In the summer of 2022, French alpinist and IFMGA-certified mountain guide removed four large metal stanchions from the slopes of 15,774-foot Mont Blanc. The stakes—used by guides as quick anchors on technical sections of the mountain—had been recently installed under the orders of Jean-Marc Peillex, the mayor of the nearby town Saint Gervais, the municipality with jurisdiction over several routes up the mountain.

Profit confessed to removing the stakes, and returned them to the town. Nevertheless, he was charged with the crime of stealing gear and accused by the mayor of “endangering lives.”

On June 5, a French criminal court convicted Profit, 62, for this offense. Originally facing fines upwards of €4,000 ($4,400), Profit was ultimately ordered to pay only €600 (about $660).

Profit, whose legendary exploits include various daring speed solos of some of the faces in the Alps in the 1980s, plans to appeal the ruling.

The ordeal sheds light on the decades-long discussion over who should decide how climbers scale peaks. The legitimacy of fixed gear in the mountains has been an enduring debate among climbers, particularly since 1970, when Italian mountaineer Cesare Maestri carried a gas-powered drill onto Patagonian spire Cerro Torre and installed discontinuous bolt ladders to the top. Placing fixed gear, or unilaterally removing it—as Jason Kruk and Hayden Kennedy did of Maestri’s infamous bolts in 2012—has sparked ethical debates that have been traditionally litigated within the climbing world.

Profit’s trial and conviction, however, may be the first time a governmental judicial system has officially weighed in on the topic.

Prior to the June 5 ruling against Profit, Anne-Sophie Vilquin, the president of the criminal court in Bonneville, France, that that it was “not acceptable for a man [i.e, Profit] to assume the right to impose his own vision of the profession of guide and mountaineering in defiance of all the others.”

Profit, however, asserted that his motivations were neither malicious nor authoritarian. “I removed these stakes to prevent amateur mountaineers without experience from taking unnecessary risks, when they there was a possible alternative route,” he told the French website .

Profit’s actions have also caused a rift among his fellow guides. Profit resigned from the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix where he had worked for decades, and is now guiding independently. This decision to leave the Chamonix guide company, , was “much worse than going to court.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű reached out to Profit for an interview, but he replied, “I have nothing further to add. I prefer to remain silent and return to the peaks, far from the noise.”

As Western Europe’s tallest mountain, Mont Blanc is a prized summit. And with a relatively easy route to the top, it invites over 30,000 climbers of varying experiences levels, many of them guided, every year. High traffic and easy climbing are a deadly combo in mountaineering, and with over and at least on the greater Mont Blanc massif, it one of the deadliest mountains in the world. (For comparison, Mount Everest’s total death count is just over 300.) Already this year across the Mont Blanc massif, six people died in an avalanche in April. A few days later, three more died in a slide just 25 miles from the peak. Then, a week later when a serac collapsed.

“The normal routes on ‘trophy peak’ mountains like Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Eiger, have lots of fixed equipment, from cables to fixed ropes, to help climbers get up and down,” says Calum Muskett, an IFMGA-certified guide seasonally based in the Alps. “This helps make these relatively technical and much desired routes much safer and I’m sure it will have saved lives over the years. At the same time, I don’t believe it is simply up to mountain guides to ‘dumb down’ itineraries. If a route becomes more difficult or dangerous for the group’s abilities, we should adapt and change to other objectives.”

Muskett says most of the guides he’s spoken to about the Profit story support his removal of the stanchions. “Though I believe he wants to improve safety on the mountain, Mayor Peillex has strong opinions that aren’t always considered the consensus view with alpinists and guides,” Muskett says.

Mayor Peillex has spearheaded several controversial initiatives to try to keep climbers from getting into trouble. Last year, he pursued the idea of to pay a deposit of €15,000 ($16,500) to cover the costs of potential rescues and funerals. He has said that people on Mont Blanc might be “climbing with death in their backpacks.” He recently threatened to , whom he referred to as “fools,” for sleeping on the summit, after passing a 2020 law that banned all bivouac-style tent camping on the peak. During a deadly 2018 season, he ordered the police to stop some Latvian climbers from ascending the mountain with a Latvian flag to celebrate their independence, asserting that it was “not the moment” for such a display and saying that the mountain was “angry.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű reached out to Mayor Peillex but he is currently on holiday and was not immediately available for an interview.

At first blush, it may be easy to try to paint Profit as an elitist holding an outdated mindset at odds with the new realities of climbing as an increasingly popular pastime that supports the thriving commercial guiding industry around Chamonix, and one that should be made as safe as reasonably possible for any paying client. But this caricature of Profit as the old-school traditionalist futilely attempting to hold a bulwark against the dumbing down of risk and the embrace of convenience over skill perhaps misunderstands the more nuanced justification for his actions.

In an in the guiding industry, Profit says that he removed these stakes to discourage people from following the traditional route up the Bosses ridge, where a large and dangerous crevasse has opened after a decade of unusually warm temperatures. Profit suggests guides now take the “DĂ©dĂ© Rhem,” a variation Profit pioneered that is admittedly much longer, but one that he believes is the more reasonable and safer.

“This DĂ©dĂ© Rhem variant was not made by chance, it is the fruit of forty years of traversing the peaks,” he wrote. “At Mont Blanc, on a glacier route, it is easy to adapt to find an alternative to a passage that is causing problems in order to avoid the installation of help points.”

Profit says these stakes weren’t even in a place where they could help catch potential falls. He also says he was able to remove two stakes by hand due to the melting ice, suggesting that they were functionally useless anchors. Nowhere in his letter did Profit rage against the commercialization of Mont Blanc or assert the ethical purity of climbing without fixed gear in the mountains.

Instead, Profit said that the stakes were functionally useless, and that they could also mislead climbers into believing that the normal path is safe to climb when he believes it’s not.

Alas, Mother Nature may have recently rendered the entire situation moot. According to Muskett, who guided Mont Blanc in mid June, the section of the Mont Blanc route where the stakes had been placed has changed once again. “The steep section around the crevasse as described in the court case no longer exists, and it’s a relatively easy track again,” he said. “In some ways it’s amusing that the court case has been about safety management of this ephemeral feature.”

This incident speaks to a broader issue in mountaineering that guides are increasingly grappling with. What happens when routes change? It’s an ethical question that European guides will need to grapple with as the on Mont Blanc and . Of course, they are not alone—routes everywhere are set to shift as the temperature continues to tick up.

Profit, however, at the expense of his job, his public record, and his reputation, took a stand to encourage a different, albeit longer, route to the top. Instead of forcing a route with fixed gear, Profit was responding to what a rapidly changing mountain is telling him. Unfortunately for that, he was punished.

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Not so long ago, the headline “Dirtbag Rock Climbers Walk Down the Red Carpet to Accept Their Academy Award” would have seemed like an oxymoron—a violation of the very laws of nature.

But in 2019 it happened: light stopped being the fastest thing in the universe, up became down, and a little rock-climbing filmÌęcalled Free Solo won the Best Documentary Oscar. Sure enough, a bunch of climbers, who once were only recognized at dusty Camp 4 picnic tables in Yosemite Valley, strutted up onto that rarified stage. They even appeared to have showered.

The trajectory of the climbing-film canon tracks right alongside the progression of the sport itself—from the speed-metal-fueled flicks of the early nineties, to Hollywood’s extravagant mountaineering hyperboles of the 2000s, to the recent gripping vĂ©ritĂ© films showing the world’s best athletes laying their actual lives on the line.

Whether the below films are all “great” by today’sÌęstandards is beside the point—though great they all are in their own ways. They are mandatory viewing for anyone who calls themselves a climber. Watch them, quote them, be inspired by them, and, as Anderl Meier of The Eiger Sanction says, together “we shall continue with style.” Here are the 20 best climbing films ever.

20. North Face (2010)

Climbing the North Face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps was one of the first “last great problems” of mountaineering. It gained its fearsome reputation after various attempts resulted in climbers dying in horrible and gruesome ways. Ìę(Nordwand, as it’s titled in German) dramatizes one of these horrific failures: the 1936 disaster in which Andreas Hinterstoisser, Toni Kurz, Willy Angerer, and Edi Rainer all perished. This subtitled German-language film veers from some of the historical facts but hews closely to the most haunting details from the tragedy, including a depiction of poor, doomed Kurz dangling for an eternity with thousands of feet of air beneath him, yet too far away from the mountainside to get himself back onto firm ground. The political subplots involving the Nazi regime’s ambitions around the first ascent of the Eiger’s “Murder Wall” slow the film down some, but hang in there—with all due respect to Herr Kurz—for some thrilling climbing drama.

Watch North Face

19. Sherpa (2015)

Mount Everest was the stage for two major films released in 2015. Everest, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, and Keira Knightley, is a dramatization of the infamous 1996 tragedy documented in Jon Krakauer’s iconic book . But it is the other Everest film released that year, Sherpa, that delivers a better depiction of the tensions and dangers on the mountain today. Following the 2013 “Everest Brawl” that broke out after an unfortunate confrontation between a Sherpa rope-fixing team and three European hotshots, including the late Ueli Steck, Sherpa director Jennifer Peedom went to the peak in 2014 with the idea of doing a documentary on the IndigenousÌęporters. That year, 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche while working to fix ropes and ladders across the dangerous Khumbu Icefall. The resulting film is richly textured, centering on a group of people who too often have been left out of the spotlight on the world’s tallest mountain. If you’re going to watch one thing about Everest, make it this.

Watch SherpaÌę

18. Rampage (1999)

Go to any bouldering area in California today, where hordes of pad-carrying, tune-bumping young guns session five-star sickness, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine a time when most climbers didn’t take bouldering seriously, deriding it as “practice climbing.” Films like , though, helped usher in the bouldering revolution, opening up the sport to a wider and more youthfulÌędemographic. Rampage is the story of the then 18-year-old Chris Sharma, now considered one of the best rock climbers in history, and his charismatic, strong friend Obe Carrion, taking a road trip to some classic blocks around the West. Sharma slaps his way up dozens of first ascents of now iconic problems, demonstrating in the process why bouldering would be here to stay.

Watch Rampage on Ìęor

17. Masters of Stone I (1991)

The videos were the first serialized climbing films. Eric Perlman (and also, originally, Mike Hatchett) directed a total of six Masters of Stone films over roughly two decades, beginning in 1991. But the first four, all released in the nineties, best represent the Masters of Stone brand of hardcore, heavy-metal-fueled extreme-sports action. These early works featured the day’s top brass, including Ron Kauk, Boone Speed, John Bachar, and, perhaps most memorably, Dan Osman. The latter performs some outrageous rope jumps and beautiful free solos, plus one in which he launches a totally reckless all-points-off dyno 400 feet up a wall. Choosing a favorite among the group is tough, but my vote goes to the OG: .

Watch Masters of Stone

16. Cliffhanger (1993)

set the bar for contrived absurdity deliciously high. The characters of this fictional action flick are frequently shown free-soloing while wearing harnesses and full racks of climbing gear, for example. The film’s greatest gift to climbers, however, is the concept of a bolt gun, which shoots a bolt and hanger into the rock with a simple pull of the trigger. But peering behind the scenes of Cliffhanger, one finds legit authenticity: the climbing writer John Long inspired the concept, and none other than Wolfgang GĂŒllich, perhaps the best climber in the world at the time, was Sylvester Stallone’s stunt double. (Stallone reportedly admitted to a fear of heights.) Then, after GĂŒllich died in a car accident in 1992, Ron Kauk stepped in to finish the film’s stunts.

Watch Cliffhanger

15. Vertical Limit (2000)

The first time climbers watch , they laugh so hard that they start to cry. The Hollywood film is primarily set on K2, where everyone becomes an amphetamine junkie and then starts killing each other over the scarce supply of “dex.” But the opening scene, shot in Monument Valley, Arizona, is the best part. The two main characters, siblings Peter and Annie, are climbing with their father when a separate rope team above fully detaches from the wall. Right before theyÌęswing down, Peter shouts, for no reason, “We got amateurs at 12 o’clock, check your safety!” Then the dad blows a whistle (huh?). The falling climbers proceed to hit the lower team and shear bolts out of the rock, leaving everyone dangling from a single cam. This forces Peter to dramatically cut the cord, which kills his father. As you wipe away the tears (of laughter), you think, That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Watch Vertical Limit

14. The Eiger Sanction (1975)

the climbing scenes in some of the “most realistic in all of Hollywood climbing.” And while the plot of this spy thriller doesn’t make sense, and the 1970s-era sexism and racism will make you cringe, the climbing scenes, at least, have stood the test of time. Desert-tower climbing aficionados in particular will appreciate the rare footage of Clint Eastwood sending the Totem Pole—considered the tallest, skinniest spire in the world—in Monument Valley. The film crew obtained permission to climb this striking, slender monolithÌęfrom the Navajo Council, with the agreement that they’d cleanÌęall pitons left behind by prior climbers. Eastwood’s is considered the last legal ascent of this rare and beautiful tower. The beer that he and George Kennedy drink on top in the film must have tasted especially good.

Watch The Eiger Sanction

13. Dosage: Volume II (2003)

, from director Josh Lowell at Big UpÌęProductions, was post–Masters of Stone and pre–. Between 2001 and 2008, the Dosage series released five DVD volumes that featured some of the most memorable short films, or “doses,” of climbing in that era. Check out Dosage: Volume V to see Beth RoddenÌęnail the first ascent of Meltdown (5.14c), arguably the hardest rock climb ever established by a woman. And Chris Sharma sends the first ascent of Realization (now called Biographie) in Dosage: Volume I. The deep-water-soloing segment in MajorcaÌęwith Klem Loskott in Dosage: Volume II, however, is a personal favorite that inspired me to take .

Watch Dosage on Ìęor

12. Torn (2022)

It’s hard to call Torn, directed by Max Lowe, a climbing film, yet it deserves its place on this list because it does a better job than any others here in capturing the emotional carnage wrought by a loved one’s death. Max’s father, Alex Lowe, was killed during an avalanche on Tibet’s Shishapangma in 1999, while his climbing partner, Conrad Anker, survived. Alex was considered the best all-around climber in the world, and stories of his legendary stoke and superhuman feats imbued him with hero status. His death left the climbing world reeling—and three young boys without a dad. Now an adult, Max set out to create a documentary about the loss of his father, whose remains were found in a glacier in 2016. In the process, he discovers that it’s a path to healing.

Watch Torn

11. King Lines (2007)

Produced by Sender Films and Big Up Productions, was one of the first high-quality, feature-length climbing films to break out of the short-form dosage mold, raising the bar for climbing storytelling to something beyond mere climbing porn. King Lines is a profile of Chris Sharma, who spent at least two decades of his career widely being called the world’s best rock climber. This film centers on Sharma’s quest to establish the hardest deep-water solo in the world, on Es Pontas, an offshore arch in Majorca.

Watch King Lines on ÌęorÌę

10. Hard Grit (1998)

The sound of a heartbeat opens the documentary , as we see a climber making his way up a plug of gritstone in the Peak District of England. The heartbeat quickens as he inches higher, entering the no-fall zone well above his last piece of gear. He lurches toward a hold but comes up short. He screams and takes a massive fall, nearly hitting the ground but instead crashing into the wall and breaking his leg. For this scene—and many that are very funny, thanks to some wonderful self-deprecating British humor—Hard Grit remains a timeless classic. It captures how many of the best and most important early rock climbers in the UK, from Jerry Moffatt and Ben Moon to Leo Houlding and Johnny Dawes, dealt with fear, and it shows why taking risks is important.

Watch Hard Grit

9. Progression (2009)

When the feature-length film came out in the late aughts, climbing was on the brink of changing in a big way. Viral media bonanzas that swept the country, like the one surrounding the first Dawn Wall free ascentÌęto climbing’s Olympic debutÌęto the climbing-gym revolution, were right on the horizon. This film, about a series of climbers pushing the sport to the next level, seems especially prescient in hindsight. Progression features the first look at Tommy Caldwell’s vision for the Dawn Wall, for example, as well as Kevin Jorgeson’s big media debut as a high-ball boulderer; that these two would eventually team up to tackle the Dawn Wall is, perhaps in a small way, the result of this film. With footage of Chris Sharma sending the world’s first 5.15b, and a young Adam Ondra promising to one day take that torch, Progression lives up to its name in every sense.

Watch Progression on ÌęorÌę

8. 14 PeaksÌę(2021)

The film is about one of the most impressive mountaineering feats of the century: Nirmal Purja’s ascent of all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in only seven months. The previous record was seven years. Purja is an utterly riveting character: charismatic, confident (sometimes even cocky), and fiercely committed to his very dangerous quest. The documentary is beautifully shot and displays some high-quality Himalayan footage, but the tender humanity in the contrast between Purja’sÌęimmense ambition and willingness to risk himself and his ailing mother’s mortality back home is what elevates the film.

Watch 14 Peaks

7. Valley Uprising (2014)

They say that Yosemite is the center of the rock-climbing universe, and culturally speaking, it’s hard to argue otherwise. In the 1970s, the park’s Camp 4 campground was home to a band of rock-climbing hippies called the Stonemasters, which included Ron Kauk, John Bachar, Lynn Hill, John Long, Dean Fidelman, and others. They weren’t just pushing the limits and establishing big new routes, they were defining a kind of counterculture, dirtbag way of life that was more than an aesthetic. Their commitment to renouncing the creature comforts of mainstream society in order to party, do drugs, live free, and climb as much as possible persists in climbing today. The era is immortalized (albeit through a nostalgic lens) in Sender Films’ second feature, . The documentary captures the essence of climbing’s bohemian background, and in doing so, it illuminates where the climbing lifestyle is going next.

Watch Valley Uprising or

6. Reel Rock 7 (2012)

The is climbing’s annual movie celebration, premiering memorable, riveting, and well-told climbing stories. There’s always at least one outstanding work each year, alongside others that are merely great. Reel Rock 15’s Black Ice comes to mind for its affecting portrait of a group of Memphis, Tennessee, climbers who try ice climbing for the first time. So does Reel Rock 12’s Break on Through, which documents Margo Hayes’s journey in becoming the first woman to climb a 5.15. And who doesn’t loveÌęReel Rock 11’sÌę,Ìęabout Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, Ben Ditto, and brothers Nico and Olivier Favresse’s sea-faring big-wall adventure? But if I had to choose just one year to watch, I’d have to go with ;Ìęit captures the near Shakespearean drama of Chris Sharma and Adam Ondra’s battle to be first to climb La Dura Dura (5.15c), presents parts of the Meru Shark’s Fin saga (see below), and highlights the “Wide Boyz”—Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker, two brilliant trad climbers from the UK—doing a 5.14 offwidth in America, as well as Alex Honnold covering more vertical terrain in Yosemite in a single day than anyone in history.

Watch all the Reel Rock films

5. The Alpinist (2021)

Marc-AndrĂ© Leclerc was one of the most enigmatic and boldest climbers of his generation. The Canadian, known for his mop of curly hair and goofy grin, completed unbelievable solos in the big mountains of Patagonia and the Canadian Rockies—and yet few knew much about who Leclerc really was. In , the Sender Films team attempts to capture the real person behind these daring feats,Ìęa difficult task not just because Leclerc proved to be elusive, but because he died during the film’s production. In 2018, he and his partner, Ryan Johnson, went missing in Alaska and were presumed buried in an avalanche on their descent. While The Alpinist features some of the most gripping free-solo footage you’ll ever see, the documentary’s true success is rendering a complete portrait of a talented young man whose life was cut short.

Watch The Alpinist

4. Meru (2015)

The Shark’s Fin, or central peak of Mount Meru,Ìęin the Himalayas, has been an object of true obsession among elite alpinists around the world. For decades, many have tried and failed to reach the top of this big wall, which sits at nearly 21,000 feet. is the definitive feature film documenting Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk’s eventual first ascent. Their achievement was years in the making and included the heartbreak of just missing the summit in 2008, as well as Ozturk’s subsequent recovery from a broken back in a ski accident. The married couple Chin and Elizabeth “Chai” Vasarhelyi’s directorial debut captures the maniacal commitment that is sometimes required to achieve really hard routes, and it speaks to the lengths to which climbers will go to get to the top.

Watch Meru

3. Touching the Void Ìę(2003)

, written by Joe Simpson, is perhaps the best mountaineering book ever, as the events it describes defy belief. In 1985, disaster struck while Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, descended from the summit of 20,814-foot Siula Grande, in Peru. After Simpson fell down a cliff and broke his leg, Yates was faced with the horrible decision of cutting the rope, knowing it would kill Simpson but that otherwise both would die. Yates agonized but ultimately did what needed to be done to save himself. Amazingly, Simpson was mangled but not killed by his fall into the crevasse. With two broken legs, he actually crawled out of itÌęand off the mountain—but barely survived.Ìę honors the book with remarkable fidelity and a quality of filmmaking that quite possibly remains unmatched in any climbing film before or since.

Watch Touching the Void

2. The Dawn Wall (2017)

The Dawn Wall was , marking 2015 as the year the once fringe sport finally gained mainstream awareness and interest. So much coverage and attention were paid to Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s first free ascent of this route on El Capitan that it seemed unlikely a subsequent film could ever impress hardcore climbers who were sick of hearing about it. And yet —włóŸ±łŠłó explores Caldwell’s incredible life story, from being kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Kyrgzstan, to cutting his finger off with a table saw, to his painful divorce from fellow pro climber Beth Rodden—managed to surpass everyone’s expectations for how rich and rewarding a climbing film could be.

Watch The Dawn Wall

1. Free Solo (2018)

Of courseÌęÌęis number one on this list—it’s the only climbing film to win an Oscar. It dissects Alex Honnold’s completion of the first free solo of El Capitan, a goal he’d been working toward for a decade, building up his skill, confidence, and uncanny ability to turn off the part of the brain that should feel very, very afraid. I consider Honnold’s achievement not only the greatest climb of all time but perhaps . Directors Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi could have filmed Honnold’s four-hour solo with a handheld iPhone from the Yosemite Valley floor, and it still would’ve had me gripped. Instead, the awesome top-down footage that Chin and his team captured of Honnold performing hard, scary moves without a rope, 3,000 feet up America’s biggest monolith, is just spectacular, palm-sweating, adrenaline-inducing goodness. Beyond the climbing footage, Free SoloÌęseriously attempts to answer the question of why climbers are compelled to risk it all for such an elusive reward; it turns out, that answer can’t really be put into words, not even by Honnold himself, but must be experienced directly and viscerally, withÌęyour heart racing at the airy sweep of exposure beneath your feet. Free Solo helps viewers experience a taste of what that’s like. And for that reason, it’s everything a climbing film should be.

Watch Free Solo

The post The 20 Best Climbing Films of All Time appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When I learned how to climb in 1998, there was such a scarcity of information on the activity that one could reasonably read everything written on the subject. And I did. I devoured everything from the dozens of classic how-to tomes by John Long to some utterly inscrutable posts by a guy known as Passthepitonspete on nascent climbing internet forums, which I printed out and brought with me on my first trip to Yosemite.

Today’s climbers have the opposite problem: there’s so much information out there that knowing where to begin is as daunting a task as climbing El Capitan for the first time. Now, , the online-education subscription service, has jumped into the fray with taught by Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell.

You may have heard of them. Honnold is the lunatic who free-soloed El Capitan, and Caldwell is the nine-fingered hardhead who spent ten years of his life banging away at El Cap’s Dawn Wall. They’re also two of the most prolific rock climbers of all time, not to mention wonderful, funny people, and they’ve teamed up to accomplish many significant feats, including the first traverse of the Fitz Roy massifÌęin Patagonia, Argentina, as well as a sub-two-hour ascent of the Nose of El Cap with a time of 1:58:07, the current record.

If you’ve ever dreamed of free-soloing El Cap or single-pushing it up the Dawn Wall, then this is the course for you. I’m joking, of course, while simultaneously cringing at the thought of all the gullible chompers out there who might entertain such ill-advised reverie.

Though all of the aforementioned climbing feats are referenced copiously throughout this MasterClass—and bolstered by an archive of video footage that will be familiar if you’ve seen Free Solo or any Reel Rock films—the actual curriculum covers just the fundamentals, from basic climbing techniques to an overview of gear and how to tackle bouldering, sport climbing, and trad climbing.

The course’s 14 classes (each between five and ten minutes) are broken down into tutorials that include Footwork, Climbing Holds, Crack Climbing, and Taking It Outdoors. There are also more lighthearted lessons, like Don’t Be a Gumby, in which Honnold riffs on the “joyous” if “semi-derogatory” term for a beginner climber. He admits he mostly uses the word self-referentially, anytime he makes a “gumby move.”

“If you’re wearing your climbing shoes in the parking lot, you’re doing it wrong, you’re gumbying,” Honnold says, accurately. And while this kind of brusque declaration (classic Honnold) might rub some beginners the wrong way, it quickly pivots to an actual teachable moment: every objective requires the right equipment, at the right time.

What MasterClass is and who it’s for have been the target of a number of interesting cultural critiques, from skits to a more serious in The Atlantic. A subscription to MasterClass costs $15 and provides access to its full library of online courses. Disclosure: I’m a satisfied annual subscriber. (Full disclosure: I’m also friends with both Honnold and Caldwell.) I like it because I can dip into 15 minutes of writing inspiration from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell or David Sedaris in the morning, then learn a new way to roast a chicken from Gordon Ramsey in the afternoon. Of course, I don’t watch these MasterClasses under the delusion that I’m actually going to become a master. But the fact is, high performers are often just inherently interesting, smart people. MasterClass brings you into close proximity to world-class performers. As much as I appreciate learning how to fillet a Dover sole from Thomas Keller, I also love being exposed to his odd quirks as a chef; I’ve watched him go through so much parchment paper on his cutting boards that I suspect he must have paper toilet-seat covers throughout his home.

Honnold and Caldwell’s rock-climbing MasterClass is designed for true beginners. Yet these two have such a good rapport that even advanced climbers would probably happily sit through all of their lessons regardless of whether they learned anything new. You’ll probably chuckle at the sight of two guys wearing helmets to demonstrate sport climbing up an uninspiring choss heap in the middle of nowhere, when you know damn well that they didn’t even wear helmets while taking 100-foot whippers on their speed ascents on El Cap—but it’s still entertaining to watch them go through the motions of being responsible educators.

The post Now Even Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell Have a MasterClass appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Brutal. That’s the word that comes to mind to describe the women’s combined sport climbing finals competition in its debut in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Brutal route setting—with exceptionally difficult, shoulder-y movements. And brutal conditions—with the hottest temperatures and highest humidity of the week. But ultimately, the competition produced predictable results as Janja Garnbret, 22, of Slovenia, arguably the most dominant comp climber of all time, won the gold medal. Garnbret took first place in the bouldering and lead climbing events, and fifth in speed, for a total score of 5 (5 x 1 x 1).

Miho Nonaka, 24, and Akiyo Noguchi, 32, both of Japan and favorites to make the podium, took the silver and bronze medals, respectively. Nonaka went third, third, and fifth in speed, bouldering, and lead for a score of 45, and Noguchi took fourth place in all three events for a final score of 64. For Noguchi, the bronze medal marks the end of her career,Ìęas she announced her retirement from competition climbing with these Games.

Brooke Raboutou, the only American woman to make finals, came in fifth overall after some unfortunate slips in both bouldering and lead. While Garnbret was technically the only woman to reach the top of two of the three boulder problems in the bouldering round, Raboutou was right there with her—getting to the final holds on those same first two problems but then slipping off before she could show control. Raboutou’s finishing score in the bouldering event belies her performance—she climbed incredibly well.

If the boulder problems seemed too difficult to really make the event interesting and competitive, the lead route appeared even harder. Not even Garnbret could come all that close to the top, despite putting up an incredible fight and reaching the highest of any competitor. Raboutou appeared to rush a move low on the route, and came up short on a hard-to-hit two-finger pocket, leaving her visibly disappointed. Chaehyun Seo of South Korea, a lead-climbing specialist, came in second in the lead event, nearly matching Garbret’s high point. Seo’s eighth-and seventh-place finishes in speed and bouldering, respectively, weren’t good enough for Seo to make much use of this impressive second-place finish in lead.

After watching the men’s sport climbing finals yesterday, it appeared that a first-place finish in any of the events guaranteed you a medal. Alberto Gines Lopez got first place in speed and did well enough in bouldering and lead climbing that the math worked out in his favor to award him the gold medal. The same almost held true on the women’s side. Aleksandra Miroslaw, a speed climbing specialist from Poland, set a new world record to win the speed event with a time of 6.84 seconds. Miroslaw then came in eighth place in both bouldering and lead. Still, the math worked out to give her 64 points—tying Noguchi for third place. However, the combined format rules dictate that an athlete’s performance in the qualifying round acts as the tiebreaker, which is why Noguchi got the medal.

The brutal route setting led to a women’s finals that lacked much of the drama of yesterday’s men’s finals, where the gold medal came down to the very last competitor’s performance. But it’s hard to argue that Garnbret, Nonaka, and Noguchi don’t deserve their spots on the podium.

As climbing’s Olympic debut draws to a close, the conversation will inevitably turn to evaluating how the spotlight of this stage will affect the sport going forward. This week, sport climbing became the top-trending Olympic sport, according to Google Trends. And with climbing returning to the Olympics in Paris in 2024, there will be much to look forward to.

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After three grueling rounds of competition in speed climbing, bouldering, and lead, the male climber who would take home the gold medal in sport climbing’s Olympic debut all came down to the final competitor of the night: Jakob Schubert.

Schubert, 30, is Austria’s best competition climber, a three-time world champion with at least 22 World Cup victories. Alongside Tomoa Narasaki of Japan and Adam Ondra of the Czech Republic, Schubert was considered a favorite to win it all. However, due to the unpredictable nature of the controversial combined format—in which the final results of all three disciplines are multiplied together to determine the ultimate results—no one was precisely sure who would win.

If Schubert managed to surpass the highpoint of Spain’s Alberto GinĂ©s Lopez on the lead wall, but then fell below Ondra’s high point, then Ondra would win gold. If he fell below GinĂ©s Lopez, then the Spanish climber would win. (If this , you’re .) Instead, Schubert crushed the route and became the only person to reach the top.

Yet even Schubert had no idea what his successful ascent meant: “After I topped out, I didn’t even know that I had the medal. Only after our national coach Reini Scherer pointed out to me that I was third could I believe it. What a moment. I won’t forget anytime soon,” he said in a press release.

Schubert’s incredible effort in the lead event earned him a bronze medal, meaning GinĂ©s Lopez took home the gold, and Nathaniel Coleman, the American climber from Salt Lake City, won silver.

It’s hard to say what is more shocking: that 18-year-old GinĂ©s Lopez—a relative unknown on the comp scene with one seventh-place and two fifth-place finishes in World Cups earlier this year—is the first-ever sport-climbing Olympic champion, or the conspicuous absence from the podium of Ondra, who is widely considered the best rock climber in the world, and Narasaki, an absolute monster with a world championship title and the holder of the Japanese speed record with 5.73 seconds.

This surprising result is a function of the combined format—włóŸ±łŠłó many climbers grumbled about when it was first announced in 2016. In response to the International Olympic Committee allotting sport climbing only one medal for the 2020 Games, the International Federation of Sport Climbing created the combined format as a way to showcase all three disciplines as opposed to choosing just one. The format would mean that speed climbing, considered somewhat gimmicky by most comp climbers, would be given equal weight to the more revered and established disciplines of sport climbing and bouldering.

Indeed, Ginés Lopez was the person who won the speed event. He came in seventh in bouldering and fourth in lead, which is a total score of 28 (1 x 7 x 4). Coleman came in sixth in speed, first in bouldering, and fifth in lead for 30 points. Schubert went seventh, fifth, and first for 35 points.

It’s easy to see how the results could’ve been totally different had a number of factors gone in another direction. If, for example, Bassa Mawem—who took first place in speed in the qualifying event on Tuesday and, in doing so, set the current Olympics speed-climbing record of 5.45 seconds—hadn’t torn his biceps later on during the qualifying lead event and thus withdrew from the finals, or if Narasaki, perhaps the best speed climber of the remaining finalists, hadn’t slipped and false-started in the final speed round, it’s unlikely that GinĂ©s Lopez would be wearing the gold medal.

“There were so many elements, like Bassa not being there, that affected the results,” said Schubert in his press release.

Another irony is that Ondra, for whom speed climbing is a notorious weakness, had his personal best performance in that event with 7.03 seconds and a solid fourth-place finish. But then a sixth-place finish in bouldering and second in lead kept him off the podium.

“The route was really interesting and created emotion, but it required a lot of endurance, and Jakob Schubert had more,” said Ondra, according to by Natalie Berry of UKClimbing. Ondra praised the Japanese for organizing a great event. “It’s been a really nice time.”

This was the way the chips (and climbers) fell, creating an objectively exciting—if difficult to follow and seemingly capricious—event.

A few of the climbers who didn’t make finals hinted, albeit as graciously as possible, that they were miffed by the format.

On Instagram, German climber Alex Megos Ìę“The Olympics are over for me. With a 9th place I’m the first one who didn’t make finals. Frustration and disappointment are the first two words that come to mind when I think about my performance. And for now there is not much else to say. At some point I’ll probably write more about the whole process, my doubts about the Olympics and the format and the time in Japan itself. Good bye Japan.”

“I waited [for] this moment for two years and now it is finished leaving a sour taste,” Italian Laura Rogora on her Instagram.

For better or worse, this will be the last time we see the combined format in the Olympics. In 2024, each discipline will receive its own medal.

Tomorrow is the women’s finals. And if what we just saw is any indication, it’s anyone’s Games to win or lose.

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At first glance, Alex Honnold and Cedar Wright are a strange pair. Honnold is 35, doesn’t drink, and trains constantly. He looks as if he were chiseled from marble by Michelangelo. Wright, 46, calls to mind a different Michelangelo—the Ninja Turtle. He’s the life of the party, he caps off training days with pizza and whiskey, and he has passions other than rock climbing, including paragliding and filmmaking. They’re both opinionated, stubborn, and contrarian.

They’re also from different generations. When the two met in Yosemite in 2007, a couple thousand feet up the side of El Capitan, Wright had been on the North Face team for nearly five years, and Honnold was just getting noticed, quietly repeating some of Peter Croft’s free solos from back in the eighties. And yet theirs has become one of the climbing world’s most beloved friendships.

We interviewed each man separately, asking them the same questions about the other. They explained what makes their partnership work so well and unknowingly riffed off each other—as soul mates tend to do.

Shared Convictions

“There’s no replacement for spending time on real rock.”

Alex Honnold: Cedar really represents a previous generation who were all about big outings. You know, the climbers who grew up adventuring in the outdoors, without access to a climbing gym. I represent the first generation of climbers who grew up in a gym. But I personally enjoy that old-school style of climbing.

Cedar Wright: One of my first big free ascents was Uncertainty Principle, on Sentinel Rock—this really beautiful formation in Yosemite Valley. I remember being frustrated by a 5.13 pitch and asking a friend, climber Jose Pereyra, what I could do to get stronger. He said, “The universe will train you.” I’m not sure if I think the universe trains me, but I do believe there’s no replacement for spending time on real rock, a philosophy Honnold and I share. In this day and age, the concept of training has become extremely gym focused, about pure performance. For us it’s about heading out and being unsure if what we want to do is going to be possible.

AH: Even though we prefer outdoor epics, we both value the strength that only focused gym training can bring. He’s always motivated to do basic fitness with me. Even after he started paragliding a lot, he’s still hang boarding and staying relatively fit.

Good-Natured Smack Talk

“Honnold is a terrible partner for a lot of people, for sure.”

AH: If I’m being mean, I’d call him the world’s weakest professional climber. I’m thinking specifically about a few of the bike-touring trips we’ve done together [including riding to and summiting all 15 of California’s fourteeners in 2013]. There were certain routes that he’d see and say, “I won’t climb that, it’s too hard.” I’d be like, “It’s the classic line. It looks great.” Instead, he’d want to climb the overhanging 5.11 off-widths [cracks that are too big to fist or finger-jam, but too small for legs and upper bodies to fit inside], because he knew he could get up those rather than the beautiful, clean 5.13 corners.

CW: Honnold can be really matter-of-fact in a way that hurts your feelings. He’ll say something like “I don’t understand why you keep falling there, it’s not hard.” His way of interacting with people doesn’t come from an emotional place but from an analytical or intellectual place. Honnold is a terrible partner for a lot of people, for sure.

AH: I think he has a stronger personality than I do. I mean, he’s burned more bridges in life than I have.

CW: But I appreciate the brutal honesty. I like to confront my flaws and inadequacies head-on. I go through cycles of extreme laziness, then extreme self-loathing, then extreme motivation. Honnold has pushed me to be a better climber through his discipline and consistency, and I think I’ve pushed him as a person.

AH: I’d say my wife played a bigger role in that department than Cedar.

CW: I’m definitely a much more emotional, naturally gregarious person. Over time, Honnold has probably adopted some of my personality traits, and that’s probably been a godsend for his climbing career, because it doesn’t matter how hard you climb if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool asshole. He’s ­become more empathetic and willing to work with people.

Compatible Levels of ­Mellow (or Lack Thereof)

“We’re both deeply impatient people who just want to fucking get it done.”

AH: We were climbing together in Antarctica in 2017 on a bad-weather day. We skied across a glacier to look at an objective we thought might be manageable in those ­conditions. We got to the base of a little tower and I was like, I don’t want to do this. This is just too grim. I was slightly resentful of the fact that I often get roped into expeditions and then, because I’m typically the stronger leader, wind up having to do all these things I don’t want to do. I said to Cedar, “If you want to climb it, you lead it.” And he was like, “No problem.” He led the whole thing, scraping snow off the ledges, getting all gripped, and being, you know, super scared as he was trying to climb this frozen tower. Because I was on top rope, I stayed in my ski boots and wore his extra jacket the whole time, completely comfortable, totally warm.

CW: He also wanted to climb as fast as possible. Honnold can egg you on to do shit that’s a little at the limit. He’ll be like, “Dude, what’s your problem?” And you’re like, “Well, my problem is that I want to put in a piece before I do what looks like some really hard overhanging climbing.” And he’s like, “Whatever, put in the piece then.” And I’m like, “Dude, take a chill pill.” But I appreciate somebody who’s impatient. That’s maybe one of the reasons we have a good relationship. We’re both deeply impatient people who just want to fucking get it done.

AH: It was one of those times when I thought, wow, we got to sneak in this extra-cool climb on a day that otherwise would’ve just been a bad-weather day, because Cedar was willing to make it happen. To me that’s a good partner.

CW: It felt like we’d sort of gotten away with something.

AH: When you go through really ­intense experiences together, it ­either destroys or solidifies the friendship. And in this case, I think it solidified ours.

Mutual Enabling

“Where’s my thank-you at the ­Oscars, fuck face?”

AH: I think Cedar’s biggest impact on my climbing has probably been facilitating certain sorts of adventures that I never would have done otherwise. Climbing California’s fourteeners and our expedition to Antarctica were some of the more formative moments in my career. And they wouldn’t have been possible without a motivated partner pushing just as hard to make those trips happen.

CW: Sometimes it’s about creating space for adventure. Just being like, “We should try to do all the fourteeners by bike, it’ll be awesome.” That’s the best thing you could ask for out of a training partner—someone who has a crazy idea and wants to try it. Even if I’m going to maybe be a little bit slower on the bike on certain days or a little bit slower on the rock on certain days, I’m there with him, with the motivation to keep going.

AH: I’m typically pushing for the harder routes and the more challenging lines. I think that’s probably helped Cedar stay strong as a rock climber. On the trips we’ve done together, there was always a little bit of tension. But I’d constantly acknowledge it, like, “Oh yeah, you’re gonna have to rest a little bit more than me because you’re like 11 years older.”

CW: I think Honnold probably owes most of his climbing career to me. I was like, “Where’s my thank-you at the Oscars, fuck face?” I should have at least gotten an “I owe it all to Cedar Wright, a middle-of-the-road climber who loves to get out there and suffer.”

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In 1993, Lynn Hill did something that no one else—man or woman—had ever done in the history of climbing, despite years of attempts: she completed the first free ascent of the Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite. And then, because she’s such a rock star, Hill returned the following year and free-climbed the Nose again—this time “in a day,”Ìęmeaning a single 24-hour period.

Hill is one of the most famous climbers of all time, yetÌęsomehow, this easily fact-checkable milestone was inadvertently erased by many major news outlets around the world last weekend.

As they reported on Emily Harrington’s in-a-dayÌęfree climb of Golden Gate (which is another route on El Capitan that isn’t the Nose),Ìęa shocking number of news organizationsÌęmistakenly characterized her as being the first woman ever to free climb El CapitanÌęin a day, not just Golden Gate. That error not only effectively erased Hill’s achievement, it also erased those of Steph Davis and Mayan Smith-Gobat, who each free-climbed Free Rider (also a route on El Cap that isn’t the Nose) in a day in 2004 and 2011, respectively.

On November 7, on , Hill shared a story from the Associated Press with the mistaken headline:Ìę“1st Woman Free Climbs El Cap in a Day.”

“I’m so happy that Biden won the election!” wrote Hill. “But here’s a news story that needs some clarification.”

Predictably, climbers about the error, a mistake akin toÌęclaiming that Harrison H. Schmitt was the first person to walk on the moon. The appears to be ground zero for the viral spread of misinformation that plagued later reports atÌętheÌę, CNN, NBC, , The Guardian, and others. (The BBC gets an award for the most nails-on-chalkboard headline, with “,” which to my ears sounds as bad asÌę“Roger Federer Ping-Pongs a Hat Trick at Tennis-Matchy Thing.”)

Tom McCarthy, a national-affairs reporter at The Guardian who isÌęalso a climber, responded to myÌęÌętweet : “For the record our original (very short-lived but that doesn’t make the mistake any less wince-y) version was a straight take from AP, a wire service pick-up, & that wire was I’m sure the superspreader seed. But they nailed the election!” McCarthy helped pushÌęThe GuardianÌęto fix its headline. Many other outlets have also since corrected their errors.Ìę

Watching one prestigious news outlet after another committing the same regrettable mistake, I was reminded of a from a few years ago, in which a bunch of kids pour out of a tent and every single one of them trips and face-plants in the grass.

Look, I get it. You can understand how an editor might carelessly make the jump from “Emily Harrington is the first woman to free-climb Golden Gate in a day” to “first woman to free-climb El Capitan in a day.” No one outside of climbing knows what Golden Gate is, and most people have heard of El Capitan. Putting El CapitanÌęin your headline is better SEO, better for clicks, and easier to understand. But this sloppy approach comes at the expense of erasing some of the most inspiring and fantastic achievements inÌęclimbing history. (It has alsoÌęcontinuedÌęto erode readers’Ìęfaith in journalism across the board—on a Mountain Project , one user wrote: “Just remember they report all the other news with the same rigid fact checking and attention to detail.”)

It also looks bad for Harrington—unfairly, in my opinion—who, instead of enjoying some well-deserved rest and recovery from her lifetime achievement, has spent the past few days calling journalists around the world to get them to unfuck their headlines and copy.

“This whole thing has been mortifying in a way,” says Harrington. “I’m the fourth woman to free-climb El Cap in a day, and I’ve never claimed anything different. I’m standing on the shoulders of Lynn Hill, Steph Davis, and Mayan Smith-Gobat, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for them.”

Harrington is also quick to highlight that some news organizations did get the facts right (including șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű). “Anyone who actually put in the effort to reach out and speak with me directly, which I was ready and willing to do, wrote an accurate and legitimate story,” she says.

Climbing is a complicated sport, full of nuances and its own jargon. As a climbing journalist, I sometimes think that I’d rather free-solo El Cap than have to write another sentence that spells out the difference between aÌęfree soloÌęand free climb.ÌęIt can be tiresome to make these nitpicky distinctions, but this media cycle has proven the consequences of not hiring journalists who are climbers to write stories about climbing. At the very least, do a basic Google fact check.

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On election night, while most Americans were doom-scrollingÌęsocial media into the wee hours, climber was feeling optimistic while racking up at the base of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. At 1:34 A.M., she began her free climb of theÌęrouteÌęGolden Gate, hoping to complete the entire thing in a day.Ìę

“I knew I was so ready,” says Harrington, who lives in TahoeÌęCity, California. “But I also knew I’d need a little luck as well.”

Over the course of the next 21 hours,Ìę13 minutes, andÌę51 seconds, Harrington motored up the 3,000-foot line, becomingÌęthe first woman to achieve this feat,Ìęas well as only theÌęfourth woman ever to free-climb El Capitan in a day, onÌęany route. (In 1994, Lynn HillÌębecame the first person to free-climb the Nose in under 24 hours. Steph Davis and Mayan Smith-GobatÌęhave each climbed Freerider, in 2004 and 2011, respectively, in a day.)Ìę

For Harrington, sendingÌęGolden Gate in a day, however, did not come easy or without risk. On one of the route’s most difficult sections, the Golden DesertÌępitch, her foot slipped unexpectedlyÌęand she took a sideways fall, hittingÌęher head on a protruding crystal of rockÌęand puncturing her forehead.

“It looked like a gunshot wound.ÌęBlood was spurting everywhere,” she says. “I thought, Oh no, this is it. It’s over.”

She promptly lowered to the belay anchor, where her partner, Ìę(“A.B.”), a renowned Mount Everest guide, checked her vitals. After cleaning up the blood and applying a bandage, he determined she was physically OK. The fall, however, really shook Harrington.

“I was ready to give up,” she says. “Emotionally, I was blasted. But A.B. said, ‘You should try again.’”

Free-climbingÌęa big wallÌęsuch as El Capitan demands that a climber ascend each pitchÌęin succession, without any falls. As opposed to free soloing, free climbing permits the use of a rope and gear. If a fall occurs, the climber may begin again at the start of the pitch and try once more for it to be considered a success.ÌęGolden Gate, with a difficulty rating of 5.13b, contains 41 pitches total, with the toughest ones awaiting in the final ten, which is partly what makes theÌęroute such a demanding one to free-climb within 24 hours.ÌęIn fact, only three other people have succeeded on Golden Gate in a day: Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, and the late Brad Gobright.

A five-time national sport-climbing champion, Harrington’s accomplishments spanÌęthe gamut of disciplines. She’s madeÌęmultiple significant 5.14 first-female ascents of sport routes, free-climbed some of the hardest big walls in the world, won titles at elite competitions, and proved herself in the realmÌęof high-altitude mountaineering, withÌęsummits of Everest and Cho Oyu.Ìę

“Emily has always been one of the most versatile climbers,” says Honnold, who belayed and climbed with Harrington on the initial 2,000 feet of Golden Gate before being relieved of belay duty by Ballinger, Harrington’s fiancĂ©. “By free-climbing Golden Gate in a day, Em has once again shown that she’s one of the most capable climbers out there.”

This isn’t the first time Golden Gate has drawn blood from Harrington. In November 2019, she attemptedÌęthe route twice. The first time, with Honnold, she ran out of gas on the upper crux pitches. She returned two weeks later, again with Honnold, but took a terrible fall on the first pitch, which ultimately sent her to the hospital with a severe rope burn across her neck. That fall could’ve been much worse, however, as Harrington and Honnold were employing a risky, if common, speed-climbing tactic called simul climbing. When Harrington fell, there was a healthy loop of slack in the rope. Somehow Honnold managed to stop her fall by grabbing onto the whizzing rope with his bare hands.

“I’ve gotten so much shit for not wearing a helmet, mostly from men, even though I wear one 95 percent of the time,” says Harrington, who required stitches for the puncture wound on her forehead after this week’s fall. “But this is the reality of climbing at your limit—sometimes you can’t wear a helmet, because it makes the climbing that much harder. You have to choose your level of risk and accept the consequences. I made that decision consciously, and I would make it again.”

One pitch where a helmet makes the climbing more difficult is theÌęMonster Offwidth,Ìęwhose true difficulty is belied by its 5.11 rating. TheÌęMonster is especially hard for shorter climbers like Harrington, who is five foot two, because it’s more difficult to gain purchaseÌęon either side of the wide crack. When Harrington first tried theÌę100-foot pitch, it took her two and a half hours to ascend.Ìę

This week, Harrington came up with a slick solution to climbing theÌęMonster:Ìęshe wore Alex Honnold’s climbing shoes over her own.

“I was wearing two pairs of La Sportiva TC Pros,” she says. “My shoesÌęand Alex’s shoes on top of mine. This made it possible for me to climb the Monster like everyone elseÌęand not be so blasted by the top.”

It was, to say the least, an unconventional tactic. But Harrington credits it with saving her energy for the upper crux pitchesÌęand ultimately helping her succeed in free-climbing the route in a day.

“As a kid, I was focused on comps and sport climbing, and I didn’t have much drive for this style,” says Harrington. “Just recently, I began to realize this is the epitome of what I love about climbing. So many things can go wrong, there’s so much uncertainty. But it all paid off yesterday. It was one of those days I’ll never forget.”

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World-class climber Brad Gobright, 31, died in a rappelling accident on Wednesday, November 27, in El Potrero Chico, a national park north of Monterrey, Mexico. Although rappelling accidents are the most common cause of fatalities in climbing, the details currently known about this incident make this tragedy unusual.

Earlier this week, Gobright traveled to El Potrero Chico with a group of 15 beginner and intermediate climbers from Southern California, where Gobright was raised, to do some under-the-table guiding with Julie Anne Baxter, a good friend. On Tuesday, Gobright and Baxter climbed Space Boyz, a classic 1,000-foot moderate sport climb.Ìę

“He did everything by the book with me when we climbed,” says Baxter. “He was trying really hard to teach me safe multi-pitch techniques and went out of his way to keep me safe.”

Baxter made plans to rest and catch up on her work on Wednesday, and Gobright put out a request on social media in hopes of finding a last-minute partner who would be willing and able to climb a route called El Sendero Luminoso. The 2,500-foot, 15-pitch rock climb is an absolute classic and, at 5.12d, one of the harder routes in the region, taking a direct line up a prominent slab of blank, gray limestone.Ìę

Aidan Jacobson, 26, from Phoenix, Arizona, saw Gobright’s Instagram request, and the two made plans to tackle El Sendero the next morning.

Gobright and Jacobson tied in together for the first time that morning, and reached the top later that day. Gobright onsighted the whole route, meaning he climbed each pitch on the first try andÌędidn’t fall. Jacobson, a climber of five years, managed to onsight all but three pitches.Ìę

Upon summitting, they began simul-rappelling down the wall using a single 80-meter rope.Ìę

Simul-rapping is a technique by which two climbers each descend opposite strands of a rope that has been rigged through a rappel anchor, their bodies acting as counterweights to each other. While this technique savesÌętime, it also demands close coordination and communication between the two climbers, for if one stops weighting the rope, it could mean sending the other climber into a fall.Ìę

Almost all rappelling deaths are caused because climbers fail to tie stopper knots in the ends of their ropes. Despite the fact that this life-saving step is universally known to climbers, many still avoid tying knots in the ends of their ropesÌęsimply because knots can cause ropes to get stuck.Ìę

Although they didn’t tie stopper knots, a stuck rope still appearsÌęto haveÌęplayed a role in this accident. According toÌęJacobson, heÌęand Gobright reached an anchor at pitch nine, where there were two climbers from Costa Rica. They wondered if they could make it all the way down to a large ledge atop pitch five, but realized they didn’t have a long enough rope. Instead, they opted to go down to pitch six, just 50 feet above the ledge.ÌęÌę

Jacobson says they didn’t bother pulling their rope to its midpoint, “since it was such a short rap, we figured we’d be fine with an 80-meter rope,” he says. Jacobson’s side was clearly touching down on the ledge, while Gobright’s side was tangled up in a bush off to the side.

“I asked if we were good, and he said, ‘Yes, we can untangle the rope on the way down,’” says Jacobson. “We didn’t tie knots in the rope, either. We started rapping. I was a bit above him. I was on the left. He was on the right. Then all of a sudden, I felt a pop, and we started dropping.”

They were about 20 or 30 feet above the ledge atop pitch five when they both simultaneously fell. Jacobsen crashed through a bush, which slowed his fall,Ìębefore striking the ledge.Ìę

“It was basically a blur,” says Jacobson. “He screamed. I screamed. I went through some vegetation, and then all I remember is seeing his blue Gramicci shirt bounce over the edge
”

Apparently, there was less rope tangled up in that bush than both Jacobson and Gobright had thought—not enough to get Gobright all the way down to the ledge. And because there were no knots in the end of the rope, it slipped through Gobright’s GriGri rappel device.

“My first thought was that some anchor bolts had blown,” says Jacobson. “I was worried I was going to get pulled off the edge by Brad, so I grabbed onto a rock and held on tight for 30 seconds.” He felt no pull, and after a minute, scrambled up to clip himself into a fixed hand line running across the ledge. His ATC rappel device was still attached to their rope along with his backup Prusik.

Jacobson had injured his ankle, but was otherwise OK. Gobright was less lucky. He fell over 600 feet to his death.Ìę

The two Costa Rican climbers who were above Jacobsen and Gobright saw the accident, and rapped down to assist Jacobson’s descent. Ray Elizalde, a Mexican first responder, of Jacobson receiving medical treatment for his injured ankle on Facebook.

Last night, the first responders were unable to reach Gobright’s body. Today, a group of climbers, including Baxter, will be assisting in a body recovery.Ìę

“I’m devastated,” Baxter said late last night. “I just don’t know if I can do this but I’m trying so hard.”

Gobright was a true climber’s climber; a sweet, irreverent, and charismatic figure who deserved the badge of being a true dirtbag. He lived out of a mid-1990s Honda Civic and orchestrated everything in his life around his passion for rock climbing—the bigger and harder, the better.Ìę

He was one of the most accomplished climbers in America, and one of the few people on earth who could go toe-to-toe with the likes of Alex Honnold, following in his footsteps up the biggest and hardest routes without a rope.Ìę

As a star of aÌęfilm titled Safety Third,ÌęGobright certainly had a reputation for pushing his limits. Bolstered by his legendarily strong fingers, his willingness to take risk fueled some of his most notable successes, such as once holding the coveted speed record on the Nose of El Capitan in YosemiteÌęwith Jim Reynolds—a feat that is immortalized in The Nose Speed Record,Ìęa feature film currently headlining the Reel Rock Tour. (Their time was 2:19:44.)

In the film, Gobright essentially free solos the final pitch of the 3,000-foot rock climb, holding on to nothing more than bolt hangers using his middle fingers, a tactic that sent shudders down the spines ofÌęHonnold and Tommy Caldwell as they considered trying to beat the record.

“That’s why I have the record and you don’t,” said Gobright, ribbing the star climbers. The competition was healthy and fun, and spurred numerous side competitions with Honnold, such as vying to see who could free solo a moderate 2,000-foot route called Epinephrine in Red Rock, outside of Las Vegas, faster.

An outpouring of grief on social media from many climbing luminaries has ensued as the news of Gobright’s death has swept through climbing circles.

“I’m so sorry to hear that Brad Gobright just died in a climbing accident,” . “He was such a warm, kind soul—one of a handful of partners that I always loved spending a day with. I suppose there’s something to be said about being safe out there and the inherent risks in climbing but I don’t really care about that right now. I’m just sad for Brad and his family.”Ìę

Each post paints a portrait of widely beloved, respected, and wonderful person, whose talents were only second to the pleasure of his company and stoke for climbing.

For any climbers who need help, please visit the to find support.Ìę

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It’s hard to know what to make of the recent New York Times and its gym-fueled explosion. It moves indiscriminately from one topic to the next, touching on everything from the impacts of blockbusters like Free Solo and the upcoming OlympicsÌęto a band of Brooklyn bohemians climbing (sort of) and brunching their Sundays away, all while checking the boxes on the usual clickbait key phrases,Ìęsuch as “free-range kids,” the much maligned “rocksplaining boulder bro,” and the chance for hardworking professionals to “unplug” at gyms, which, ironically, as the story also points out,Ìęnow offer Wi-Fi and co-working spaces.

Reading the article is akin to what it must be like to be a cat chasing a laser. And it’s about as true to our sport as an article on, say, NASA would be if you largely focused on interviewing people in line for Space Mountain.

The article’s dek says it all:Ìę“The nubbly fitness obsession that forces you to unplug and concentrate or—AAAAH!” Which translates to, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Actually, we don’t know what this is about.” (Also:Ìę“nubbly”? Are they talking about Tommy Caldwell’s , or Reinhold Messner’s toes, or
?)

To be fair, writing about climbing, with all of its jargon and nuance, for a wide audience is never easy. And The New York Times has produced some of the better journalism on this sport by a mainstream publication. John Branch’s of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s 2015 Dawn WallÌęascent comes to mind.

AndÌęagain, to be fair, there are things that this article does get right, namely that climbing is growing, thanks to anÌęexplosion of climbing gyms across the country. Its depiction of gyms as social hubs for working professionals who largely have no interest in climbing outdoors is also accurate. The notion that many of these gym climbers have absolutely no clue what they’re doing is also, sadly, quite true. And crags are getting more littered and crowded as the sport grows.

Yet there are things to nitpick. For example, the Red River Gorge, a 29,000-acre region in Kentucky with hundreds of crags and thousands of routes, is described merely as a single “dramatic rocky cliff.”

Climbers don’t “leap (or tumble)” from bouldering walls; they just fall off them. A lot.

While climbing does challenge the analytical left hemisphere of our brains, “engineers in particular” are no more attracted to this sport than anyone else, nor are they necessarily better at it. And I can guarantee that the bouldering walls at Google campuses are less serious training centers than ornamental dioramas intended to fool people into thinking, This is a cool place to spend 80 hours every week.

The main beef that climbers have with this story, however, involves the lengthy section in which Harley Pasternak, a guy who trains such celebrities as Kim Kardashian West and Gwyneth Paltrow, weighs in by dismissing climbing as a vehicle to full-body fitness. Dude, has he , a registered flex offender in several zip codes? Pasternak goes on a tirade about how climbing doesn’t train necessary muscle groups like hamstrings, glutes, the lower back, rhomboids, and triceps. This might be true if you only climb at the traveling carny wall that appears at every the local county fair, but this argument falls apart any time you get on really steep routes.

Go climb the Monster Offwidth on El CapitanÌęand tell me that climbing isn’t a full-bodyÌęexperience.

One of theÌęmore disparaging quotes from Pasternak is, “Keeping in mind the average American is significantly overweight, I would talk everyone I could out of rock climbing unless you are incredibly light, agile, fit and functional. There is a very small minority of this country that should be rock climbing.”

To suggest that people who don’t have Honn bods shouldn’t even be trying this sport straight-up sucksÌęand is based on about as much science as the debunked claims made by Goop’s .Ìę“I would like to fundamentally disagree with you
. There is ‘no certain way’ you have to be to climb,” pro climber Sasha DiGiulian, who was quoted in the Times piece, wrote .

“As a bigger guy who finds climbing so rewarding and healing, this quote really hurts,” Drew Hulsey, a climber from Nashville, Tennessee, told me. “I’m doing everything a fit climber does. I’m leading outside, I’m in the gym fourÌętimes a week. It just hurts to read something so demeaning.”

It’s also plain wrong. Climbing is one of the best sports in the world, precisely because it’s open to every age, gender, and ability. The scene at any gym or crag is one populated by people from threeÌętoÌę70-plusÌęyears old—women, men, nonbinary—all climbing with each other, all building trust, connection, and friendships.

Climbing may not give you a butt like Kim Kardashian, but it’s a path to making anyone as strong as an ape. No matter your ability, you will gain strength (and flexibility) through climbing that will (eventually) allow you to lever your body up an impossible-looking wall, which is more impressive than vanity beach muscles. Deadlifts may be , but climbing is way more fun,Ìęfilled with amazing people,Ìęand ripe with opportunity to travel.

I started climbing in a gym—though it’s hard to call it that by today’s standards—over 20 years ago. I’ve seen the sport change immeasurably, for better and worse. And while today’s plastic-bred climbers may just be in it for the aprĂšs Brooklyn brunches, the chance to let their kids go “free range” on the auto belays, the luxury vacation “experiences” with celebrity climbers in Greece, getting bigger forearms and hulking lats, unplugging, co-working, or rocksplaining, some percentage of these folks will use gyms as doorways to something far more meaningful and profound: a real lifestyle filled with adventure, respect for nature, and populated by one of the most interestingÌęand diverse communities I know. Gyms may be trending, but what comes next isÌęwhere the real stories begin.

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