.

As far as big climbs since then, certainly people stayed around and did first ascents or lots of other climbs, Mike Corbett being one of them. El Cap routes—hard El Cap routes. Sea of Dreams got done the following year. Around that time was Bill Price’s 5.13—a lot of hard free climbing happened then.

People were doing some really good climbs at that time, but whether it was because of the airplane I can’t really say. I’m sure it influenced it. A lot of people benefitted from it. People were very generous with it. It’s a little different than nowadays. My god I can still remember the taste of it.

Silver: What does the Yosemite Climbing Museum have as far as exhibits related to the plane crash?

Yager: I have seven pieces of the airplane wreckage. The biggest you can see at the very end of the credits in Valley Uprising—that’s me holding a piece of the fuselage. It could be part of the wing, I have no idea. It’s a sheet of aluminum that’s maybe three feet by five feet. I’ve got a hydraulic pump, some pieces of fuel line. Piece of fuselage or wing. We also sell airplane t-shirts.

Silver: The film doesn’t include you speculating about the nature of Jack Dorn’s death. What is your theory regarding what happened to him on the Yosemite Falls Trail?

Yager: I don’t think he was pushed. It just seems a little far-fetched. It was speculation. The way I understand it is that my friend Sean Plunkett actually had the book. He was up there when Jack got the money. My girlfriend at the time worked at the bank. I knew there were soaking wet bills they brought to the bank to exchange. Everywhere I turned, I was involved in it. Everyone was involved. Even if they didn’t go up there, they had friends that did.

Silver: As the unofficial historian of Yosemite climbing history, how do you see this incident—proud, shameful, funny? Was it a turning point of sorts?

Yager: I think it’s the crowning piece of history as far as the `70s go—it was a very tumultuous time. It started in 1970 with the riots. That scared the park service. Shortly after, they created the LEO [Law Enforcement Officer] arm of the park service—in other words, people carrying guns. The people who had the sit-in at the meadow that caused the riots all looked like the climbers of the `70s—or we all looked like them. We had long hair, we had beards, we’re up there climbing with very little money. The last thing we’re going to do is go get a haircut or buy a razor. I’ve never even owned a comb!

There was prejudice there. We’d get harassed. There wasn’t really anything going on. We were the eyesore of the community and looked like bums. Also the law enforcement and park service and Curry Company people, a lot of them didn’t like us because quite honestly they weren’t really fit. Climbers always had girlfriends and a cabin to stay in during the winter. There was a lot of jealousy there. Climbers weren’t having to work and they were. Climbers were having fun and all the female employees seemed to really like them and they didn’t like that. I kind of get it.

The other thing I’ll say is that the park service harassing the climbing community and the climbing community pushing back became this kind of cold war or invisible war. When I first moved up there, I was a little kid but I learned pretty quickly to stay away from that guy, listen for the radio, and so on. There were undercover people up there to listen in on you—it’s really weird.

Silver: How did the dope plane crash change that dynamic?

Yager: In some ways, it created a little bit of a truce and was kind of the turning point to eventually getting along. First of all, we didn’t want anyone to know we went up there. We were scared. Number two: If I was an NPS person investigating that, I’d feel like I screwed up. I wouldn’t want that story to get out either! We were all like: Let’s pretend this didn’t happen and go back to where we were.

What really turned it around was the Facelift and the movies lately and a lot more climbers working for the park service and the concessionaire. But it was the culmination of that antagonist relationship between the park service and the climbing community. It took many, many years before it got to where it is now, but I think it was the start of it.

Silver: Was Yosemite Facelift inspired in any way by the mess left by the crash?

Yager: I’ve never been afraid to clean stuff up [laughs]! I lived off of canning too for a while. A nickel a can back then with everyone not recycling was so easy—then you could go out for dinner and get a beer. I made up to $80 one day! Back then, that was a lot of money.

I started [Facelift] because I was a climbing guide and one of my jobs was to talk about Leave No Trace principles. Sort of hard when you’re tip-toeing on the trail and behind every rock there’s a bunch of toilet paper and cigarette butts. I just felt like I was being hypocritical by ignoring it. I’d get so mad, but I’m not going to pick up toilet paper and put it in my climbing pack. I thought: I can be mad about it for the rest of my life, or I can turn it around and do something about it.

Where to watch High Ground 

High Ground premiered at the Yosemite Cinema in Oakhurst on September 5. It will be playing again during the weekend of Yosemite Facelift—an event established and spearheaded by Yager through the YCA—from September 23-27.

The documentary will also screen at the San Diego Film Festival on October 16 and 17.

Dash Pictures expects small theatrical releases, as well as additional film fest screenings in the next few months, but can’t announce details yet. It will likely be available to stream or rent online in early 2027. Follow @highgroundmovie for updates.

The post How the 1976 Yosemite Weed Plane Crash Inadvertently Shaped Climbing History appeared first on Climbing.

About our reporting: Associate Editor Sam MacIlwaine reviewed dozens of court documents dating back to 2007 and spoke with former Hazel Green resident Ken Yager to unearth new details, including the location, of the controversial Yosemite land swap proposal.

It’s 2026, and unfortunately, the sudden downsizing of public lands has become a routine occasion. But sometimes journalists get ahead of it. On Friday, NOTUS reporter Anna Kramer broke the story that the Trump administration was secretly pushing the National Park Service (NPS) to give a piece of Yosemite National Park to a private equity firm. This unprecedented land swap would allow the firm to build a road from its adjacent 83-acre property directly into Yosemite National Park, bypassing existing park entrances.

Several outdoor groups and politicians have denounced this news, including the Yosemite Union, the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Sierra Club, and both California Senators. Even the world’s most famous climber, Alex Honnold, spoke out about the proposed land swap, writing on his Instagram story, “[T]his is the epitome of selling the future to cash out in the present. Craziness.”

Now, with conflicting responses and old court documents uncovered, we have a fuller picture of the origins and potential impacts of this land swap, as well as how it would divide record-long crowds by class and wealth.

As Trump’s DOI calls the story false, the developer confirms it

On Friday, a Department of Interior (DOI) spokesperson outright denied that it has been working behind the scenes to give away NPS land. “This [NOTUS] story relies on anonymous allegations to manufacture a political narrative that simply is not true,” the spokesperson wrote to our sister publication Outside on August 28. “There has been no political pressure to reach a predetermined outcome, and claims suggesting the Department is secretly working to hand over NPS land to a private developer are false.”

However, about 10 hours later, Kingsbarn’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, confirmed that he has been working with the NPS toward such a land swap. “Over the last six months, Kingsbarn Realty Capital and I have been working directly and cooperating with National Park Service staff at Yosemite National Park in California to provide safe access from the Hazel Green property to the park entrance,” Davis wrote in a press release on Access Newswire. “We identified a land exchange for an access road under half a mile.”

On September 1, Kingsbarn CEO Jeff Pori joined the conversation, telling the Washington Post that the DOI referred him to NPS staff during an in-person meeting last year. Pori also told the Post that the Hazel Green parcel is currently being appraised, the next step before the NPS can identify an equivalent parcel to gain in exchange. He confirmed that Kingsbarn’s project will be similar to the previous owner’s plan, which included a 150-room hotel and 80 private cabins.

Where exactly is this proposed new road on Yosemite lands?

Three miles into the park from the Oak Flat entrance, there’s a nondescript spot known to photographers as the Hazel Green Dip, where Big Oak Flat Road temporarily sags. About 600 feet directly west of this point is the privately owned, 83-acre Hazel Green Ranch, hidden by Yosemite’s forest. Mariposa County records note the address of Hazel Green as 12828 Old Yosemite Road.

Yosemite Climbing Association (YCA) founder Ken Yager told Climbing he lived and worked at Hazel Green from 1997 to 1999, operating as a caretaker in exchange for free housing. While he often parked his car at the Hazel Green Dip pullout and traversed over to the ranch through the forest, he vehemently opposes paving a road through it.

“While it’s only a distance of 200 park land yards, [this trail] weaves through a forest of large trees, populated by the most varied wildlife I’ve ever seen in the park,” Yager wrote on August 31 in the YCA newsletter. “An access road would destroy the wildlife and destroy the area.” He told Climbing that he is most concerned about the precedent it would set. “It’s pretty obvious that they’re trying to defund the Park Service and privatize the whole [of the] parks,” he said. “They’re testing the waters.”

Why the land swap is moving forward now

Yager personally witnessed the ranch’s ownership transfer in 1998, when Lewis Geyser bought it with intentions to build an upscale, eco-friendly resort for short-term lodging. At the time, NPS was still finalizing their Yosemite Valley Plan to reduce congestion. During these talks, Geyser offered NPS the use of some spillover parking spots on his property, knowing that NPS would have to build an access road to reach them. But in 2000, when NPS rejected his offer, Geyser lost the promise of his shortcut into Yosemite.

Seeking another way to gain direct access to the park, in 2007, Geyser sued NPS and DOI for the right to use and improve two old stagecoach routes from the 1870s. He didn’t own the land for these routes, but they could offer a slightly more circuitous intersection with Big Oak Flat Road in the park. Between 2007 and 2012, he pursued two complaints and an appeal. Both failed.

“I don’t think [Geyser] believes the [resort] project is viable unless he gets the road access,” a Mariposa County administrative officer, Rick Benson, told Bay Area paper The Mercury News in 2012, after Geyser had lost his appeal.

In 2024, Geyser sold Hazel Green Ranch for $4 million to an LLC controlled by Las Vegas private equity firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital, according to the NOTUS report. Kingsburn’s website boasts a $2.8 billion portfolio of “income-driven properties,” including 76 medical centers, 47 office buildings, and nine gas stations. The firm has dubbed the LLC “Sanctuary at Yosemite.”

What makes a small forest so valuable

Having a private road into the park, Yager told Climbing, would transform Hazel Green “from a million-dollar property to 100 million dollars plus.” While the exact numbers are speculative, the financial power of building and controlling a brand-new entrance to a national park—especially one as iconic as Yosemite—is undeniable.

Currently, three sections of privately owned property exist within the park: Wawona, Foresta, and Aspen Valley. But all of these private tracts of land are fully enclosed by NPS land. Residents still must pass through one of five park entrance gates to enter. Hazel Green, on the other hand, is already accessible from several forest service roads that connect to Highway 120 outside the park.

With a shortcut into the park, future Hazel Green resort guests would enjoy the new, exclusive privilege of bypassing the crowded entrance gates to reach the Valley floor—a privilege that not even Yosemite’s own NPS employees are afforded (A significant portion are forced to commute from El Portal, outside the gates). If the park decided to still charge Hazel Green guests for entrance, the burden would fall on a recently downsized NPS workforce to staff a sixth entrance booth.

“There’s no reason to make more of these private rich communities inside the park,” said Yager. “Everyone should be able to visit the park on their own terms.”

What happens next with the proposed Yosemite land swap?

It is not yet clear whether the land swap would require Congressional approval. On September 1, a DOI spokesperson told the Washington Post, “A land exchange does not necessarily require a congressional appropriation if the proponent agrees to cover all associated costs.” Already, Senators Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) have signaled their opposition to the project.

The land swap may also be subject to legal challenges. Jon Jarvis, the National Park Service director during the Obama administration, told Politico yesterday that the land swap “cannot be done” and a “good court challenge” would likely come to that conclusion. He cited the Redwood Act of 1978, which mandates that the NPS’s “authorization of activities,” including construction activities, “shall be conducted in light of the highest public value.” This law could be used to argue that for the land swap to be legal, it would need to benefit the Park Service, not just a private entity.

Regardless of whether it must go through Congress, the project would still have to open a public comment period and undergo a required environmental study to proceed. However, those processes are not foolproof; widespread public opposition failed to prevent Arizona’s most prolific climbing area, Oak Flat, from being transferred to a foreign-owned mining company in March. But where Oak Flat’s land swap was snuck into a must-pass federal law, this new land swap is not yet binding and can still be rejected by the NPS.

Yager warns giving away “even a tiny piece” of Yosemite to private interests would set a precedent for other for-profit businesses to pursue land swaps in national parks.

“If this happens, imagine what’s going to happen in other parks that don’t have the voice Yosemite has,” he said. “If they get away with this, every national park is in danger. Every one.”

The post How the Controversial Yosemite Land Swap Would Effectively Create a Private Park Entrance for the Wealthy appeared first on Climbing.

While working a new line in a quarry in Scotland, professional climber Mat Wright fell an estimated 26 feet (8m) onto his belayer on the evening of August 29. He slipped at the worst possible time—while attempting to clip his next piece of protection. His fall ripped the cam below out of the crack. While the following piece of protection held, it still resulted in Wright crashing onto his belayer—and fiancée—Anna Taylor.

“This was going to be my final burn and then we were going home,” Wright told Climbing. As the dimming light and headlamps in the video above suggest, it was getting late—sometime between 8:30 and 9 p.m. “We were actually really relaxed. My first go had been positive and Anna even said before my last attempt that she had a good feeling about it. There wasn’t this frantic atmosphere where I was trying to squeeze one last go in before darkness.”

Wright, who has climbed up to 9a (5.14d) and also works as a coach, was headpointing a new line he calls Celtic Crack. He’s been working on the project for about a year. While he estimates he’s tried the line 40 or 50 times, previous attempts were all on top rope solo. His late-August deck occurred on his third “proper lead burn.” While he hasn’t yet proposed a grade, he expects it will fall in the 8c+/9a (5.14+) range, adding that he’s “very open to being wrong about that.” The line follows a thin flared crack on dolerite rock at Cambusbarron Quarry, about an hour northeast of Glasgow.

Confused about international climbing grade conversions? Use this chart.

After the incident, we caught up with Wright to learn more about the circumstances and systems at play to find out what led to such a near-catastrophic whipper. We also identify what all climbers—and belayers—can learn.

How the ground fall occurred

Wright considered the evening of August 29 his first time properly leading Celtic Crack. Attempt number one “went really well.” He cleanly pulled through the hardest move of the crux, then fell on a challenging foot sequence afterward; a .2 cam caught that fall. “That’s somewhere I’ve fallen loads of times, so it wasn’t particularly surprising,” he recalls. After resting, he fell again in the same spot.

Later in the evening, he began his third attempt. After the crux, he placed a .1 cam and began pulling up the rope—a Beal Joker 9.1mm—to clip it to the cam. But suddenly, his left hand slid off the side pull.

If Wright had been anticipating a fall, he might have been able to warn his belayer. But he says he “felt completely stable.” He was careful not to over-grip the sidepull as well, since this limit route would shut him down if he gripped too hard. The slip, he says, came out of nowhere. “One moment I was clipping and the next moment I was flying backwards,” he remembers. “I’d got into this mindset that I knew the route so well that I would know when I was going to fall.”  In retrospect, he thinks the conditions were a tad too warm and humid that day, possibly leading to the slip.

While he’d practiced the move dozens of times on toprope, he hadn’t yet dialed it with the challenge of placing gear. “I thought I knew the gear incredibly well,” he explains. “What I hadn’t completely understood yet was how all the movement, gear, fatigue, clipping, and fall potential interacted when I put everything together.”

When his hand slipped and he began to fall, the next piece down—a Black Diamond yellow Z4 .2 cam about 12 inches below his right foot—failed. A Black Diamond 0.2/0.3 offset cam below that held. In the meantime, Taylor tried to quickly take in slack through the Grigri she was using to belay. “The rope became tight right at the bottom of the fall,” he says.

Wright believes he fell around eight meters (26 feet), or roughly half the length of the route. In the video, he appears to almost crash down in a seated position, with his backside impacting the side of the belayer’s chest. Both he and Taylor ended up in the soft dirt at the foot of the crag. “I don’t think I hit her completely unrestrained because the rope had started arresting me, but I still hit the side of her chest hard enough to crack a rib.”

Genuinely concerned that Taylor had broken her back, Wright stabilized her and called for an ambulance. After waiting an hour with still no rescue personnel dispatched, they decided to evacuate the quarry independently to get her to a hospital, particularly because she had intense chest pain and a back injury seemed less likely as time passed.

Could the belayer have done anything differently?

For his part, Wright says that the fall felt “fine.” His self-described “cat-like” reflexes kicked into gear and he relaxed into the fall—and unfortunately, onto his belayer. The seconds he spent mid-air didn’t allow enough time for even a single thought to run through his mind. “It just happened,” he says.

Had Taylor not taken in the additional slack, the impact on both the climber and belayer might have been more traumatic. And had she not absorbed the impact of his fall, Wright speculates that he might have landed feet first and broken an angle or leg. While Wright worried that Taylor might have broken her back, luckily, her head, neck, and back remained uninjured.

Wright says that he doesn’t see the amount of slack in the system from his belayer as a contributing factor to the fall. Taylor did her best to take in the slack he pulled up when clipping and tried to deliver a soft catch. He also doesn’t see their weight difference (around 22lbs/12kg) as a contributing factor to the fall dynamics.

“She’s extremely experienced at belaying hard trad and understands this stuff very well,” he says. And like Wright, Taylor is also an accomplished trad climber. The core problem? “Neither of us expected that yellow cam to rip.”

You might watch the video and invent critiques of the belay. Could Taylor have been closer to the wall? Should she have stepped aside to avoid becoming a human crashpad? Or run away from the wall? Should she have worn a helmet?

In the fraction of a second that a belayer might (or might not) perceive that an unexpected fall is occurring, they have very little time to strategically react. Wright says he wouldn’t have expected her to catch his fall any differently. “If anything, I think she reacted incredibly well and quite possibly prevented me from being seriously injured or maybe even saved my life,” he says.

While a helmet wouldn’t have changed Taylor’s injury (the cracked rib), Wright does say that in retrospect, they both should have been wearing helmets (Wright chose to wear one that day; Taylor did not). He admits that if the fall had unfolded differently, a head injury to the belayer could have been possible.

Could Wright improve his gear placement strategy to prevent a future deck?

Wright says there is only a 2.54cm area of the 8mm-wide crack where he can fit the next cam. If he puts it any lower, it blocks a critical foothold he relies upon to get through the crux. He also can’t really see the cam as he’s placing it because it goes into the crack behind his thumb, so he’s slotting it in by feel.

The position he’s in while placing this piece is also less than ideal: he’s hanging from a pocket with his middle finger, as he stacks his index and ring fingers around it. He calls the footholds “extremely poor.”

While the .2 Z4 failed on this last go, he did say that it had held his falls several times before during that same session. “Just because something catches you three or four times, doesn’t mean it’s definitely going to catch you on the fifth,” he says. But he doesn’t blame the cam; he blames the placement.

What Wright plans to do differently next time

Since the accident, he’s gone back to Cambusbarron Quarry to play with how he protects this section of the climb—and clean out the crack more thoroughly for next time. “One thing I noticed is that because of the awkward position, I can occasionally place it at quite a significant angle, maybe around 45 degrees,” he observes. “My current suspicion is that the cam could have rotated when I fell and that movement allowed it to pull from the crack.”

While he’ll never know what really happened, he will make more of an effort to ensure the cam isn’t as angled, trying to inspect it before trusting it. Next time, he also plans to place two cams in that spot, even though it will require him to hang on to those meager holds for a few seconds longer. That said, he doesn’t know when “next time” will be, since he’s determined that he isn’t actually ready to safely lead the route yet. “Nobody needs me to climb Celtic Crack,” he says, acknowledging the selfishness of the pursuit of a hard trad first ascent.

“My biggest mistake was becoming too confident in a single small cam because it had already held several falls,” Wright says. “I’ve since gone back and reassessed the whole system. I’ll now place two cams for redundancy, take more care with the orientation and cleanliness of the placements, only lead in good conditions, and properly discuss the worst-case fall and belayer position before leaving the ground.”

 

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“Dangerous climbing requires optimism”

Ultimately, Wright acknowledges that there’s “a slightly uncomfortable psychological side” to this hard trad line in a lush Scotland quarry. Namely, that if you attempt a high-risk trad route while anxious about a groundfall or your gear ripping out, you’ll never be able to climb it.

“Dangerous climbing requires optimism,” Wright explains. “But optimism can also become a blind spot.” It requires you to prepare, trust, and commit. “I don’t think the answer is to stop doing that. I think the answer is to have the uncomfortable conversation earlier.”

In other words, as you prepare, be a pessimist. Ask the hard questions. Imagine the worst case scenario. Then mitigate and move forward optimistically. Wright has already begun to do that, insisting that he’s “not frightened by the memory of the fall itself.” It has, however, prompted him to reconsider his own relationship with risk at least a little bit. “There’s probably a danger in becoming so comfortable that something objectively serious starts to feel normal,” he says.

Of course, as this accident demonstrates, the climber can’t be the only one to commit to the consequences. The belayer must commit, too.

In the case of Celtic Crack, will Taylor, who is still recovering, be signing up to belay Wright when he feels ready to lead it again one day?

“Anna won’t be belaying me on Celtic Crack again,” Wright says.

What climbers (and belayers) can learn from Wright’s incident

In Wright’s words, “I’m not particularly proud that I got this wrong and Taylor was injured as a consequence, but pretending these mistakes don’t happen doesn’t teach anybody anything.” He offered up his story to become a teachable moment for the climbing community.

So what are some helpful reminders and learnings?

1. Make your protection redundant if you’re worried about it failing. If you’re placing small cams, consider placing a couple close together, as Wright plans to do next time he leads Celtic Crack.
2. With small cams (.4 or smaller) like those that Wright is placing, aim for a lobe retraction of 30 to 60 percent. This is the ideal retraction range that Derek Gustafson with Black Diamond recommended to Climbing about a year ago for maximum efficacy.
3. Just because your gear holds once, doesn’t mean it will hold twice.
4. Discuss all potential fall scenarios with your belayer and how the belayer ought to respond in each scenario—where they should be positioned, which direction (if any) they should move in the event of a fall, whether to take in slack, etc.
5. An obvious one: Wear a helmet. While Taylor didn’t sustain a head injury in the incident, she certainly could have.
6. Be a pessimist, then an optimist. As Wright underscores, assume the worst and decide how you can mitigate for it. Prepare as best you can, whether that’s headpointing for half a decade or changing your gear placement strategy. Then climb with optimism.

Happy Friday, and be safe out there this weekend. If you have some fall footage that you’d like others to learn from, please send us your Weekend Whipper submissions using this form.

The post Climber Decks Onto Belayer on First Ascent Attempt in Scotland appeared first on Climbing.

Editor’s note: Steven Potter draws on two-and-a-half decades of climbing to analyze the recent Simon Boes controversy. Potter spent a month researching the history of lying in climbing, referencing countless magazine and journal articles, dusty internet forums, and his own experience as a wide-eyed teenager.

I. Deep Fakes

A slightly sad, honest truth: After 25 years of rabidly consuming climbing news, I tend to find the lies and fakes more interesting than the real feats they mimic. This explains why, when YouTube served me a video entitled “Did this pro climber just lie about his hardest ascents? Noah Wheeler’s double V16 send, and more!” my jaded self misread the title, believed that Noah Wheeler himself was the liar in question, and immediately clicked.

“Not another of our emerging greats!” I thought, delighted.

I was thus mildly disappointed (and maybe a little relieved) when the anonymous host of the Some Climbing News YouTube channel, who I’ll refer to as SCN, informed me that today’s liar was not Noah Wheeler but an obscure Dutch semi-pro named Simon Boes.

To the presumed delight of his sponsors—La Sportiva and the Dutch gym GRIP—Boes had recently sent his first V16, a boulder called Deep Fake, located in Brione, Switzerland. In doing so, he had joined an elite cadre of ascensionists, including American Matt Fultz.

The problem, SCN explained, was that Boes might not have actually climbed Deep Fake—because the “send video” he’d posted was itself something akin to a deep fake.

Boes’s video is, in my opinion, actually pretty impressive from a craft perspective. It’s eight minutes long, and he devotes the first six minutes of it to an incredibly boring and almost nauseatingly detailed rundown of the boulder, establishing himself as the authority on its beta, and implying that the reason you and I don’t climb that hard is that we don’t focus on specifics like he does. Then in the final two minutes, when Boes gives us the “uncut” of his send, he adds a greyscale filter on everything except for his body: the boulder is gray, the river is gray, the pads are gray, yet his red GRIP t-shirt and pink-strapped La Sportiva Solutions still pop with color. He also overlays “the ghosts of previous attempts” (as SCN calls them) onto the footage, allowing us to see black-and-white versions of Boes fall on move after move while Boes’s full-color self perseveres upwards towards the immortality of semi-pro fame.

This kind of stylization is not new in climbing films, and viewers familiar with the history of climbing media implicitly understand that there’s a philosophy at play here. Aligning himself with trustworthy iconoclasts like Sean Bailey and Aidan Roberts, Boes has edited his send video in a way that protests against the necessity for send videos. He is tired, Boes’s ghosts not-so-subtly declare, of reducing his hardest sends—sends which involve significant physical and emotional effort, sends which are the apotheosis of decades of training and dieting and dreaming—to boring, single-angle, uncut video clips of him making hard boulders look easy.

But there’s a catch. Cleverly hidden behind those philosophical ghosts there is an obvious cut in Boes’s supposedly “uncut” footage—a disparity in body position that informs the careful viewer that we are not in fact being presented with a pretentious but fundamentally accurate record of Boes’s ascent. Instead, Boes, who is no longer sponsored by La Sportiva and GRIP, has presented us with a fake. A deep fake. A deep fake hiding behind a protest of the idea that uncut footage is necessary to verify one’s ascents.

II. Climbing’s antiquated honor system

Claims. Proof of claims. False claims. False proof of false claims. I wasn’t yet thinking of any of those things when in May 2005, at age sixteen, I proudly hyperventilated my way to the eight-foot summit of my first V5, a lowball traverse called Inverted Siberian Husky. Too psyched to keep this experience to myself, I jumped back down onto my single pad, opened my shiny new flip phone, and called my mentor (a teenage elder statesman who’d been climbing for two whole years!) to brag about it.

“Oh, well, congrats, dude,” he said.

Only when he hung up did I realize that my friend might not believe me; and the insolubility of this problem filled me with both terror and a kind of preemptive shame. I was a teenager alone in the woods with the black flies; I had never even held a video camera and would not own a smart phone for five more years; I had no way to prove what I had done. And now (I feared) my friends, my new friends, the people guiding me into this wonderful sport, would think I was a squirrelly little attention-seeking liar.

I did not yet know it, but this tension—the push and pull between being proud of what you’ve done and anxious that it be believed—is an ancient part of our sport.

It’s almost hard to imagine now, but in the days before smart phones and GoPros, before GPS watches and drones, climbers who climbed alone or at night or in very remote places often had very few ways to provide evidence of their claims. To offset this, most climbers—particularly alpinists, but also rock climbers and the journalists who wrote about them—subscribed to a kind of Boy Scout chivalry that Greg Child, writing for this magazine in 1994, called “the honor system.” Climbers embraced (or said they embraced) honesty and trust in lieu of disbelief and denunciation. “When climbers failed, they admitted failure,” Child wrote. “When they succeeded, they got kudos, regardless of proof, which was often not available.”

This honor system required two types of buy-in to work. Climbers did not just need to tell the truth; they also needed to believe each other—particularly when people said they did things that, thanks to their very unlikeliness, pushed the sport forward. For this reason hundreds of climbing’s most groundbreaking (or supposedly groundbreaking) ascents were simply believed. Sometimes there were summit photographs, but often those photographs showed a climber on a patch of snow, set against the sky, with almost no identifying characteristics. Sometimes there was a friend with a telescope in basecamp, or a friend holding the rope below a climb, who said they’d seen the climber do precisely what they said they’d done. But often there wasn’t even that. Instead, climbers like Reinhold Messner and Peter Croft and Alex Honnold came down from the heights with stories, and their stories were believed.

Of course, you’re probably familiar with instances where the honor system collapsed, where a professional climber lied, or was accused of lying, and factions of believers and disbelievers clamored and threatened and banished and wept. It happened after Italy’s Cesare Maestri said he’d made the first ascent of Cerro Torre in 1959. It happened in the early 1990s when Slovenia’s Tomo Česen claimed to have soloed the first ascent of Lhoste’s murderous South Face. It happened in 1995 when France’s Fred Rouhling claimed the first ascent of the world’s first 5.15b; and in 2003 when Spain’s Bernabé Fernández claimed the first ascent of the world’s first 5.15c; and in 2005 when the U.K.’s Rich Simpson said he’d repeated Action Directe (5.14d); and in 2010, when South Korea’s Oh Eun-Sun digitally fabricated summit photos of Kanchenjunga to prove she was the first woman to reach the top of all 14 8,000-meter peaks; and in 2023 when Canada’s Gabe Lawson hoodwinked yours truly (among others!) into believing he’d just established his country’s first V16.

But even though liars and fabricators have wrought confusion and anger upon every discipline and every decade of our sport’s history, I think what’s surprising —and far too easy to overlook—is how well the honor system did seem to work, and for how long.

Let’s take Alex Honnold as an example.

It’s easy to forget—post Reel Rock career, post Academy Award—that Honnold’s name first trickled into the climbing world’s wider consciousness as a rumor, a story, whispered by him, bullhorned by others. In 2007, when he repeated Peter Croft’s Astroman and Rostrum solos, Honnold (like Croft two decades earlier) was not seen; but he (like Croft) told a friend about it; and the friend (like Croft’s friend) announced it to the world. And the world, having no reason not to believe him, believed—and we believed even though no one really knew who this Honnold kid was. His closest brush with fame, at that point, was probably placing second in Youth Nationals in 2004.

And that was just the start. A year later, when Honnold outclassed every free soloist in American history by doing Moonlight Buttress and the Direct Northwest Face of Half Dome without a rope, he again provided no proof other than a pair of intricate stories and his word that they were true. Indeed, in both cases, he had not wanted witnesses. He wanted to climb when he was ready to climb. He wanted to climb for himself, not for the imagined eye of an observer. And since it was the honor system era, an era when “spraying” about your ascents was as cardinal a sin as lying, we understood that, and respected it, and believed him.

But here’s the thing. If some scrawny kid who came runner-up in nationals a few years ago called me up tomorrow claiming that he’d repeated Honnold’s free solo of Free Rider, then one-upped it by free soloing El Corazon, but had no proof because he climbed for himself, not others, and didn’t want to be distracted with logistics and social pressure in such a dangerous situation—I would have serious doubts.

And that’s not all. Because even if I believed this young upstart, if I acted according to the old honor system and published a story about someone whose name you’d never heard outdoing Honnold just as Honnold had once outdone Croft, I doubt that you would believe me. Which brings me to a sad conclusion: thanks to technology, thanks to money, thanks to breach after breach after breach, climbing’s ancient honor system is more or less dead.

III. A Lucid Dream

After realizing that Boes’s video did not accurately portray a send, SCN did some journalistic due diligence, contacting Boes and asking to see the uncut footage or be put in touch with witnesses. But Boes did not acquit himself well. He said his ascent was “genuine” but he was “not comfortable sharing the raw footage right now,” nor was he “in touch” with his witnesses. (What does that last excuse even mean?) So SCN concludes his segment by saying, “there’s not enough evidence that proves Simon actually sent this boulder—or seemingly any of his other hard boulders he’s claimed to have done. At the same time, there’s also just not enough evidence to prove that he didn’t actually do these boulders either.”

SCN’s main takeaway, therefore, was that pro climbers “need to have uncut raw footage of your hardest ascents… or at least witnesses.”

Then he adds:

At this moment, I think that there are only a very small handful of people who could claim an ascent with no evidence that people will accept without question. And there’s an even smaller group of people within that subset who could claim an ascent with zero evidence and zero witnesses, have that ascent be questioned by someone, and yet still have the broader climbing community reject those suspicions. Unfortunately, at this point, it seems that Simon is in neither of those camps.

Listening to this, I did not just remember the naively halcyon era that predated “this moment”; I also remembered the controversy that fully launched the concept of uncut footage into the bouldering mainstream.

In March 2010, when Paul Robinson made the first ascent of Lucid Dreaming, in Bishop, California, and graded it V16, the internet believed him. Everyone knew Robinson had some of the strongest fingers to ever grab stone, and the fact that his ascent lacked both witnesses and uncut footage wasn’t at all unusual. It wasn’t even talked about. Smart phones were still not very widespread; Instagram didn’t exist yet; and virtually no pro climbers doubled as pro filmmakers. But gradually, over the next few months, climbing fans like me began hearing that Robinson’s lack of footage was, thanks to some very specific circumstances, actually a little suspicious.

Robinson, we eventually learned, had been in Bishop trying Lucid under the observation of several videographers working for Reel Rock; and though he was close to sending, he was not able to do it before the filmmakers had to leave town. When they left, they loaned Robinson a camera and told him to film himself. But Robinson had never used a camera before. And when he showed up at the boulder, alone, it seemed like it was about to rain. So he didn’t even bother hiking the camera up to Grandpa Peabody boulder. And at first he was glad he didn’t. He stuck the crux from the ground and was nearing the top of the 55-foot-tall boulder’s outro slab when it started to rain. As he later told the Nugget Climbing Podcast, had he taken the time to figure out how the camera worked, he may well not have sent. But he quickly changed his mind. Within weeks it became clear that because Robinson had the ability to record his ascent, but didn’t, people would question whether he was telling the truth. The ensuing debate was one of the first times I remember the internet truly lambasting a person I admired. And for Robinson, as he later told the Nugget, it was the beginning of a “very dark time.” “There was this huge storm of doubt for… for years.”

In some ways, Robinson harnessed the controversy. Wanting to prove the doubters wrong, he set about forcing himself into that rarified category of climber who, despite having “zero proof,” and “zero witnesses,” and outspoken doubters, still commanded the respect and faith of the wider community. He did this by doing two things. First, he went on one of the great climbing sprees of his era, sending a then-unprecedented seven V15s in the next 12 months and retroactively downgrading Lucid Dreaming (before it received a second ascent) based upon his now-wider grade pyramid. Second, he got footage of everything. And this footage changed professional bouldering forever.

Robinson, who seems to be a pretty smart guy, had noticed that the videographers at Reel Rock and Big Up Productions “were making in like four days what I was making in an entire year off my sponsors”; so when he started collecting footage as proof, he recognized that it was valuable. Rather than relying on third-party storytellers to communicate his ascents to the public, Robinson thus became one of the first pros, and certainly the strongest up until then, to skip intermediaries and monetize his climbing by delivering footage—first feature films like The Schengen Files, later shorter vlogs published on YouTube—directly to fans. In doing so, he not only earned money from his audience, he became more valuable to his sponsors, who were therefore willing to pay him more. (Going direct to consumer in this way was not entirely new; in the 1880s and 1890s, long before gear sponsorships were a thing, a Rhode Islander named Annie Smith Peck, who was arguably world’s first professional mountaineer, sustained her climbing career by writing books and and giving lectures about her adventures—a storytelling business model that people like Reinhold Messner and Todd Skinner were still using a full century later. What made Robinson different was that he was operating with film; which meant that the stories he shared with his audience could also double as proof of his accomplishments.)

Yet the Lucid Dreaming controversy was not a lesson for Robinson alone.

In 2010, alongside the specific debate about whether or not you believed Robinson had done Lucid, the bouldering community conducted a wider debate about proof. Internet sheriffs like Jamie Emerson (who then ran the popular climbing blog B3Bouldering) and Brian Runnells (who ran Climbing Narcissist) argued about whether all pro climbers ought to behave exactly how Robinson now was. Since GoPros and smart phones and relatively cheap cameras gave people the ability to easily prove their ascents, did pros now have an obligation to do so?

IV. Uncut or it doesn’t count

It is hard to say when exactly the pro-proof faction “won.” Nor is it clear when it became necessary to film or otherwise record not just your hardest boulders but basically all hard climbs by all pro climbers in all disciplines. But it is clear that things had changed by 2019, when a German photographer named Hannes Huch accused Swedish sport climber Said Belhaj of lying about his 2018 ascent of Action Directe (the same savagely bouldery 5.14d sport route that Rich Simpson had lied about doing in 2005).

The accusations were familiar. Huch, working on a film about Action Directe, had shot video of Belhaj on the route twice. The first day of shooting was before Belhaj claimed to have sent, and Belhaj wasn’t really close on it. But after a week of light climbing elsewhere, he returned to the route with much better conditions and sent. Or said he sent. He then went to Greece for a few weeks, where he climbed long pumpy routes on tufas, before returning to Action Directe to shoot more video with Huch, who for the second time saw a Belhaj who was not physically capable of climbing the route—a route he had now claimed to have climbed.

Belhaj, of course, had excuses. On the first day of shooting with Huch, he later said, it was his fourth day on, and it was hot, and he was in training mode, not sending mode. And when he returned to Frankenjura a month after his send, they only had one day to shoot, and it was far too cold, and Belhaj had picked up a finger injury, so he hung all over the place. Fatigue, as all climbers know, is real—as are good conditions and finger injuries. So when Huch leveled his accusations against Belhaj, attention quickly turned away from whether Belhaj could have done the route, and more to whether he could provide any evidence that he had. Since he had not yet realized that Paul Robinson’s lesson applied to sport climbers, Belhaj had not taken video. But, of course, since Action Directe is a sport route, there had to have been a witness: his belayer.

The problem was that Belhaj couldn’t produce one.

Why not?

“Well, as a professional climber,” Belhaj explained to LaCrux, “you are often traveling alone and climbing with anyone you can find. Every year I climb with literally hundreds of people. Some become friends for a lifetime, some you only do a warmup or climb for one day and you never see them again.”

This was what had happened, he said, with Action Directe. He’d met some guy named Mike on Instagram. Mike belayed him on Action Directe. They went out again in the rain a few days later, then never saw each other again. But when Belhaj’s ascent was later questioned, and when Belhaj tried to track Mike down, Belhaj discovered (or said he discovered) that Mike’s profile was no longer on Instagram, and that their direct messages had disappeared from his search history.

“That may sound strange,” Belhaj admitted, “but what can I do?”

Of course, honorable dinosaurs gathered round in support of Belhaj. 8a.nu’s founder, Jens Larsen, went on the record saying that if a climber has a convincing grade pyramid, i.e. has a track record of similarly hard climbs, then “I do not think the media should start asking for proof… we have to respect the freedom of climbing.”

To this, Carlo Traversi, one of Paul Robinson’s peers, simply wrote, “A sponsored/professional climber should always be prepared to provide proof of a notable ascent. It’s part of the job.” Daniel Woods, who knew Belhaj personally and clearly didn’t believe he was telling the truth, told him to get back out to Action Directe with a camera and “prove everyone wrong” by climbing it for real.

Whether or not he was telling the truth, Belhaj, of course, had no choice but to evoke, and defend, the old honor system. In his LaCrux interview, he directly addressed his critics:

For me, climbing is freedom and trust. … If a friend tells me he has climbed a route, I’m happy for him and don’t question the ascent for a second. … If someone would not be honest about a climb it’s their problem, no one else’s.

Now, I feel for Belhaj. If he lied, he probably perceived an immense, even existential, amount of pressure from his sponsors to demonstrate that he could climb famous hard classics; and getting caught was incredibly painful, and professionally damaging, and something he will never recover from. But if he didn’t lie, it’s even worse; because if didn’t lie, then he was a victim of our changing times, someone who played by the rules as he knew them only to be fouled out by a rule he hadn’t quite understood existed.

But regardless of whether Belhaj was guilty of lying or not, he could not be more wrong in his analysis of the consequences. Because when pro climbers are not “honest” about a climb, they don’t just damage their consciences. Lies in climbing are often quite literally a form of theft. And theft, by definition, has victims: when one lying climber fakes an ascent, it dilutes the accomplishment of people who didn’t; and when a lying climber bluffs their way into a lucrative sponsorship, they butt in front of others who are telling the truth.

V. An apology, of sorts

I think it’s safe to say that 2026 has not been great for Simon Boes. Two weeks after SCN outed him to the Internet, Boes published a closed-comments post on Instagram. In it, he expressed surprise at the scale of the blowback, which “has had a much bigger impact than I expected,” but maintained that “my position regarding my ascents has not changed.”

“At the same time,” he adds, “I understand why some people have their doubts. Looking back, I should have been more careful with how I documented and presented my climbs.”

The “uncut” footage that Boes originally claimed to have is still not out in the world. At this point it’s probably safe to assume that the single, unblemished take of climbing that beautiful V16 by the river never existed. Which may explain why Boes also decided to step away from his sponsors, and to step away from the Internet, and say—embodying Daniel Woods’s recommendation for Said Belhaj—that he planned to return to Deep Fake and climb it again. “I want my future actions to speak louder than any statement I can make today.”

VI. After the burden of proof

Now, in 2026, we live in a world where the internet’s endless pundits are out there demanding evidence. And it’s probably a good thing. So long as everyone knows what their responsibilities are, so long as everyone understands that they must corroborate their claims, our community of skepticism, our insistence on proof, counterintuitively helps restore our community to a more trusting state. If no one is being singled out, if everyone agrees that they must provide uncut footage or belayer names, then the innocent are protected from slander and our community is protected from theft.

But I remain troubled by the example of Simon Boes—or, more specifically, how dang convincing Simon Boes’s deep fake of Deep Fake was. It reminds me of something that the late alpinist Ueli Steck, defending the honor system after himself being accused of falsifying an ascent, told a journalist in 2014, three years after Oh Eun-Sun digitally faked photos of Kanchenjunga, thirteen years before Boes deep-faked Deep Fake:

“Actual ‘proof,’” Steck said, “is incredibly difficult to come by; given modern photo-editing technologies, not even a photograph is 100% conclusive. Ultimately, it’s always a matter of plausibility, not hard proof.”

Even though Steck is no longer with us, he may be getting more right every year. It’s all well and fine, at least on paper, to stop believing each other’s claims and demand proof. But what do we do with our skepticism when people start manufacturing proof that’s impossible for us to disprove? What will happen to our ability to trust each other once someone like Simon Boes has access to AI technology that allows him to create a truly convincing uncut of Deep Fake? Do we need to livestream all our climbing sessions? How will that work in areas that (thank god) still don’t get cell reception? Will we have to carry Star Links with our fans and ladders to the boulders? Is it possible to fake a livestream?

When I first started researching this story, I thought that there was a fundamental difference between climbers like Paul Robinson and Said Belhaj, who were accused of lying because they couldn’t produce evidence of a climb, and climbers like Simon Boes and Oh Eun-Sun who fabricated that evidence. I’m a bit less sure of that now. Now, I think, each of these people was telling a story, a story that may be true and may not be true, a story which we either believe or don’t based on its cohesiveness, or based on the storyteller’s ability to summon credible details, or based on our willingness to dismiss reasons for doubt.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes I wonder if the honor system was the best thing our community has ever lost. But I will say this: I can’t be bothered to film my climbs. But I generally climb with a guy named Peyton. If you doubt what I’ve done, give him a ring.

The post How Climbing Lost Its Honor System appeared first on Climbing.

About our reporting: To investigate this fatal rappelling accident reporter Natalie Berry spoke with IMFGA guide Calum Muskett, expert alpinist Colin Haley, and a close friend of the deceased. The results exposed a small yet fatal rappelling mistake that many climbers may not know to avoid.

What really happened in Norway

On July 18, Fiona Layton and her climbing partner hiked for three hours to the base of Gjertvassbreen glacier in Norway’s Hurrungane Range. They had dinner, chatted, and settled down for the night, bivying under the lingering midnight light of a Norwegian summer.

At 3 a.m. on July 19, the pair woke up and left camp one hour later. They planned to attempt a 300-meter (984-foot), eight-pitch crack line, Sørveggen på Gjertvasstind—the South Face route on Gjertvasstind, also known as the Birkeland–Landrø Line (5.12a/b).

To reach the base of the route, they crossed the glacier and prepared to make one rappel on relatively low-angle but exposed terrain, with slabs and a steep snow couloir below.

According to an accident report conducted by a friend, Layton and her partner’s rappel anchor consisted of a master point knot made with new cord, which was firmly secured around a large block.

They used two ropes: one thin, 70-meter, 9.6mm Edelrid dynamic rope and one thinner, 65-meter, 6mm Petzl Pur’line tag line. They tied a double fisherman’s knot to join the ropes together through the looped anchor point, which they used in place of a rappel ring.

The double fisherman’s is an uncommon rappelling knot as it is trickier to untie and bulkier than the flat overhand, but it is a safe option. While it is optimal to rappel through a carabiner, ring, or maillon to avoid wear on the anchor and ropes, the lack of a metal connection point was not a safety issue here.

Layton’s climbing partner remembers that the team originally set the “midpoint” of the two connected ropes in contact with the anchor cord on the dynamic rope’s side. The joining knot, she remembers, was on the tag line’s side of the anchor cord.

The climbers were worried about the rope tails getting stuck in the loose and blocky terrain, so they did not tie knots in the ends, which reached below the next anchor.

Layton’s partner rappelled first using a tubular belay device—an ATC—and a prusik, while Layton was already attached to the top of the lines, ready to rappel. The partner made an anchor at the bottom and secured herself to it.

Either before or shortly after Layton began her rappel, her partner believes that the joining knot was moved through the anchor cord, to the other side. This resulted in the midpoint of the rappel being moved to the tag line side of the system. What’s unknown is whether Layton intentionally moved the knot before she rappelled—perhaps to reduce friction for the eventual rope pull—or whether the knot moved itself after she began the rappel.

However, the anchor loop that the team was using to rappel through was likely not large enough for the joining knot to slip through by itself.

Layton started rapping quickly on an ATC and a prusik, following her partner’s path. As she descended, the thin tag line moved through the belay device faster than the thicker dynamic line due to differences in friction. This meant that the joining knot of the two ropes was moving away from the anchor point, shortening the tag line as it was fed upwards.

As she rappelled, Layton did not notice that one line was getting shorter and the other longer. When she was about 10 meters (33 feet) above her partner, the end of the tag line went through her ATC and she fell about 100 meters.

Her friend called local emergency services, and a rescue helicopter and air ambulance arrived in 30 minutes. Medics concluded that Layton had died quickly.

Five hours later, a climbing team from the Norwegian Alpine Rescue Group arrived to help the friend ascend safely back to the glacier.

Why the positioning of the rappel ropes was fatal

Rappelling accidents are common, especially when climbers don’t tie knots at the end of their ropes. However, this particular accident was not initiated by loss of control on the rappel. Instead, it was the placement of the ropes’ connection point that caused the tag line to slip upward—and the dynamic rope to slip downward, resulting in shifting, uneven rope lengths—as soon as Layton began rappelling.

Let’s back up. Climbers often use a skinny tag line while climbing and rappelling to avoid carrying two heavier dynamic ropes. To set a two-rope rappel, the ropes are attached with a knot (in this case, a double fisherman’s). Once you have two ropes attached with a knot in the middle, you have to thread them through the rappel anchor (in this case, a single master point). Then you have to decide whether you’re rappelling on one or both ropes. To use just one—the heavier one—you can fix it with a carabiner block in the Reepschnur method and later pull it down with the tag line.

But let’s say you want to rappel on both lines—useful if a retrieval carabiner and knot would get stuck in a crack, for example—using an ATC. In this case, which of the two ropes do you want to form the “midpoint,” touching the anchor point? Whichever rope has the midpoint, the other rope will be the one that you’ll use to pull down the full two-rope setup.

Most climbers who rappel using a two-rope system will choose to set the midpoint on the thicker rope. In this case, Layton’s partner made that choice. However, by the time Layton was rappelling, the knot had moved to the other side. It is possible Layton chose to set the midpoint on the tag line’s side, which opened her up to a dangerous consequence: knot migration.

With the midpoint on the faster-feeding tag line, the joining knot was free to shift downwards, causing the tag line to move upward and get shorter as Layton rappelled. If the midpoint had been set on the dynamic line, the joining knot likely would have been blocked by the master point knot in the cord, preventing the tag line from shortening due to knot migration.

Gus Landefeld, a close friend of Layton’s, has climbed extensively with both Layton and her climbing partner. He told Climbing he understood why one might want to set the midpoint on the tag line.

“It’s really nice to be able to pull your dynamic lead line, because the tag line’s less likely to get stuck,” he said. “And if it does get stuck, you can lead back up on your dynamic rope. It’s also easier to pull. It’s a really popular method amongst friends of mine and experienced climbers that I know.”

However, Landefeld said that he and other friends had also experienced knot migration while using this tag line set-up in the past.

“I didn’t know it was possible until I saw it happen to me one day,” he said. “You’re moving, and then the ropes are also moving while you’re moving, so it’s just really easy to not notice what’s going on.”

After realizing the danger of knot migration, Landefeld and a friend came up with a method to mitigate it. Just like in Layton’s set-up, the second climber to rappel would be pre-rigged on the ropes to keep the ropes stable for the first climber

But before the second climber began to rappel, they would make one key adjustment:

“Once secured at the anchor below, the first climber would then pull a meter or so of slack in the tag line, and fix it to their belay loop on a locking carabiner, so the tag line has a finite amount of distance that it could slip,” Landefeld said.

While Landefeld’s method could work, it relies on the first person to remember to secure the tag line before the second begins to rappel. British IFMGA mountain guide Calum Muskett describes setting the midpoint on the tag line and pulling the dynamic rope as “inherently unsafe” due to the knot migration risk, and advises against this.

“Always fix the dynamic rope and use the tag line to retrieve to mitigate the risk of rope slippage,” he says. “I would not recommend any other way of rappelling with a tag line.”

Muskett opts not to use a tag line system for long descents, because he believes there is a greater risk of getting the dynamic rope stuck or damaged. In Europe, rappelling with a tag line is much less common.

“It’s better to use two dynamic ropes for lots of rappels and much faster,” he says. “But you can get slick using a tag line and fixing the dynamic rope at each belay. The priority is having a safe system for the rope configuration.”

Renowned American alpinist Colin Haley suggests the same: use two dynamic ropes when you can, and if using a tag line, always fix the dynamic rope and use the tag line for retrieval.

“I almost always prefer to pull the skinny rope because I find that the knot migrating away from the anchor is such an issue,” he says.

As an additional safeguard, Haley uses the Reepschnur method, by clove-hitching a locking carabiner to the dynamic rope immediately beside the joining knot, then clipping the carabiner into the dynamic rope on the other side of the rappel anchor. This blocks the knot from migrating during the rappel. 

Landefeld and Layton’s friends and family hope that climbers can become more aware of knot migration when using tag lines following this accident. “I don’t think it’s that widely known,” Landefeld added. “There’s not much literature out there about it.”

While this incident highlights the little-known danger of knot migration, it also serves as a reminder to always tie knots in the ends of your ropes, even if they are touching the ground or reaching past the anchor. This way, the consequences of a set-up error and knot migration—or any other issue, such as the loss of control—do not have to be fatal.

Editor’s note: This article was briefly taken down on September 3 on 2:23 p.m. MT and re-published at 3:28 p.m. MT to correct an error and add more information about the dynamic rope used. A previous version stated that Layton’s partner had also rappelled with the midpoint on the tag line side, just like Layton. It has been updated to reflect that Layton’s partner rappelled with the midpoint on the dynamic rope side. The midpoint moved at some point before or during Layton’s rappel.

The post The Death of a 27-Year-Old Climber Exposes the Danger of Knot Migration During Rappel appeared first on Climbing.

Editor’s note: In reporting this story, we interviewed representatives of Access Fund. We also drew upon research for past coverage that included reviews of federal documents, interviewing a Diné/Hopi climber, and connecting with the Outdoor Alliance on new maps that cross-reference recreation sites and extraction sites that are established or of interest across Utah’s national monuments. 

This morning, on September 2, climbing advocacy organization Access Fund, along with Patagonia and several other conservation groups, announced a new claim in its ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration for significantly downsizing Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.

Access Fund and Patagonia originally filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2017, when Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85%, as well as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by 47%, during his first term. When President Biden restored the national monument in 2021, the organizations suspended their lawsuit.

Now, the coalition is picking back up the torch after Trump announced even greater cuts to Utah’s two national monuments. Today, Access Fund filed a motion to re-open its 2017 lawsuit in light of the recent reduction. On July 13, the Trump administration released a proclamation that reduced Bears Ears by 91%. He also reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by over 90%.

This more recent downsizing stripped over 80% of the iconic Indian Creek climbing area of national monument status. The change in public land status puts an estimated 1,200 Indian Creek climbing routes at risk of noise, air, and visual pollution—or losing access entirely—due to extraction interests. A new interactive map from Access Fund plotted these climbing areas against sites of interest for extractive industries, from oil and gas to uranium. Below, you can view a static version of this map.

That estimate of 1,200 impacted routes does not include additional climbing found in other parts of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, such as Valley of the Gods. Furthermore, the new federal proclamation doesn’t recognize climbing as a protected activity across what remains of Bears Ears, like the Obama and Biden administrations did.

“Access Fund, and the vast majority of Americans, supports Bears Ears and national monuments,” Erik Murdock, Access Fund’s deputy director of programs, policy and government affairs told Climbing. “The massive reduction of Bears Ears National Monument is illegal and we are proud to go to the mat for the Bears Ears landscape, our tribal partners, Indian Creek climbing, the Antiquities Act, and the future of America’s public lands.”

In its original lawsuit, Access Fund challenged the presidential ability to reduce a national monument. The Antiquities Act empowers presidents to establish national monuments, but not to alter their boundaries or dismantle them. In 2017, its co-plaintiffs included Patagonia Works, Utah Diné Bikéyah, Friends of Cedar Mesa, Archaeology Southwest, the Conservation Lands Foundation, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Access Fund is filing its new claim and resuming its lawsuit with the same co-plaintiffs.

The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition also has an existing lawsuit from 2017 against the Trump administration. That Coalition includes representation from the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribal governments, all of whom hold sacred ties to the Bears Ears land.

“The illegal reduction of Bears Ears National Monument threatens a landscape of extraordinary ecological, cultural, historical, and recreational significance,” Access Fund executive director Heather Thorne said. “Bears Ears protects critical habitat, sacred places and cultural resources of deep importance to Indigenous peoples, irreplaceable archaeological and paleontological sites, and some of the country’s most exceptional outdoor recreation opportunities, including world-class climbing. Sacrificing these lands for the short-term interests of extractive industries would cause far reaching and unnecessary harm to America’s public lands system.”

This is a developing story that we will update as new information becomes available. 

The post Access Fund Sues Trump After 80% of Indian Creek Removed From Bears Ears National Monument appeared first on Climbing.

Short climbers are constantly developing creative beta, pulling harder, and moving more dynamically than our taller partners. Although there are moments when our size works to our advantage, like fitting comfortably into sit-starts, we often must approach climbs differently. But don’t despair! There are several strategies to help shorter climbers perform at their best and make the most of our unique skillsets. Below, I’ll cover everything from optimal grip strategies for small handholds (what my tall partners would describe as “footholds”) and harnessing dynamic power, to the technique, flexibility, and mobility you’ll need to stay on the wall, injury-free.

Small holds

When the next hold feels out of reach, nearby footholds often become intermediate handholds. These are typically small or awkwardly oriented, making finger strength and grip selection critical for preventing injury.

The four main grip types for small holds are: open hand, half crimp, full crimp, and closed crimp. Crimping places disproportionately high forces on the middle and ring fingers. Particularly in the full crimp position, there can be upwards of 380 newtons (N) of force in recreational climbers, which approaches the failure threshold of the finger pulley system at ~400 N.

To understand the implications, consider the anatomy of the fingers. In the hand, tendons attach the flexor muscles to the bones of the fingers and are held in place by fibro-osseous tunnels called annular pulleys, numbered A1-A5. Injury to the A2 and A4 pulleys is most common in climbing and can lead to “bowstringing,” reducing grip strength and function.

During crimping, the distance between the tendon and bone can increase to ~4.3 mm at the PIP joint, which is more than double the distance of an open-hand grip and significantly increases mechanical stress on the pulley system.

Conversely, adopting an open-hand grip allows shorter climbers to minimize tendon strain while extending their reach by several inches through a straighter finger positioning. This approach can facilitate a more fluid and natural wrist motion, if we start with an open-hand hold before transitioning into a half or full crimp as the movement progresses.

Practical takeaways:

• Default to open-hand grips whenever possible
• Progress to half crimp → full crimp → closed crimp only when necessary
• Avoid closed crimps during dynamic movements
• Build tolerance gradually through climbing and structured hangboarding

Because of the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID) principle, training that mimics climbing-specific loads—such as actual time on the wall—is more effective than general forearm strengthening alone.

Footwork

One of the most effective ways to reduce strain on your fingers is to use your feet more efficiently. For short climbers, we need all the advantages we can get, so precise footwork is essential.

When standing on small footholds, use the inside edge of your shoe to maximize contact and reduce slipping. However, it is best to become comfortable using all aspects of our shoes with minimal rubber contacting the holds as we may use more intermediate foot holds.

Try these drills to reinforce intentional movement and reduce unnecessary energy expenditure on the wall. They are great to implement during warm-ups on easier climbs.

• Ninja feet: look at the foothold you are aiming for before placing your foot as quietly as possible.
• Sticky feet: once you place your foot on a hold, do not readjust.
• Or, combine the exercises above like in the video here

After establishing solid footholds, shorter climbers can further extend their reach by developing lower-leg control and power. Strengthening the calves through exercises such as leg presses with heels lifted or standing calf raises allows us to gain critical inches by standing on our tiptoes to grab the next hold. Additionally, mastering techniques like flagging and smearing is essential for maximizing balance and maintaining body tension throughout the climb.

Heel hooks

Heel hooks are another powerful technique to offload the upper body and keep our center of mass close to the wall. Since shorter climbers cannot reach as high, heel hooks offer a solution to provide upward momentum toward the next hold and can act as an “additional hand” for hand-foot matches. However, this technique involves heavy recruitment of the hamstring muscles, which are one of the most commonly-strained muscles in the body. The risk of injury increases even more when the heel hook is above hip height, as it loads the muscles in a lengthened position.

Most of the general population has a strength imbalance of stronger quadriceps than hamstrings, so it is even more important for climbers to strengthen their hamstrings. The following exercises can be performed with both legs and then progressed to single leg:

• Hamstring curl machine
• Hamstring curls on Swiss ball, TRX, carpet sliders (or socks on hardwood floor)
• Nordic hamstring curls

Dynamic power

When our reach isn’t enough, we have to instead use dynamic movements (dynos). This makes vertical power and lower-body strength all the more important for us to train. To improve your dyno:

• Focus primarily on your hip positioning and alignment in both the setup and actual movement.
• As you bend your legs into a squat position, push your hips down and away from the wall.
• During the jump, pull yourself back in with your hand and push your hips forward into the wall, and forcefully push your feet away from the surface you were standing on.
• Watch a short demonstration here.

For lateral dynos, the same principles apply:

• Push your hips down and away from the next hold in setup, then swing your hips up and toward the direction of the next hold during the jump.
• Watch a short demonstration here.

To improve coordination:

1. Practice the jump by squatting deep to generate the proper power.
2. Focus on the direction of your hips as described earlier.
3. Emphasize pulling down and toward yourself as hard as possible.
4. Put it all together in a powerful dyno.

There is often also a mental component to dynos, as the next hold can seem too far away. Mental strategies, such as imagining each step of the dyno and successfully catching the hold, can be just enough to tip you over into success.

• Mentally rehearse every detail of the catch: which direction your hips will move in, how your hands will wrap around the hold, how the hold will feel under your hands, and how you will expertly control the swing.
• Imagining success is just as important as real success.
• Practicing dynos repeatedly will allow both your mind and body to habituate to how the movement feels by increasing neural pathways with repetition and boosting your confidence for the next dyno.

Off-the-wall power training

• Load: 30-60% of 1RM
• Volume: 3-6 sets of 1-5 reps
  • To determine your 1RM, find the heaviest amount of weight you can lift while maintaining proper technique for only one repetition.
  • Table 17.7 is a chart to help you determine what percentage of 1RM you are at.

Examples:

• Squats
• Kettlebell swings
• Olympic lifts

Plyometrics

Other non-weighted exercises to help improve power production include plyometric exercises, which involve a rapid stretch followed by a muscle contraction. To increase your power, it is important to jump again immediately after landing from the previous jump. Example exercises include:

• Box jumps
• Squat jumps
• Depth jumps
• Power skip

Flexibility and mobility

Sometimes, getting a high hand-foot match or beta breaking with a wide split can help us get to the next hold. Having hamstring flexibility and hip mobility allows us to put ourselves in positions that are more advantageous to compensate for not being able to reach as high or far.

• Flexibility is how much a joint can be moved passively
• Mobility refers to the range through which the athlete can actively move.

For example, you may easily use your hands to place your foot on a high start hold but have difficulty engaging your hip flexors to bring your leg to that same volume without your hands.

Stretching

• Up to 4 mins per muscle group per session
• Aim for 10 minutes per muscle over a week
• Perform them 5-10 minutes after a climbing or workout session, while your body temperature is increased, or as a separate session
• Avoid static stretches before a workout to reduce injury risk

PNF stretching

Another type of stretching is proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF), which includes several techniques best performed with a partner4:

• Contract-Relax: partner passively stretches muscle to mild discomfort for 10 seconds → athlete contracts stretched muscle (against partner’s hand) for 6 seconds → athlete relaxes and partner passively stretches for another 30 seconds (video)
• Hold-Relax with Agonist Contraction: partner passively stretches muscle to mild discomfort for 10 seconds → athlete contracts agonist (opposite muscle) against partner’s hand for 6 seconds → athlete relaxes and partner passively stretches for another 30 secs. (video)

Mobility drills

Lastly, below are examples of some lower-body mobility drills that can help you actively reach higher footholds.

• Seated 90/90 hip rotations
• Seated hip flexor lifts over a block
• Standing hip flexion with kettlebell
• Ankle dorsiflexion mobilizations (mobilization with movement)

High reaches and shoulder health

Upper body flexibility/mobility is also beneficial in preventing shoulder injuries, as shorter climbers often spend more time in the overhead position reaching for the next holds. Repetitive overhead movements may increase the risk for subacrominal impingement—compression of the structures under the shoulder blade due to decreased space—or overuse of the rotator cuff muscles that help lift your arm. It is important to maintain thoracic mobility and shoulder strength to prevent injuries.

Mobility for upper body:

• PVC pipe movements (common alternative objects: broom, dowel, taunt towel/elastic band)
• Child’s pose
• Push-up plus / plank plus
• Prone swimmers
• Thoracic mobility over foam roller/chair

Stability exercises:

• Banded internal/external rotation
• Serratus anterior punches
• Inverted kettlebell carry

See a doctor of physical therapy

Despite these recommendations, injuries can still occur. Physical therapists are movement experts who can identify key impairments and create tailored exercise plans for your specific needs. Get evaluated by a licensed physical therapist so they can help you continue your climbing journey!

About the author

Kacey Yip is a recent Doctor of Physical Therapy graduate from Baylor University interested in further exploring sports, hand, or neuro/vestibular PT. She has been climbing for six years and still can’t decide if she loves bouldering or sport climbing more. When she’s not climbing, Kacey also enjoys spending time with friends, running, hiking/mountaineering, lifting, and photography.

This article was written with much-appreciated mentorship support from Dr. Jared Vagy, DPT, through the Student Climbing Special Interest Group, a free program for student physical therapists to receive education and mentorship in the treatment of climbing-related injuries.

About the contributors

Dr. Jared Vagy “The Climbing Doctor,” is a doctor of physical therapy and an experienced climber, has devoted his career and studies to climbing-related injury prevention, orthopedics, and movement science. He authored the Amazon best-selling book Climb Injury-Free, as well as The Resilient Climber, and is a frequent contributor to Climbing Magazine. He is a professor at the University of Southern California, an internationally recognized lecturer, and a board-certified orthopedic clinical specialist.

To learn more about Dr. Vagy you can visit theclimbingdoctor.com or visit him on Instagram @theclimbingdoctor or YouTube youtube.com/c/TheClimbingDoctor

Kevin Cowell is a physical therapist, clinical instructor, and rock climber based out of Broomfield, CO. Kevin owns and operates The Climb Clinic (located at G1 Climbing + Fitness) where he specializes in rehab and strength training for climbers and mountain athletes. He found his passion for climbing in Colorado while attending Regis University for his Doctorate of Physical Therapy and has since become a Certified Strength & Conditioning Coach (CSCS), Board-Certified Orthopaedic Clinical Specialist (OCS), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapy (FAAOMPT).

You can contact Kevin via email at kevin@theclimbclinic.com or by visiting www.theclimbclinic.com. Also, be sure to follow Kevin at @theclimbclinic on Instagram for free rehab and strength training resources.

Julien Descheneaux is a master of physical therapy who dedicates himself exclusively to rock climbing injuries, having treated over 1,200 climbers. He’s been covering Quebec competitions as a certified Sport First Responder since 2014. He is also the author of the online class “Climbing injuries at the upper quadrant” for the Quebec PT Board (OPPQ) and gives regular clinics and conferences on the subject. He founded PhysioHR in 2016, the first PT clinic inside a rock climbing gym in Canada and is currently the resident PT at Bloc Shop Chabanel.

You can contact Julien via email at julienlephysio@gmail.com or by visiting https://www.physioescalade.com/.

Todd Bushman is a doctor of physical therapy, clinical instructor, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), and climber of mountain, rock, ice, and plastic. Todd is a dedicated climbing specialist based out of Bozeman, MT where he practices full time. He is actively pursuing advanced training to become a Certified Orthopedic Manual Therapist (COMT) through the North American Institute of Orthopedic Manual Therapy. Todd is also available for remote consultation regarding climbing injuries, movement analysis, and strength training.

You can contact Todd via email at todd.climbingcoach@gmail.com or visit him @try.hard.pt on Instagram.

Carly Post is a physical therapist in Los Angeles, California. She is passionate about climbing and enjoys helping people move better and optimize their ability to participate in their lives to their fullest potential. She can be reached at carlypos@usc.edu and on Instagram at @carlypost

Sources

1. American College of Sports Medicine. American College of Sports Medicine position stand. Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2009;41(3):687-708. doi:10.1249/MSS.0b013e3181915670
2. Baechle, Thomas. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. 4th ed., Human Kinetics, 1989.
3. Coombs R, Garbutt G. Developments in the use of the hamstring/quadriceps ratio for the assessment of muscle balance. J Sports Sci Med. 2002;1(3):56-62. Published 2002 Sep 1.
4. Fiorentini S. Prevention of flexor tendon pulley injuries among climbers. Satakunta University of Applied Sciences. 2020. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020120125473
5. Haff GG, Triplett NT, eds. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. 4th ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics; 2016
6. Gareth J., Johnson M. I. A critical review of the incidence and risk factors for finger injuries in rock climbing. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2016;15(6):400-409. doi:10.1249/JSR.0000000000000304
7. Ginszt M, Ginszt A, Berger M, Gawda P, Tarkowski Z. Finger flexor pulley injury of sport climbers – Literature review. Polish Annals of Medicine. 2016;23(2):191-194, doi.org/10.1016/j.poamed.2016.01.009
8. Ingram L.A., Tomkinson G.R., d’Unienville N.M.A. et al. Optimising the dose of static stretching to improve flexibility: A systematic review, meta-analysis and multivariate meta-regression. Sports Medicine. 2024;55:597-617. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02143-9
9. Mobraten M, Christophersen S. The climbing bible: Practical exercises. 2020.
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The post The Short Climber’s Guide to Success and Staying Injury-Free appeared first on Climbing.

Searching for a good gym climbing shoe in the $100 price range? Normally, we’d say you might be out of luck. But right now, with Labor Day Sales going on, you can get yourself a pair of Ocun’s new Jett S climbing shoes for a cool $104.96—barely more than a Benjamin. Normally retailing for $139.95, these shoes are currently marked 25% off at Backcountry. The retail price is actually cheaper, however, on Amazon; same discount, but you can score the Jett S for a grand total of $97.46 (taxes and shipping excluded, of course). The price of this shoe will likely rise on September 8, after Labor Day Sales end.

When we reviewed these shoes in May, we praised them for their outstanding comfort, while excelling at precision placements and steep climbing. After testing these shoes for a few months, we highly recommend them as your high-mileage gym climbing or training shoe. They’d also perform just fine on moderate outdoor climbing or bouldering, though we wouldn’t advise investing in them as your go-to outdoor rock shoe. And we would definitively not recommend slab climbing in the Jett S.

“This is in the top five most comfortable shoes I’ve worn,” one of our testers wrote in his notes. “This is its standout feature—at no point did I get hot spots, pinching, fatigue, or discomfort.”

Ocun Jett S Pros and Cons

Pros

• Light and comfortable—great for bouldering, boarding, and long-term wear
• Notably precise on innie divots, pockets, and jibs
• Despite a narrow last, the shoes spread well laterally to accommodate wider feed
• Above-average hooking and scumming
• Durable and affordably priced ($129.95 at REI) in an age of $200 rock shoes

Cons

• Slippery smearing
• Toe-tip delamination

Shop for $104.96 at Backcountry

Shop for $97.46 at Amazon

The post Deal of the Week: A Super Comfortable Gym Climbing Shoe for Under $100 appeared first on Climbing.

It didn’t sound weird until the barista asked me where I was going. “I’m flying to Berlin to climb this very specific bridge,” I told him. “Under a highway.”

“Berlin?”

I felt his surprise. “Yeah. Well, a few miles north of Berlin.” It was six A.M. on a Tuesday, and this coffee shop was the only one open in Moab, Utah. “It’s training for a harder climb in Canyonlands.”

“Oh, sick.”

What I did not mention: It’s gross and covered in graffiti, and it’s core to my destiny to do well on it.

He handed me the chai latte and chirped out a good luck. Inside my 4Runner, Moab’s sun-dipped cliffs melted to flat freeways. I sipped the chai and put on a romantasy audiobook, but my mind quickly drifted to what I’d forgotten to pack.

I knew I had the essentials: 14 rolls of Euro tape, two pairs of my thickest shoes, a 70-ish-meter rope I’d cut a few times, and eight of Mary’s #5 cams. The rest of the cams would come from Henry, the Berlin-based climber who first discovered the bridge crack. In a flourish of generosity, Henry had dropped into my DMs and offered to let me and Mary borrow at least 16 cams.

Henry had also DM’d me a 29-paragraph explanation of the bridge’s unique danger, coupled with hand-drawn diagrams of the dimensions he’d obtained using a laser point measurer. Simply put, the crack was too low and too long to protect normally. Even with placing a piece every two meters, rope stretch meant you’d crash into concrete if you fell on the far side of the river. When legendary crack climber Tom Randall made the first ascent in 2024, he’d opted to free solo what he officially dubbed Autobahn.

Then, last year, Pete Whittaker and Mari Salvesen each flashed it with eight cams, which Henry assured me did not actually protect them from a skull-smashing fall. Climbing Autobahn safely, he concluded, was a problem not yet solved. Perhaps I had a suggestion?

I’d received these messages in June, from inside a slowly-overheating red tent in Yosemite’s Camp 4. It was too much to process and had taken me weeks to respond.

“I’m really not trying to die on a bridge,” I finally wrote back, sometime in July, this time from a different tent beneath the Stawamus Chief in Canada. I suggested we give up the redpoint and simply build a via ferrata with the cams, fix the rope, and clip in as we climb.

After all, I didn’t need the send. My goals for the trip were simple: First, use the bridge to train for Century. Second, spend time with Mary. That was it.

Last year, when Mary invited me to train for five months together for Century Crack (5.14b), it felt like stepping through a portal to another universe, one where I had a quest and a purpose.

Since its first ascent by the Wide Boyz (aka Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker) in 2011, Century Crack has been the hardest offwidth in the world—a mythological concept, as distant to me as winning the Olympics. Only four men in history had ever done it. But Mary was the best female offwidth climber in the world, and I was her protégé. She’s coached me from my first-ever trad lead to my first 5.13. I’d supported her on both her 5.14 roof crack sends. With our energies combined, maybe the impossible would yield.

In March 2025, I moved into Mary’s guest room in Moab, got a job at this magazine, and gave up the nomadic dirtbag life for rent payments and a real kitchen. Twice a week in the crack trainer, Mary and I pushed each other to climb longer and longer in her ten-foot wooden panels. We ripped our crack gloves, sprained our ankles, bled from our knees, cried through foot numbness, and screamed at each other to stay in for just 30 more seconds. Each session’s reward was exactly one episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, a New Zealand-based show from the ‘90s that Mary has held in lifelong veneration.

What happened on Century last fall is another story, which I promise to write one day. For now, what you need to know is this: Mary sent. I didn’t. Once the (literal red) dust settled, I found myself with an injured right thumb and a whirlpool of anxiety in my chest. There were six months left before Century would reopen for my season two: a reasonable time to heal my thumb and get stronger. Except this time, I’d be doing all my training alone.

In mid-April, before I left Moab to complete my crack training in Yosemite and Squamish, Mary suggested we head to Berlin to try Autobahn, that cobweb-infested bridge in Berlin that Tom had put up in 2024. At the time, he’d called it the hardest offwidth in the world, somewhere between 5.14b and 5.14c. While Mary and I struggled to believe that claim, she still insisted it would still be a good end-of-summer exercise. With just a month left until I headed out to the White Rim, I boarded a flight to Berlin, hoping she was right. Otherwise I’d be wasting my time.

Forget the plan

Two days later, I sat in the passenger seat of Henry’s van, my backpack overfilled with #5 cams at my feet. He was driving Mary and me through Oranienburg, a quaint suburb north of Berlin, with lawn sprinklers and fenced-off gardens. Mary leaned forward from the backseat, a coffee in her hand, asking the German when he was going to come visit Moab.

The bridge appeared from behind two hills, like an illusion folded out of nothing. Henry parked, and we jumped out like a heist crew.

Autobahn looked exactly as it did in the Google Maps street view—and somewhat shorter than Tom and Pete’s YouTube videos had made it seem. A wide, barely streaming canal separated one bank from the other. Cars rumbled above in an insulating cover of noise. I’d been surprised to see the underside of the overpass contained not one, but dozens of parallel cracks. Most were finger-sized, but the crack in the very center was deeper, as if darkened for emphasis. The offwidth.

Recoiling from the smell of piss, I walked to stand directly beneath it. Across from me, a man sat on the guardrail, watching his dog playing in the water.

I was still unsure how to feel about treating a bridge as some sort of legitimate rock climb. When Tom had first announced Autobahn as “harder than Century Crack,” I had doubts. Then, as I hit 200 feet in the crack trainer and spent 23 sessions struggling on Century, the doubts became opposition. Autobahn is a predictable chunk of concrete. Century, on the other hand, is a cathedral of sandstone, an undulating monster.

Last year, when Tom visited Mary’s house in November, I told him my thoughts: There was no chance that what was essentially a uniform, 200-foot crack trainer was harder than Century. I mean, Mary and I had both done 200 feet with 15 pounds in training, multiple times. Uninterrupted endurance could be automated; a roof crack’s disorienting, incessant cruxes could not. And the bridge didn’t even have a pivot!

Mary, who’d sprained an ankle on her Century send, joked to Tom that he’d simply forgotten how hard Century really was after 13 years. He shrugged and laughed. “I think you’ll both change your minds,” he said. The challenge had been issued.

From then on, I’d filed Autobahn away as a future sidequest. But soon after arriving in Berlin and finally touching the bridge, my confidence sprang back. I’d made it to the first pillar—about 50 feet in, where the water began—in about five minutes without much trouble. When I got down, I immediately told Mary that the offwidth was deep, more comfortable than any crack trainer we’d tried, and nearly the exact size I’d been doing laps in all summer. We abandoned the via ferrata plan. Since that first go, a tiny ecstasy began sparking in the back of my mind. I couldn’t look at it directly. I was simply here to train, remember?

But didn’t training mean training to go for it?

I turned from the canal and hopped a muddy puddle, climbing the stairs. Mary and Henry were already dumping gear on the upper concrete platform. Behind them was a graffiti painting of a tombstone.

There, against the wall, I began my offwidth ritual. I carefully taped my hands down to nearly my elbows. It was too hot to wear long pants, so I pulled neon blue biking sleeves over my bare calves. Between the three of us, we had a whopping 30 cams. It was more #5s than I’d ever seen in my life.

“How many are you going to bring?” asked Henry, as I clipped them to my harness.

“All of them.”

When I stood up, the purple metal stuck out like a tutu. It felt bulky, but the weight was familiar. Mary cackled, capturing my costume on video.

A shift in reality

I failed right away. Pulling myself onto the starting block had been awkward before; with 25 extra pounds on me, it was actually a limit move. When I finally rolled myself onto my stomach, closing my mouth to avoid the cobwebs, I crouched on the ledge for two minutes. My breath was so heavy I felt like I was screaming. I forced myself to calm down.

“What’s your plan?” Mary asked.

“I’m going to just go as far as I can,” I said. This was our code for “real redpoint attempt,” so she fell silent and adjusted the camera. My breathing was finally relaxed again.

“Okay, watch me,” I told Henry.

My first foot bumped its way into the crack. The road noise disappeared. I felt the same inexplicable jump that happens when a surgeon gets paged or a bullet goes off. I had trained for 17 months, and very specifically, for the past six months, to climb in this exact size, to make this complex movement fluid.

My other foot went in, and everything else vanished.

“Do it now and never again”

Fifty feet into the crack, I hung upside-down, nearly at the water. Both my arms dangled toward the ground.

I counted seconds: One, two, three, four. Relax the core. Grab the cam. Pre-clip it to the rope. A burn started in my upper foot, then pierced the muscle—bluntly, like my shoe was caught under a hydraulic press.

Don’t rise yet. Five, six. Yes, that was enough.

I threw myself up into a sit-up, shoving a new cam in to my left, then set with a hand-fist stack to the right of my legs. At the same time, I tore out my flaming right foot from the crack and held it sideways into the air. For two breaths, I pointed my toes in a slow circle like I was in a yoga class. Eminem boomed from my speaker below.

“Ten!” Mary shouted.

That means nothing. The ankle went back in, and I snatched the other one out, flexing it down, then up, like a dance move. At some point last year, 10 minutes had indicated my maximum time in the crack trainer. I refused to think about what it meant now.

Here’s the thing about offwidth roof climbing. To most people, the half-cartwheels like the ones I performed in Autobahn look casual, almost sleepy. Stick the foot in, take the other out, flap it around for a bit. Calmly place it back in. Move the stack forward. Chill, right?

But what this pace totally conceals is the urgency of running a high-stakes stopwatch test. Each isolated motion, every recovery window for a certain part of my body, can be no longer and no shorter than what I could sustain forever. Keep the foot in a second too long, and it’ll burn so hot it won’t make it through the next long rest. Rise too early from the flop, and my wrists will numb out before I can shake out my feet. A moment of impatience or sloppiness could mean I never truly recover again. For hundreds of feet, at every move, total disaster was only a second or two away.

This is enough. You can drop here. The flood of giving-up thoughts began to crash over me. I’d learned, in training, to anticipate them, but if I truly listened to one a little too hard, I’d lose my resolve in seconds. It’s all mental. My easy rhythm of flips and stacks became forced. I could no longer hear anything but the music that pulsed quietly in the background.

“Sixteen!” Mary shouted.

Surely I’d only been climbing for eight or nine minutes. I had the urge to ask Mary to quit giving me fake time stamps, but I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t change my mind later. I said nothing.

“Eighteen!”

Soon I began to panic for an escape. The end was still miles away, and I was moving in inches. I’d started in a breezy autopilot; now I forced myself into every move.

I’ll make it to the pillar at the end of the river. Anything else was unacceptable.

As I lost all sense of time in enforcing my rhythm on my burning wrists and feet, I refused to re-evaluate my plan. The pillar. Now that I had a destination, I spent my reserve strength, devoting all my focus to completing my moves in time. Sweep, stack, and lock. Five, six. Up.

But another thought floated before me. Do the whole thing now, and never again. Pointing my toes, accepting they would never escape from numbness but that moving them was still good, I opened my mind to the horror of starting over. All the way from the beginning.

Do it now, or you’ll have to start all over.

“How many cams do I have?” I screamed.

“You have a lot!” Mary yelled back. “You have nine cams!”

I chose to believe her. Do it now. Never again. It was the only thing that held me back from the pain. Letting go wouldn’t quench the burn; it would only cast me into more agony.

When I passed the pillar, my immediate future condensed into one possibility: I was going to complete this route. The alternative was unimaginable: falling backwards onto the concrete. I’d lose both my ankles before I allowed that to happen.

With no more decisions to make, the flood of giving-up thoughts finally receded. In their place was a paralyzing burn on my right hand, the one I made a fist stack with. At my next flop, I shook it out. Pulled the tape down my wrist to loosen it. The pain simmered, only blooming during my feet rests. I’d have to move faster, but I couldn’t. So I had to endure.

Eight feet left. Mary held her arms up below me, as if she’d catch me. My hands were sweaty, and I couldn’t find my chalk bag. Now. Never again. But the flat edge of the block was grippy enough to take the risk. The final cam went in. I dropped onto my hands, then swung into the ledge with a strength that surged from nowhere. I was standing on the ledge. With one last stack, I slid down and sideways onto my thighs, then reverse-mantled onto my elbows.

I dropped to the ground, a punctuation.

“Yes, dude!” Mary screamed. She was jumping around me, hugging me.

“Dude, that was nowhere near as hard as Century,” I said laughing, wiping the sweat from my forehead. “Like not close at all.” I was buzzing with adrenaline, ambling in circles, looking for something else to charge toward. “What was the time?”

“25 minutes.”

Longer than I thought, but still, a clean confirmation of what I’d felt from the beginning. That I could do this, that this was well within my limit.

Suddenly exhausted, I sat down to rip off my tape, and began ranting to Mary about every single thing I had felt.

Autobahn: My first 5.14

After the adrenaline wore off, I realized that the thrill of sending Autobahn was about much more than confirming to myself that Century Crack was still at the top of the offwidth pyramid. It also marked the hardest route of my life. More importantly, during this redpoint, I’d actually found a way to push past my original goal—the far pillar—for the first time in my career.

Before this, I was the type of athlete who could never handle workouts that asked me to go to failure. Instead, I’d always make up a secret goal inside my head, tick that off, and call it done. But climbing all 200 feet of Autobahn, albeit through uniform terrain, felt like too steep of a target to embrace at the start. I hadn’t even been able to say it out loud. And yet I’d followed my mantra of “Don’t predict” for the entire, slow stretch.

A week later, when Mary sent the route, I was right at the end, hugging her in the very spot she’d hugged me. We were euphoric; we’d officially completed our mission ahead of schedule, and could now just have fun in Berlin for the second half of the trip.

“What did you think?” I shouted.

She went serious, and looked directly at me. “Dude, I think you’ve done your first 14.”

I went quiet. “Really?”

“Yeah.” She turned back to the route, which still dangled the rope in 28 loops. “This was definitely harder than Necro. It feels like 14a.” Then she laughed at my silence. “I’m serious. I think that you climbed 5.14.”

I had been spiraling over the grade of Autobahn for days. Shortly before Mary sent, I had concluded to myself that it was probably 5.13d, but decided to wait and defer to Mary’s expertise. Obviously, I had no idea where to draw the line between 5.13 and 5.14; I’d never come close to it before. Mary had sent multiple 5.14 roof cracks already.

Now, she was implying I’d achieved the trad climbing milestone I’d dreamed about for years—something I had only ever imagined would happen when I finally pulled myself over the lip on Century.

I demanded reasoning; I nagged her with my doubts. Certainly there was more than a letter grade between Century and Autobahn. But the more I challenged her, the more she consolidated her opinion, adding that she thought Autobahn fell somewhere between Necronomicon (5.13d/5.14a) and Black Mamba (5.14b). Even after we spoke with Tom, who understood our reasoning and reassured me he wasn’t offended, I still hesitated to claim 5.14a out loud. What if someone else came and downgraded it again?

Eventually, Mary told me sternly, “Listen. Everyone is always going to downgrade the things that are important to you. It’s a fact of life. But that doesn’t mean you don’t celebrate them.” A few days later, we got two tiny cakes at a Berlin bakery, and asked the baker to label them as Auto and Bahn.

Crossing invisible lines

It’s been nearly a month since Autobahn, and to be honest, the grade milestone still feels hypothetical—something that could be suddenly stripped. I always pictured sending 5.14 as an immediate, palpable victory experienced through tears of joy, not a footnote added in retrospect.

This contrasts entirely with the fierce pride I felt after every crack training session this year, especially the solo ones. When I accepted that I’d be training alone this summer, without Mary, I feared that I’d be too lazy to really push myself. Would I be able to make actionable progress without a partner keeping me accountable? It was a true relief to find myself compulsively unable to not chase personal bests. In Yosemite, for example, I’d spend hours at the crack trainer in Camp 4, hanging from one leg beneath a bug net, struggling to breathe in the nighttime humidity.

In fact, the first time I climbed the rough equivalent of Autobahn—25 minutes in a four-inch crack with 20 pounds on my waist—it was such a night, and I was alone. The pop music in my earphones was particularly inspiring, like a 2010s movie soundtrack. As I performed slow flips, I kept asserting, It’s all mental. It’s all mental. When the timer finally beeped, I gently lowered myself to the crashpad. Then I crawled out from the bug net and went to my tent. Walking over the leaves with my headlamp low, I felt a powerful glow racing beneath my skin—a sense of proof, of showing up, of becoming the person who fights for her dream. There was no one to tell me what I had done.

The post What It Felt Like to Send My First 5.14 in an Obscure, Concrete Bridge in Germany appeared first on Climbing.

In a sense, it’s the core of our sport: the crux. It’s the hardest moves on a climb, the moment of truth, and the split-second where you launch from one timeline into the next. In our experience, the crux is something that you can’t study for or train into autopilot. Often, the real crux is a piece of the puzzle that you’d never expect.

In the Crux category of our 2026 Summer Photo Contest, we chose nine photos that visually capture the essence of a crux. For some photographers, this essence bleeds from an in-motion shot of a climber lunging with full commitment. For others, the crux is more mental: the few seconds just after the fall, or right before the big risk, where a climber stares at the reality of failure and gathers their courage to try again.

Whether it’s executing a perfect sequence or choosing to believe in the impossible, our Crux winners have found diverse and inspiring ways of interpreting what it means to risk everything for glory. See what each photographer told us about the story behind their Crux shot.

Juanse Goes for the Rodeo by Esteban Escalante (Winner)

 The great Colombian climber Juanse [Juan Sebastien Sanchez Martin], was looking for a way to clip the last quickdraw on the crux of La Crespa Dura, this beautiful 5.13b project, which he onsighted. Juanse is a professional climber who has sent up to 5.14a. 

I took the photo in a beautiful moorland, where it was starting to rain, which made sending the route even more interesting. This route is in the Santurbán Moorland of Colombia.

About the photographer: Esteban Escalante is a photographer and climber. He has found catharsis through photography. He is currently recovering from an accident in the mountains and says he is thankful to be alive. Recovery has been his “life’s project” one step at a time. Follow along @mochiladventure or @estebanphoto.

Planet X, by Morgan Bradley (Runner Up)

Hugh Heinrich contemplating the crux of Planet X (5.14a/b) in Rifle, Colorado

About the photographer: As a climber of over 12 years, and a photographer for longer, Morgan aims to paint an authentic picture of the sport, lifestyle, and people that have shaped his life and work. Follow along @morganfbradley.

Majestic Line by Jordi Llauradó i Vilà (Runner Up)

Ross Fulkerson enters the main section of Dreamcatcher (5.14d) after pulling off the first slab crux of the route. A majestic moment on a majestic line. 

About the photographer: Jordi Llauradó i Vilà is a filmmaker and photographer from Catalunya, Spain focused on climbing and the stories that happen around it. Vilà is drawn to real moments, strong characters, and the world’s most beautiful rock climbs, aka “Rigatonis.” He loves documenting these stories and turning fleeting moments into images that stick around long after the climb is over. Follow along @jordi.llauvi

Ulassai Limestone by Geri Csapo (Honorable Mention)

Klaas Willems putting up a fight on the final section of his newly developed line Medusa (8b/5.13d) in the mecca of vertical limestone, Ulassai, Sardinia.

About the photographer: In 2022, Csapo picked up a secondhand camera after he sold most of his things, moved into a van with his girlfriend, and headed for the road. Back then, he could have never predicted that photographing the outdoors would have such a special place in his heart. See more of Csapo’s work here and follow along @ofsurfandsummits.

Progress Under the Lights by Gaz Leah (Honorable Mention)

Real progress rarely happens under the lights.

It happens in the quiet isolation of the gym, when nobody is watching, when the move is awkward, the body is tired, and the answer still has to be earned.

Ben Mayforth, sending during a training session in the months before winning the Para Climbing World Cup. The podium came later. This is where it was built.

About the photographer: Gareth “Gaz” Leah is a British-born photographer, filmmaker, climber and expedition leader based in Utah. He has spent much of his life in remote and vertical places, and photography is how he makes sense of them. Leah is less interested in manufacturing drama than understanding why a moment matters. He looks for scale, tension, and small human details that give a scene gravity, then stays quiet enough to let it reveal itself. See more of his work here, and follow along @gazleah or @wellgoodmedia

Recomposure by Geri Csapo (Honorable Mention)

My dear friend Gui (Guillaume Peyrasse), finding a moment to recompose himself on a thin basalt slab in Tenerife, Spain.

About the photographer: In 2022, Csapo picked up a secondhand camera after he sold most of his things, moved into a van with his girlfriend, and headed for the road. Back then, he could have never predicted that photographing the outdoors would have such a special place in his heart. See more of Csapo’s work here and follow along @ofsurfandsummits.

Superb Roc Star by Veillard Antoine (Honorable Mention)

Réunion Island (east of Madagascar). Queland Loïc in a finale boulder of the Réunion Roc Star Contest. An amazing atmosphere with a crazy crowd. 

I took this photo during the final stages of a natural climbing contest. Together with some friends, we organized this two-day event on natural boulders that nobody knew about and which we kept secret right up until the day of the event.

During the fiercely contested final, Loïc completed the third boulder in superb style thanks to an incredible mental battle, which gave me the chance to capture all his emotion at the top of the boulder. A moment that would see him take his place on the podium.

About the photographer: Veillard Antoine has been a photographer for over 10 years. He tries his hand at a bit of everything, but what really gets him going is sports photography (surfing, climbing, kitesurfing, mountain biking, etc.). After spending 13 years in Réunion, where he took this photo, he moved to France a year ago. It’s been a life-changing move that’s given him the chance to explore a new playground and new sports to photograph. See more of his work here and follow along @antoine_veillard_photographe

Flow Storm Crux by Chris Thai (Honorable Mention)

Tiana Swartz prepares herself for the dynamic crux on Flow Storm (V7) in Heaven’s Gate near Eleven Mile Canyon, Colorado. The move requires throwing to the next hold and cutting feet, making it the defining sequence of the climb. 

About the photographer: Chris Thai is a Denver-based photographer and climber who focuses on climbing, outdoor recreation, and community. He started bringing a camera to climbing events as a way to document the people around him and help local communities. That grew into photographing competitions, community events, and climbers both at home and while traveling. His work tends to focus on the people and moments around climbing as well as the climbing itself. When he’s not photographing climbers, you can find him with his camera documenting his cat doing absolutely normal cat things. Follow along @Thaifighter3.14

Falling off the First Crux, by Cris Posadas (Honorable Mention)

Ainhize Belar falling on the first crux of Víctimas Pérez (9a/5.14d) in Racó de la Finestra in Margalef, Spain, with the iconic Lyon head in the background, visible from the inside of Finestra’s roof. I’m not actually sure if this move is recognized as “the crux” of that line, but she fell a couple of times there, so it is at least her crux at the time.

About the photographer: Cris Posadas is an Argentinian photographer who has lived in Spain and is currently based in Chile. He specializes in climbing and mountain photography. He is the founder of Gamantri and a passionate overall climber. You can see more of Cris Posadas’s work at @gamantri.

The post Crux: 9 Photos That Capture the Power and Struggle of a Climb’s Hardest Move appeared first on Climbing.

The rocks we climb may be incredibly old, but the people who climb them span a remarkable breadth of ages. We’ve seen two year olds bouldering and 80-year-olds spryly sending sport climbs. In the past year alone, we’ve written about a nine-year-old crushing a 5.14b, a 51-year-old sending his first 5.14d after nearly a decade of trying, and what it’s like to get into climbing in your sixties.

However young or middle aged or old you may be, take a moment to behold the vast age range of climbers across this planet. These are our six favorite photographs in the Rock and Ages category of our 2026 Summer Photo Contest, from Spain to India to the Gunks. Below, each photographer shares the story behind the shot.

Era Leo at 11 by Cris Posadas (Winner)

Leo Cea sticks the crux move of Era Vella (9a/5.14d) in Margalef, Spain, a couple of days before becoming the youngest person ever to climb the grade at 11 years old. The photo was taken in November 2024. 

At 11 years of age, Leo made the second ascent fo Tecnoking in March of 2024 in Chile. The line was confirmed as 9a (5.14d). But, as complex as the climbing grading system is, the grade was a bit questionable to some. So that same year, Leo had the chance to travel to Margalef, and had his eyes on Era Vella to confirm the youngest 9a in history. 

Curiously enough, that season was the DANA weather phenomenon in Spain that caused the floods in Valencia and intense rains all over the country—so worst conditions possible. 

Leo ended up sending the route on November 15, 2024, just before turning 12, and the shot is from the first time he stuck the crux move, as far as I remember. 

About the photographer: Cris Posadas is an Argentinian photographer who has lived in Spain and is currently based in Chile. He specializes in climbing and mountain photography. He is the founder of Gamantri and a passionate overall climber. You can see more of Cris Posadas’s work at @gamantri.

Franco, 76, Climbs Lots of Flies by Aditya Gandhi (Runner Up)

A veteran of the climbing community in India, Franco Linhares (age 76) consistently challenges himself on demanding routes, inspiring climbers of all ages through his commitment, strength, and enthusiasm for the sport.

As the photographer, I wanted to capture the moment he clears the crux after a powerful section. The image highlights his expression at the instant the hold is secured.

Franco Linhares is an absolute legend within the community. After completing many of his outdoor projects, he is focused on his Basalt Climbing Foundation, which aims to help children from rural communities reach the Olympic podium by 2036.

This photo was taken this past May on the sport route Lots of Flies (7a/5.11d) in Belapur, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It proves that age is no barrier to achieving gritty sends and enjoying the sport week after week.

About the photographer: Based in Mumbai, Aditya Gandhi is a climber and outdoor photographer drawn to capturing the beauty of climbing and the outdoors. He spends most of his time exploring local crags and, inevitably, sanding down his fingers.

Laurent Sending in the Font by Soline Ralite (Runner Up)

This picture shows my friend Laurent sending Les Yeux Plus Gros Que le Ventre, a 7C+ (V10) traverse in the Font, a few months after his 60th birthday. The older he gets, the stronger he sends. He will never cease to amaze me!

About the photographer: Follow along @soline_rl

Family Sending on Pooh Corner by Dana Hyde (Honorable Mention)

My husband, Charles, climbing Pooh Corner (5.8/6a) in the Sagres area of Portugal, with the ocean stretching out below him. A beautiful classic and a must-climb for anyone visiting Portugal. 

The route name gave us a good laugh before he started climbing, but Charles quickly realized just how fitting it was. As you make your way up the crack, sections become filled with algae and a rather slimy, gooey buildup. This makes the climb a little more interesting—and a lot grosser—than expected.

By the time he reached the top, there was no question in his mind: “Pooh Corner” was definitely the right name for this route. It ended up being one of those funny climbing memories that made our Christmas trip to Portugal even more memorable.

Charles only began climbing a few years ago, at the age of 37. By the time this photo was taken, he was 41—fully in love with the sport. What started as one person discovering climbing has become something our whole family now shares: a passion that has taken us around the world, chasing beautiful places, unforgettable routes, and the experiences that come with them.

This photo captures more than just a climb. It captures the joy of starting something new, the courage to keep growing, and the way climbing has opened up the world for our family.

About the photographer: Dana Hyde is a hobbyist photographer who has loved photography for as long as she can remember. She really started getting into it after her son was born, when she bought her first camera to capture memories of him growing up.

As he got older and developed a passion for climbing, her photography naturally followed. Today, she spends a lot of time photographing her son, husband, and friends climbing. She’s also a volunteer photographer for her son’s climbing team. Follow along @danahydephotog

Evelyn on Absurdland by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis (Honorable Mention)

Evelyn, age 11 (at the time of this photo), climbing Absurdland (5.9) in the Gunks, upstate New York.

About the photographer: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis is working on a long-term photo project about the Gunks community. He intends to display the wide diversity of Gunks climbers, from the people having a fun day on 5.4 multi-pitches, to crushers projecting 5.12 trad. See his work here and follow along @jessejiryudavis.

Leo on Victimas by Cris Posadas (Honorable Mention)

Leo Cea at 11 years of age, trying Víctimas Perez (9a/5.14d) in Racó de la Finestra. This was a “rest” day from his project at the time (Era Vella) in Margalef. He sent that route a couple of days later, becoming the youngest person to ever climb 9a. A little more than a year later, he also sent Víctimas Perez (this line) on a rainy day.

About the photographer: Cris Posadas is an Argentinian photographer who has lived in Spain and is currently based in Chile. He specializes in climbing and mountain photography. He is the founder of Gamantri and a passionate overall climber. You can see more of Cris Posadas’s work at @gamantri.

The post Rock and Ages: 6 Photos of Rock Climbers Young and Old appeared first on Climbing.

In June, we launched a Summer Photo Contest to showcase the most outstanding images that capture the beauty, emotion, culture, breadth, and power of our sport. We called upon professionals and amateurs alike to share the shots they waited patiently for, whether on the ground or thousands of feet up.

We received nearly 250 submissions from all corners of the globe, from seaside cliffs in Portugal to alpine climbs in Greenland. As you wait for the heat and chaos of summer to give way to the more favorable conditions of fall, seek out some visual inspiration with the winners, runners-up, and photos that received honorable mentions in our summer contest.

Crux

Our call to action for the Crux category? Capture climbers contemplating, pulling through, and falling off the crux.

Juanse Goes for the Rodeo by Esteban Escalante

The winning photo put an unexpected spin on the typical crux shot. With all the ominous drama of a Francisco Goya painting or other Romantic work, this image by a Colombian photographer of a Colombian climber communicates the hope and desperation of navigating the crux in an utterly mystical setting. Photographer Esteban Escalante shows us a climber’s version of shooting for the moon: an improbable rodeo clip. While the climber didn’t quite manage to lasso the draw, he did continue up this 5.13b route for the onsight.

In the photographer’s words: Juanse [Juan Sebastien Sanchez Martin], a great Colombian climber, was looking for a way to clip the last quickdraw on the crux of La Crespa Dura, this beautiful 5.13b, which he onsighted. Juanse is a professional climber who has sent up to 5.14a. 

I took the photo in a beautiful moorland, where it was starting to rain, which made sending the route even more interesting. This route is in the Santurbán Moorland of Colombia.

About the photographer: Esteban Escalante is a photographer and climber. He has found catharsis through photography. He is currently recovering from an accident in the mountains and says he is thankful to be alive. Recovery has been his “life’s project” one step at a time. Follow along @mochiladventure or @estebanphoto.

See all of the runner-up photos in the Crux category.

The Dirtbags Aren’t Dead

Cedar Wright famously proclaimed the dirtbag an endangered species in a 2014 Climbing essay. A former Climbing editor countered that dirtbagging isn’t dead, only notably different than the paragon set by the Yosemite Stonemasters. Or did Luke Mehall have the last word when he declared that “the dirtbags aren’t dead, they’re just in Mexico,” in an essay for the Climbing Zine?

We turned the age-old question of whether dirtbags have gone extinct to photographers, who sent us portraits of car-dwellers, nocturnal boulderers, and crag-based communities. While some of their scenes display the sort of shenanigans that may arouse suspicion among parents, white collar workers, and the government, we’re here to celebrate it.

True Dirtbags in Indian Creek by Reilly Kaczmarek

The winning Dirtbags Aren’t Dead shot came from the windblown sands, proud buttes, and supreme cracks of Indian Creek in Utah. Like two colorful objects planted in a Dalí desert landscape, the dirtbags in question are doing what dirtbags do best: facing the landscape and the sky, totally free, in direct communion with their surroundings. The primary colors and splayed-out posture of the closer dirtbag in particular expresses a pure, childlike joy. In a modern world of screens, automation, and grayscale, the unapologetic freedom captured here will never go out of style.

In the photographer’s words: Makar Shpilenok and P. Rene Aronson show what it means to be on a climbing trip in the desert. René, Makar, and I had rolled into the Creek the night before. We’d left late, followed offline maps down unmarked roads, and pitched in the dark with that low sense we might be somewhere we shouldn’t be. This was shot the next morning, on November 20, 2023, on a romp to soak up the sun and enjoy our newfound independence in the desert. (You can read our full trip report in Wayward Magazine‘s first and latest edition.)

The three of us go back to high school. After five-plus years climbing together, the roles settle without discussion: Makar takes the sharp end, René cooks, I carry the camera. This trip wasn’t about sending anything hard, rather a moment to enjoy the freedom found in the hours between tying in and packing up. To me, it’s not about the send. It’s driving through the night, sleeping in sand, eating grit, and insisting none of it matters beyond our small circle, fully knowing the inherent meaning in the meaninglessness.

About the photographer: Reilly Kaczmarek is a photographer, award-winning filmmaker, and mountain athlete with a geology degree from the University of Colorado – Boulder, known for working on cold approaches, long shadows, and unmarked sceneries where clouds decide the schedule. Kaczmarek approaches each project with both technical precision and years of lived experience, paying close attention to how light moves across terrain, how bodies move through space, and how small moments compound in consequential environments. His practice is in creating art, not content. Inspired by the belief that the process matters as much as the outcome, he is guided by a simple rule: If you compromise how the work is made, you compromise what it means. Follow along @reilly_kaczmarek.

See all of the runner-up photos in the Dirtbags Aren’t Dead category.

Rock and Ages

For the third category of our Summer Photo Contest, we invited photographers to share images that celebrate the many stages of life when we climb, from two-year-olds bouldering to 60-year-olds raging up sport lines.

Era Leo at 11 by Cris Posadas

Climbers often look astoundingly miniscule in the midst of a big wall, a long route, or in the mountains. But does this climber look especially tiny to you? That’s because in this shot, he’s only 11 years old as he picks his way up the steepest section of the 148-feet (45-meter) line known as Era Vella. By emphasizing the climber’s youth and dynamic movement against a grandiose backdrop of still, towering cliffs, this photo expresses in a single motion the sheer scale of geologic time compared to the human experience in all its depth and breadth.

In the photographer’s words: Leo Cea sticks the crux move of Era Vella (9a/5.14d) in Margalef, Spain, a couple of days before becoming the youngest person ever to climb the grade at 11 years old. The photo was taken in November 2024. 

At 11 years of age, Leo made the second ascent fo Tecnoking in March of 2024 in Chile. The line was confirmed as 9a (5.14d). But, as complex as the climbing grading system is, the grade was a bit questionable to some. So that same year, Leo had the chance to travel to Margalef, and had his eyes on Era Vella to confirm the youngest 9a in history. 

Curiously enough, that season was the DANA weather phenomenon in Spain that caused the floods in Valencia and intense rains all over the country—so worst conditions possible. 

Leo ended up sending the route on November 15, 2024, just before turning 12, and the shot is from the first time he stuck the crux move, as far as I remember. 

About the photographer: Cris Posadas is an Argentinian photographer who has lived in Spain and is currently based in Chile. He specializes in climbing and mountain photography. He is the founder of Gamantri and a passionate overall climber. You can see more of Cris Posadas’s work at @gamantri.

See all of the runner-up photos in the Rock and Ages category.

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