Back before climbing went mainstream (Olympics, gyms, Hollywood documentaries, , yippee!), we climbers were known for our social awkwardness and unapologetic penury. The community was an eclectic mix of rule-following problem-solvers (e.g., mathematicians and engineers) and barely functioning societal dropouts who survived on peanut butter and ramen while sleeping in caves, stripped-down cargo vans, or passenger cars with plywood “box springs” in lieu of seats.

So perhaps a good joke, playing off the classic riff about engineers, might have been:

Q: How do you know when a climber likes you?

A: She stares at your rock shoes instead of her own when she’s talking to you.

With such an oddball crew, there were (and remain) Yet the good news—I guess?—with the sport’s recent boom is that there are more of us than ever, expanding the pool of eligible single climbers.

This also means that there are now at least 10 reasons why dating a climber might possibly be a good idea.

1. Climbers Are Low-Cost/Low-Maintenance

Climbers have traditionally been non-materialistic; the thinking was that we’d rather be poor and have the free time to climb than labor away earning enough cheddar to slurp consommĂ© alongside tiny-fork bluebloods at some Michelin-starred snob-hole. On the one hand, this is great news. Our low-overhead minimalism makes us cheap dates. Want to stage a “romantic” “picnic” with a moldy loaf of French bread, spray-can cheese, and gooey tomatoes harvested from a dumpsterĚý (“it’s caprese!”) while watching pirated Netflix on a phone using the free Wi-Fi in the McDonald’s parking lot? We’re all-in—and easily impressed—as long as it doesn’t overlap with good condies.

The con? Any money we do have—or that we siphon off you—usually goes right back into the sport: These days, most climbers easily drop a few thousand bucks a year on gym memberships, shoes, chalk, pants, cams, ropes, pads, fingerboards, fans, travel, and skin care.

2. We Like to Travel (To Rocks)

Another thing traditionally associated with climbers: wanderlust. And since travel is the glue that binds many a relationship, we’re a catch. The only caveat is that there needs to be rock (or a gym) at our destination or we go full “Torrance,” like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. For instance, if you told me I had a once-in-a-lifetime, all-expenses-paid trip to Fiji, where I’d be taught surfing by Laird Hamilton, my first question would be, “Is there any rock in Fiji?” And my second would be, “Or at least a doorjamb in the bungalow for my hangboard?”

As a further example: years ago, after a month of Eurail touristing around Europe, I landed on the Greek isle of Paros (where the Euros gaily tan and windsurf during their August holidays). At that point, I was so hard up to touch rock that I did pointless traverses in a crumbly beachside cave right where everyone takes a dump… in the 100-degree heat. Talk about a “shitty” landing—and a near-psychotic desperation to clamber.

3. We’re Fit

Climbers must be some of the most training-obsessed athletes around, even at the amateur level where literally nothing is at stake. Witness the endless training ateliers, podcasts, apps and tools, and our obsession with etc. We end up with toned, attractive, eminently datable physiques, even if all we’re doing is eking out sad, expensive, barely noticeable one-percent gains after months of self-flagellation. The downside: We are so rigid about our workouts that we do weird things like fingerboard while riding as passengers in cars, or even “car-king”: ARC endurance training by squeezing a grip ring while driving.

4. We Know How to Do Proper Pull-ups

Unlike CrossFitters, whose half-assed “pull-ups” make them look like fish death-flopping in a dinghy (see video below) and will never get them stronger, our rizz us up with sexy, well-defined shoulders and backs (see reason No. 3).

Also, I may be biased (I probably am), but I feel like our sport is smarter than CrossFit: We need to execute complex, choreographed beta under the pressure and duress of facing a fall, whereas all CrossFitters need to do is figure out how to roll a tractor tire around an office-industrial parking lot without getting rhabdo.

5. We’re Good at Communicating

At least on a rope, since we need to be clear with our belay commands in a life-or-death situation. How well we express our needs off the rock will vary. Everyone’s different! Plus we tend to forget that the non-climbing public won’t always understand our lingo. So if your climber boo says, “My feelings for you are deeper than the anchor jug on ł§ľ±±ô±đ˛Ôł¦±đ,” they love you. But if they say, “Hanging out with you is worse than a front-team double split on a greasy Bishop afternoon,” they hate your stupid face.

6. We’re Really into Skin Care

Other than models, actors, and perfectly complected skinfluencers, climbers might be than anyone on Earth. If you date a climber, you’ll never need to buy balm, salve, lotion, ointment, emery boards, nail files, tape, Band-Aids, or nail clippers again. We have all that stuff stashed in multiple spots—medicine cabinet, cragging pack, gym pack, and cars. It’s not all designed for making your face radiant and free of age lines, but you will most definitely have the best finger and palm skin in town.

7. You’ll Be Plugged into an Instant Community

Just as , , usually from our apparel, veiny forearms, and chalky, hands. In this way, we tend to bond quickly, forming communities and networks both large and small. So if you pair up with a climber, you will be plugged in to a big family, which is great if you are a social person, but perhaps not so great if you’d rather not see your guest room turned into a hostel for a rotating cast of aromatic vagabonds who range from lost skatepunk bouldering kids, to dreadlocked Germans chain-smoking Drum cigarettes, to penny-pinching bro-grammers soaking up all your Wi-Fi while they work on rest days.

8. We’re Youthful and Free-Spirited

Climbers are often accused of hiding from real life by being out at the rock all day, which is 100 percent true. But this carefree lifestyle also keeps us young at heart and fun to be around. Thus, while some might call us immature, I prefer to think of climbers as ˛â´ÇłÜłŮłó´ÚłÜ±ô.Ěý

Take it from me. At age 53, I can spend all day bolting choss, stop in at the gym to train, come home and pop in a frozen pizza and wash off some baby carrots for the kids like the “World’s Greatest Dad” that I am. Then trade wiener, butt, and fart jokes with my boys at the dinner table much to my wife’s chagrin. And still wake up the next morning with enough energy to put in a two-hour workday and then MoonBoard. I mean, if I were single, I’d be a major catch!

9. We Always Know the Weather

No one is as obsessed with the weather as rock climbers, who schedule our lives around when it’s ideal to climb. Condies are king, and we stay up to date—via multiple apps and websites—at least a week out on the weather, including wind, humidity, chances of precipitation, etc. So, if you never want to have to check the forecast again, date a climber.

10. Lots of Us Are Secret Trust-Funders

Despite our and our apparent poverty (worn, soiled clothing; blown-out rock shoes; guerilla camping; etc.), many of us are actually secret trust-funders. I mean, how else do you think that buddy of yours who never works somehow manages to spend three months a year in Spain and three months at Rocklands while also basing out of a high-end condo in an expensive mountain town and shopping exclusively at Whole Foods? It’s because he has a secret income he might be ashamed to talk about, e.g., a trust fund. If you play your cards right, you, too, can share in that bounty, trading the stress and tedium of work for the delicious apathy of… “not work.”

Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of the and the memoir Ěý

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It was 2006. I had a job at Climbing Magazine, but was often so paralyzed with terror and searing muscular pain that I had to lie facedown on the floor with my eyes closed, the voices of my coworkers echoing and distant, as if heard through a culvert. Thirteen lost years of taking pills to suppress the twin specters of anxiety and depression had left my nervous system thrumming like a shattered bone; I was raw, wrung out, destabilized by withdrawal, marooned in an agitation called akathisia that drove me to pace, wring my hands, and tear at my brow, leaving half-moon fingernail imprints. As I’d learned from online support groups of psychiatric survivors, the only thing that would heal the damage was time. But each minute that passed was an obscenity. My central nervous system was in hyperdrive—all gas, no brakes. I could no longer recall what it was like to feel calm, to not see threat lurking in each object and interaction.

I was sleeping three hours a night. When I did fall asleep, at 3 a.m., I’d awaken awash in sweat, hallucinating a phantasm in the corner that slowly dissolved into shadow.

I’d given away almost all of my possessions.

I no longer wanted to be alive.

My plan was to hang myself, but I had only the leash I’d fashioned from an old orange climbing rope for my dog, Clyde. Clyde and I had ridden up that morning to Thompson Creek Road with two friends who then headed off on a trail run where the track dropped into a canyon. When they disappeared, I took Clyde and headed for the nearest stand of trees. The smell of sagebrush was in the air, mingled with the faint tang of cowshit from summer-dry patties. This moment hadn’t exactly been planned; nor unplanned either.

I unclipped the rope from Clyde’s collar, twisting the gate on the locking carabiner. At the cliffs, Clyde—an 85-pound Bengali-striped Plott hound who was ruled by the millions of olfactory cells in his bulbous black nose—would wander off after scents, and he’d long ago figured out how to unclip a single carabiner. His rope leash had to be secured either with a locker or two carabiners reversed and opposed.

Clyde was a year and a half old then, a big brown dog rippling with muscle, his ears floppy, snout long and eyes ringed with black fur that framed long lashes. He howled at you with elation—Whoo, whoo whoo!—after an absence, and had soulful brown eyes that he locked on you, studying your every move. These he turned up to me now as I slowly coiled the rope in my right palm, beginning to tie a knot. Clyde whined.

I see you. Don’t do this. I need you.

I slowly undid the rope, and then clutched Clyde in a bear hug, feeling his warm fur slip over his ribs, smelling his hound-dog odor, sobbing into his ear that I would never try to leave him again.

Clyde had come into my life through happenstance. In spring 2005, my then girlfriend, Kasey, was working as a reporter at Boulder, Colorado’s paper The Daily Camera, when she was sent to the Humane Society to do a puff piece on adopting pets. I received an email that night in Carbondale, where I was living: “Should I get him?” We hadn’t been looking for a dog, but were set to move in together in a few months in Boulder. A dog wasn’t the worst idea.

The photo showed a brindled, pot-bellied furball, his eyes bright and muzzle dark. His sister, Bonnie, had already been adopted; both were identified as “Lab/pit bull mix.” They’d been found along a highway near Taos, New Mexico, abandoned, running, terrified.

Later, as Clyde’s and my lives intertwined, I came to know his idiosyncrasies like he did my own. To my dismay, he was reactive—growling, hackles raised—around people who had dark skin, big jackets, and gloves, or who smelled of cigarette smoke. When we were on the highway and slowing down to exit, Clyde would flip out, yowling and trying to climb into my lap. I imagined a man striding across northern New Mexico hardpan, a dilapidated trailer behind him. Bundled up against the high-desert cold, he took a drag on a cigarette before gathering the unwanted puppies and loading them into his vehicle.

Clyde lived to be fourteen, venerable for such a large dog and testament to the benefits of giving your hound an active life. Over the past fifteen years, as I’ve lived through myriad ups and downs with my healing, I’ve had to take breaks from climbing that spanned months and even years—dark periods in which my nervous system exploded again, affecting every part of my body from my gut to my hands to my teeth. The one constant, for most of it, was Clyde. Every day until he could no longer walk, Clyde needed exercise. He forced me to move. He forced me to stay alive, and not abandon him, as had already happened so early in his life. And he loved to be at the crag.Ěý

Whether that was good for anyone other than Clyde, however, was another matter.

Hounds wander and hounds steal food. Their sensitive noses and floppy ears form a cone that imports the faintest scents—it’s sensory overload. They can’t stop tracking.

This olfactory acuity and the shenanigans it inspired were something I came to take for granted, forgetting how Clyde’s behavior might affect others. In 2007, after I moved back to Boulder, my future wife, Kristin, and I took a trip to southern Colorado to climb in Newlin Creek Canyon. When we went into a gas station, leaving Clyde in Kristin’s Honda CRV, he gnawed a hole through her favorite purple-and-white backpack to access some vacuum-sealed salmon jerky. All of which he devoured, leaving the bag on the passenger seat. Clyde had been planning the escapade, waiting for us to leave him in the car.

“Darn it!” Kristin shrieked in astonishment. “Look at my pack! Clyde ate a hole in it!”

I pulled my crag pack out of the back, showing her where Clyde had chewed through a mesh pocket to steal Corn Nuts. “He does stuff like that,” I said, and then added, “He’s a real fucker.”

“That doesn’t help,” Kristin said. “That doesn’t help at all.” Clyde sat in the back seat licking his chops.

In no particular order, during his lifetime Clyde pilfered and devoured: an unopened packet of Twizzlers I’d stashed in the door of my car (how did he know Twizzlers were even “food”?); three-quarters of an extra-large pizza; innumerable sticks of butter off the Thanksgiving and Christmas tables; a package of Newman-O’s, the chocolate overload so agitating him that I had to walk him around the local reservoir for four hours; a packet of frozen elk meat he stole from the mini-fridge at the Climbing office, prizing open the door with his snout; multiple packages of hot-cocoa powder; a Starbucks mocha, whipped cream and all; the morning scones of this magazine’s former publisher, who’d just taken over the role and thought the employees were stealing the food off his desk each morning as a prank; poorly buried human feces at a cliff in Boulder Canyon, which Clyde vomited all over my car on the ride home; and whatever bilge he could find in the garbage in our kitchen, until we wised up and started shutting the garbage can in the bathroom when we left him alone in the house. Clyde then learned how to head-butt the door open, as well as how to access the pantry where we kept his dog food—I secured a latch that eventually gave out when Clyde forced his massive paw under the bi-fold door one time too many.

Even knowing his predilections, I’d bring him to the cliffs. Clyde had terrible separation anxiety, plus he needed the exercise. He was so strong I’d often load his doggy pack with bolts, water, and battery packs for new-routing days in the Flatirons, and then watch him bound ahead, up the steep sandstone talus, on his long stilt legs.

My partners learned to hang their packs in trees to keep them safe from Clyde, as if we were in bear country. “Oh great, it’s Clyde,” Chris Weidner would say when we met up to climb and Clyde bounded out of my car. “Hi, Clyde.” Chris keeps his crag snacks in old harness bags, one of which Clyde had shredded one day in the Flatirons to purloin Chris’s Whole Foods sandwich.Ěý“Fucking Clyde,” he said, surveying the wreckage. “Why do you bring this dog?”

In 2008, Chris, Kristin, and I were cragging in Eldorado Canyon along the West Ridge, an accordion of alcoves, corners, arĂŞtes, and slabs that rises to meld with a tumble of crags—Rincon, Shirttail Peak, the Potato Chip—on the canyon’s beetling northern scarp. I remember well the route I was leading, Pool of Blood, a 5.9, because it was the first time I trusted my nervous system enough to tackle a 5.9 traditional lead again, and not implode on me and trigger a panic attack mid-route. I’d led the opening fist crack, laying it back and sinking a few big cams, and had reached a small stance. There weren’t many other climbers about that cold winter day, so we’d left Clyde off his leash. Then I looked down. As with so many other times before, Clyde had simply vanished.Ěý

Sometimes he would be gone for hours, sending Kristin and me casting about the woods at twilight hollering his name. Other times Clyde escaped in town, roaming alleyways, knocking over trash cans like a grizzly until he wandered home or I found him tearing in circles, chasing his own tail in someone’s yard—or I got a call from the Humane Society to come pick him up (he was microchipped). One evening in November 2005 when I was in the throes of tranquilizer withdrawal, hemorrhaging fear, I’d taken Clyde for a trail run (well, shuffle) on Mount Sanitas west of Boulder, and he’d disappeared. As snow and gloom descended, I’d wandered up and down Sunshine Canyon behind Sanitas, screaming, “Clyde, Clyde, Clyde!” until I went hoarse. Soaked, miserable, wracked by sobs, I’d returned to our duplex only to open the door and see Clyde sitting at Kasey’s feet, both of them looking at me nonplussed.

“WhereĚýwereĚýyou?” she asked. “Clyde came home an hour ago.”

This day in Eldo, Clyde had been there minutes earlier, curled into his trademark ball below a tree. He couldn’t have gone far. Kristin set off to retrieve him. As I lowered, she rounded the bend, short of breath, dragging Clyde by his collar as he smacked his lips and snuffled.Ěý

“You won’t believe this one,” she said.

As Kristin recounted it, Clyde had foraged off uphill. Up at the next crag, he’d homed in on a climber’s backpack, dragging it off into the woods. When the climber realized what was happening, he’d followed Clyde. As the guy approached, Clyde unzipped the pack with his teeth and extracted a roast-beef sandwich, a Dagwood with all the toppings made at home that very morning. Clyde stood over his treasure growling and baring his teeth until the guy backed away, leaving Clyde to unwrap the sandwich and devour it in peace.

“I was really looking forward to the sandwich,” the climber had told Kristin. “But your dog wouldn’t give it back to me.”

“Unreal,” I said. As Kristin and I gathered our food to bring to the climber as a make-good, Chris gave me a look. “Fucking Clyde,” he said. “Your dog is insane.”

Clyde liked to dig dirt nests at theĚýcliff, which I’d fill in and cover with duff. He’d often use rocks as pillows or even find horizontal fissures in cliff-base slabs to lie in. If your backpack looked like the softest thing around, Clyde would lie on that, too. I mostly climb at obscure cliffs, so I could leave him unleashed, but after the sandwich incident in Eldo, if I was visiting a busy area I’d either leave Clyde at home or tie him up.

At a semi-secret spot south of Eldorado Canyon, Clyde excavated a nest in the “Silver Saddle,” a treeless col that overlooks a ponderosa-filled gulch opening east onto the Great Plains. Clyde was 10 or 11 then, still in good health, but as I watched him curl into his hole under white winter sunshine, my thoughts turned to mortality. The climber who’d named the Silver Saddle, Alan Nelson, had died of cancer at a young age. I’d look at Clyde and wonder how many days he had left—or how many I did, for that matter. At some point Clyde would be too old to make it to the cliffs. That day was coming.

Kristin and I have two boys now, ages six and nine, and our life has reconfigured around the exigencies of raising them, especially during the pandemic. The boys are high energy, wild, unpredictable—gleefully play-fighting with foam swords one minute, and, the next, hurling each other’s Lego constructions across the room over some perceived insult. Yet in a way Clyde was my first son—the first dog who was not a family dog and for whom I had, after Kasey and I parted, sole responsibility. It was a responsibility that kept me alive on days when I might have otherwise given up.

Around the time Clyde turned thirteen he went deaf. I’d come home to see him lying on the stairs and would approach from the front to pet him; otherwise Clyde would whip his head around, teeth bared, as if to say, “Dude, what the fuck?” Soon his eyes took on a milky cast, and I wondered how well he could see. He had a fatty tumor on his right rear leg that the vet said would be too dangerous to remove. We left it there; it grew. Clyde’s back legs gave out, and I bought a harness that let us take a precious few final walks together, me lifting his rear haunches while he skittered along the path.

In the final month, Clyde somehowĚýknew.Ěý“He’s giving us these looks,” Kristin said. “Like he’s trying to tell us something.”

On Clyde’s last day, he could no longer move, and I had to carry him from room to room, him now a too-thin sixty-five pounds that were still somehow heavy. As pale evening sun filtered through the cottonwood grove beyond our living room, I did a yoga practice next to Clyde. With each dip into Upward-Facing Dog, I marveled at the twinkling of sunlight on the glossy fur of his muzzle, on the dark, textured skin of his nose, on the fact that he—or any of us—exist at all. Clyde lay there, looking up at me occasionally, breathing slowly, his flanks inflating and deflating like a bellows. I’m still symptomatic from the iatrogenic damage psychiatry did, mainly in the form of an electrical current running along my spine that makes my muscles burn and locks up my diaphragm, causing me to wheeze. But that evening, as I moved through the Warrior series beside my dog, the symptoms lifted. It felt like Clyde’s final gift to me.

Clyde died at 3 a.m. on May 2, 2019, as I lay next to him on our upstairs landing, his eyes rolled up in his head and breath growing fainter and more rapid until there was no longer breath to draw. Numb, hollow-bellied, I bundled Clyde in his favorite blue blanket and took him to the vet for cremation before the boys woke up.Ěý

As he’d aged, I’d taken Clyde to the cliffs less and less. But I still remember the final time he asked to come, with an eager, puppyish look, as my friend Jay and I geared up to climb north of Taos. Clyde had some strange final burst of energy that day, twelve-plus years old, me carrying our things this time so he wouldn’t be burdened by his pack. As Jay and I stopped at a spring to fill our water bottles, Clyde bounded ahead, surging up the rocky trail. He was home then, back in northern New Mexico where he’d been born. Clyde howled with joy as he waited for us.Ěý

Let’s go, guys,Ěýhe seemed to be saying.ĚýWe’ve got this.

The post How the Worst Crag Dog Saved My Life appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Rock shoes have evolved light-years since the early days of the 1980s, when there was just one option: board-lasted high-top boots. Today shoes for the sport come in so many flavors, with new models being developed every year, that it takes concerted research to find the niche rock shoes you want. Not to worry, though: we did the work for you, and here present the most interesting, highest-performing climbing shoes of 2023.

The Winners at a Glance

Editor’s Choice: Scarpa Vapor S

Butora Gomi

Black Diamond Aspect Pro

Black Diamond Method S

Five Ten NIAD VCS

La Sportiva Katana Lace

La Sportiva Skwama Vegan

Red Chili Voltage LV

Scarpa Quantix SF

Tenaya Indalo

How We Test

Number of Testers: 10

Number of Shoes Tested: 16

Number of Vertical Feet Sent: 40,000-plus

Lowest Grades Climbed: 5.6, V0

Highest Grades Climbed: 5.14a sport, 5.12 trad, V10

Most Accessible Testing Venue: A backyard garage gym with a side-by-side MoonBoard and Tension board

Least Accessible Testing Venue: Bugaboo Mountains, British Columbia

Number of Times Our Lead Tester Threw His Shoes at the Rock Because He’d Punted on His Project Yet Again: At least once—maybe more (but who’s counting?)

Our climbing-shoe philosophy rests on two pillars. First: consider each shoe’s stated niche, and test it on the appropriate terrain. Second: take each shoe outside its comfort zone, to see if it has any surprise attributes. We also emphasize testing each model on as many climbs as possible, both to generate the most thorough feedback and to break in the shoe to see how it really performs. (Any reviewer who offers an opinion after a few gym sessions is full of it.) Testers will also climb the same route or problem repeatedly in different pairs, to see how the shoes stack up against each other on the same footholds and sequences.

This year, ten testers (including myself)—all experienced climbers ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties—considered 16 new (and newish) rock shoes, and narrowed our final selection down to ten. We tested on routes between 5.6 and 5.14; we tested at the climbing gym, on outdoor sport routes and boulder problems, and on MoonBoards, Tension boards, and Kilter boards; and we tested on trad climbs, sport climbs, and multi-pitch alpine rock climbs. Our crew covered almost all rock types—sandstone, limestone, granite, basalt—on everything from slabs to caves, and on cliffs in British Columbia, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Utah, and Kentucky.

The main factors we considered were fit, break-in period, comfort, precision, edging, smearing, hooking, scumming, and jamming. We also considered durability—how well a shoe holds its structure and last after heavy use. (Does it stay pointy, precise, and sharp, or does it “slop out” too quickly? Are the uppers and other components still intact?)

In this list, we kept the focus on intermediate and advanced climbing shoes, which are typically priced around $150 (but can run into the $200 range) and built for high performance. There is such a glut of undifferentiated, entry-level shoes on the market that it didn’t make sense to consider them in this review—and, to be honest, even newer climbers might do well to consider higher-end offerings after their initial months in the sport, to see what precision footwear is all about as their foot muscles strengthen.

Meet Our Lead Tester

Matt Samet, the former editor of Climbing, has been an avid rock climber since the mid-1980s, the era of high-top Firé rock shoes. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he primarily sport-climbs, boulders, and trains on his home wall, and has been testing climbing gear for more than 20 years. The Climbing staff (Delaney Miller, Steve Potter, and Anthony Walsh) were also key testers for this review, as were husband-wife duo Chris and Heather Weidner, who are also based in Boulder and boast decades of climbing experience, as well as a shared hardest redpoint: Stockboy’s Revenge, a 5.14b in Rifle, Colorado.

The Reviews: The Best Climbing Shoes of 2023

Editor’s Choice: Scarpa Vapor S ($229)

Weight: 8.3 oz
Pros:

>Insane sensitivity
>A vacuum fit and lots of rubber make for epic steep-rock footwork (hooking, grabbing, and scumming)
>Zero dead space

Cons:

>Squishiness and asymmetry can be distracting on slabbier terrain

Don’t let the low-key aesthetic fool you: the Vapor S is a powerful, muscular slipper. The key is a sticky, full-length XS Grip 2 outsole married with a surprisingly flat last and touch of asymmetry that curls your big toes inward like talons. None of these attributes alone scream high performance, but consider them alongside the shoe’s overall flexibility, glove-like fit, gummy M50 rubber over the toe box, semi-stiff heel cup, and a low-profile, rounded toe that deforms preternaturally into tiny pockets, slots, and thin cracks. The collective result is one fierce steep-rock beast. Like a total beast, the kind you can maneuver into subtle heel-toe cams that would feel clunky in any other shoe. For a slipper, the Vapor S is also surprisingly versatile, as Heather Weidner can attest: “I was very impressed with the ability to toe in on small edges on more vertical terrain, as well as smear on slopey, sandy feet, but was also able to pull and grab on steep footholds.” Personally, I had the best gym session of my life in these shoes: I couldn’t get them to slip, whether on jibs or slopers, and I felt everything underfoot. Ditto on Red River Gorge cave climbs, where this shoe dug into the holds but offered just enough heft to see me through edging (smedging!) cruxes on the slabbier outros. The removable Nano Strap closure system looks nice, and I always ratcheted it down, yet it doesn’t seem to do much more than help angle your toes slightly one way or another.

Bottom Line: The Vapor S is for slipper aficionados who gravitate toward bouldering, gym climbing, and sport climbing. It’s pricey, yes, but all the elements are done right, and the shoe conforms to the foot like a second skin.

Butora Gomi ($160)

Weight (all weights listed are per shoe): 8 oz
Pros:

>Soft, intuitive, socklike fit makes for a quick break-in
>Regular version accommodates wide feet
>Excellent “all-shoe” sensitivity—good feedback in the toe box, heel, and scumming patch

Cons:

>Neo Fuse rubber felt squishy for long sport pitches, especially when sustained edging was involved

This nearly all-rubber boot had some of the best all-shoe feedback of the test. Translation: it’s sensitive everywhere, from the toe box to the heel cup to the scumming patch. (Most rock shoes only offer supreme sensitivity in one or two of these spots.) One tester confirmed this on a modern-style gym problem that involved rocking over a sloping jib screwed onto the side of a triangular volume. The hold was angled in such a way that you could only drop your heel—not toe—onto it. The Gomi did better than just about all the other shoes I tried on this problem, mainly because I could feel the jib through the molded heel cup and thus trusted the shoes on this bizarre move. Ditto for scumming and toeing into tiny jibs on gym boulders and overhanging rock. The socklike fit and tensioned Power Rand drive you down into the big toe, despite the Gomi’s merely mild downturn, offering an almost prehensile grip. On the flip side, this pair of shoes is not incredibly supportive, so I experienced some calf fatigue and squish on longer edging pitches, and the toe is a bit too rounded for micro crimps. That said, as a bouldering or sport-crossover shoe fit for wide dogs, the Gomi is one of the better, friendlier-priced options out there.

Bottom Line: This is a well-rounded boulderer-friendly shoe that also crosses over into sport climbing—especially steeps.

Black Diamond Aspect Pro ($200)

Weight: 10.6 oz
Pros:

>One of the kinder fits for a performance trad shoe
>Solid long-term comfort and incredible stability at stances
>Narrow toe profile great in cracks
>Thick, sticky Fuse rubber outsole was grippy on slabs

Cons:

>Toe box could be sharper, for better precision
>Lace eyelets caused foot pain in deep jams

We began by testing this shoe on a mixed bolt-and-gear granite slab with a strange, leaning, flaring crack, followed by thin nubbin stepping and faith smearing—exactly the type of climb it’s designed for. The big news here is that the Aspect Pro has such a kind, cushy microsuede footbed, and a softer demeanor than similar trad shoes, that it performed amazingly out of the box, needing almost no break-in period. On its inaugural voyage, the shoe felt grippy and reliable—and even had a dash of sensitivity, despite the full-length bilayer midsole. On smears, one tester found himself enjoying the Fuse rubber—a kind of thick, softer outsole that wouldn’t usually be my jam. It deformed nicely to rugosities in the rock. At 21.1 ounces, a pair of Aspect Pros is heavy, but in exchange you get stability and calf support, priceless for stances where you’re fighting calf fatigue while hunting for protection. The leather footbed promises long-haul comfort, bolstered by a sweat-wicking, knit tongue and thick, ropy laces that hold tension well, ensuring a dialed fit. However, tester Chris Weidner noticed a painful pressure point on the overhanging 5.10+ hand crack of Beach Buzz in Indian Creek, Utah. “After lowering and taking off the shoe, I realized that the combination of small lace coverings over such thick laces caused a single point of lace to be jammed against the crack, and thus also against my foot,” he noted. He did like the narrow toe profile, which shone while climbing Hail of a Beach, a baggy-fingers, thin-hands 5.11- crack also at Indian Creek. “I could stuff the tiptoe into the crack, twist, and stand on it reliably,” he noted.

Bottom Line: The Aspect Pro is a great option for trad and multi-pitch climbers seeking stability for long leads and mid-ankle coverage for cracks but favor a soft feel with greater emphasis on smearing than edging.

Black Diamond Method S ($144.95)

Weight: 8.8 oz
Pros:

>Comfortable fit, even when sized tightly, making for great bouldering-session wear
>Designed with a soft, pliable last that’s ideal for smearing, steeps with big footholds, and volume climbing
>Eye-catching camouflage aesthetic

Cons:

>Some bagginess over the forefoot hampered toe-scumming performance
>Black Label Fuse outsole feels too thick for a performance slipper

A softer sibling to Black Diamond’s all-arounder, the Method, the Method S is an ideal comfort shoe for long gym sessions and steep routes, thanks to its mild downturn and cozy footbed. It’s also one of the flashier shoes on the market: both the men’s and women’s versions sport a camouflage heel cup and tension rand that tend to be conversation starters with others. Two testers felt the Method S was great for grabbing extruded footholds on gym boulders and board climbs. “I was surprised by how well this shoe toes in on MoonBoard plastic and Tension board wood,” noted tester Chris Weidner. The shoe is sensitive (reason: the Soft Flex midsole is 0.9 millimeters thick, comprised of a small horseshoe in the toe box), making it a choice pick for smearing and steep grabbing. And it’d be even more so if the outsole wasn’t so thick—an odd choice for a slipper. (This issue that resolves over time, as you grind the sole down.) The sensitive squish means almost nonexistent edging performance, so you have to learn to toe in to holds, not on to them. Testers noted there’s no break-in period, and the shoes held up well, minus some minor toe flattening. My major complaint was that the scumming patch was baggy (albeit amply sized and nicely ridged). On a double-toe-hook parkour move, I slid down before the shoe caught. Though it did eventually snag, and I did send the problem.

Bottom Line: The Method S is the shoe for gym boulderers, board climbers, and cave boulderers who appreciate sensitivity married with a soft fit for long-session wear. It’s also adapted for smearing and big footholds, resulting in a solid steep-rock shoe that’s simply fun to climb in.

Five Ten NIAD VCS ($150)

Weight: 9.5 oz (men’s) / 8.5 oz (women’s)
Pros:

>A very stiff, precise toe (though surprisingly rounded) allows for edging and micro-edging support
>Sticky 3.5-millimeter Stealth outsole yields surprisingly good smearing for a shoe with a full-length midsole

Cons:

>The flat last coupled with dead space midfoot hampered a precision fit

Five Ten’s Anasazi line has enjoyed a cult following since the 1990s. The NIAD family—Lace, Moccasym, and the VCS—is a reimagining of that line. The VCS is the most well-rounded of the three options, occupying middle ground between the stiffer Lace and the softer Moccasym. It’s a beast of an edging shoe, with the kind of old-school support (read: a flat last coupled with a full-length, two-millimeter midsole) and precision you want on long, vertical face climbs and trad pitches. “I hadn’t climbed in Eldorado Canyon for a couple years, and I’m always surprised at how small the toe edges are and how much you have to trust your feet,” said tester Heather Weidner of the Colorado hot spot. “In the NIAD VCS, I was able to be precise in my toe placements. The stiffness of the toe edge made it easy to weight my feet without too much calf pump on vertical, technical terrain.” Another tester, Yosemite local Chris Van Leuven, described the toe as “chiseled,” and commented on how well it let him lay the shoe against offset seams but also stand on micro edges and granite nubbins. For such a stiff shoe, it offers quite decent smearing performance, thanks to über-grippy Stealth C4 rubber. As with so many Five Tens, these shoes are better for long, narrow feet, although the toe box is more rounded than, say, the brand’s Hiangle. Weidner, who is flat-footed, experienced dead space midfoot and had trouble eliminating it with the straps. “The flaps under the Velcro need to be arranged perfectly while buckling, which I found annoying, especially on multi-pitch climbs where you take your shoes off and on constantly and have many other logistics to think about,” she said.

Bottom Line: This option is perfect for climbers who tend toward old-school edging, as well as mixed and traditional pitches, and who value support over sensitivity. The fit is geared more for flat, narrow feet, though it’ll accommodate wider feet after break-in.

La Sportiva Katana Lace ($219)

Weight: 8.8 oz (men’s) / 7.5 oz (women’s)
Pros:

>Offers extreme precision for edging and micro-edging
>A long toe box and laser-cut sole promote access to thin cracks, pin scars, and seams that elude other shoes

Cons:

>Very stiff: smearing takes real trust and visual inspection of the foothold

The Katana Lace is among the highest-performing all-around and thin-face shoes on the market, overbuilt for durability, support, and performance in that unique Italian way. Trad aficionado Clayton Laramie wore them to flash his hardest climb ever, a 5.12c gently overhanging a mixed-face-and-seam route in the Tan Corridor of Colorado’s Staunton State Park, about an hour south of his home in Boulder. “I love this shoe,” he said afterward. “It’s my personal favorite for hard trad and vertical face.” Meanwhile, Climbing’s digital editor, Anthony Walsh, lauded the thin toe profile. “Both vertically and horizontally, It provided unparalleled access to thin cracks and a ton of precision,” he said. Walsh said the shoe shone on Zap Crack, a 5.12+ crack line in Squamish, British Columbia, where the crux centers on two parallel, left-leaning seams: a right-hand seam that takes 0.1 cams and a toe jam and left-hand offset seam that you crimp. “The Katana was the only shoe that could meaningfully jam the right seam while my left foot edged hard on granite chips,” he said. The key with such a long, thin toe is that it’s also supportive, with no flex. The Katana held its rigidity and shape over months of testing, in part due to the full-length 1.1-millimeter midsole. On the downside, even after breaking these in, the shoes remained stiff, and you often had to take smears on trust, visually confirming your foot placement. For me, the low-volume women’s version, with its four-millimeter XS Grip 2 half-sole (versus the men’s full-length four-millimeter XS Edge sole), climbed much better; its deliberately inbuilt flex and softer outsole rubber render greater versatility while still keeping the precision toe.

Bottom Line: Need a stellar precision shoe for thin face climbs (pockets and micro-edging) and thin crack routes? The Katana Lace is it and will especially appeal to anyone who prefers long, narrow, supportive toe boxes.

La Sportiva Skwama Vegan ($199)

Weight: 8.1 oz (men’s) / 7.1 oz (women’s)
Pros:

>A new vegan option for what’s a proven, high-performance slipper
>Versatile
>Extremely sensitive
>Perhaps La Sportiva’s most forgiving last for wide feet

Cons:

>Break-in takes time and patience

The Skwama has a huge fan base for a reason: it’s a high-torque, highly sensitive slipper that gets the job done—and done well—on just about any terrain, even the slabby stuff. The downturned last drove energy into the forefoot. The XS Grip 2 outsole and pointy toe provided stick and bite on tiny holds, especially bouldery steeps. The bulbous, geometrically patterned heel held its own in stiff hooks—arêtes and heel-toe cams—but also deformed for technical hooks on crimps and rails while bouldering. This shoe dominated on everything from the 40-degree MoonBoard to a gently overhanging pocket climb called Triple Sec, 5.12d in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge that involves precision high steps into tiny pockets and smeary feet. The synthetic upper stretches less than leather and complements what La Sportiva calls its SkinLike insole: an interior 0.6-millimeter odor-reducing microfiber layer that’s adhered to a 1.6-millimeter microfiber upper. These shoes may feel a little squishy to some, especially climbers who haven’t yet developed strong slipper feet, and they aren’t great for endless edging routes. But for everything else, the feedback married with power is 100 percent on point.

Bottom Line: Designed for advanced climbers with strong feet, the Skwama Vegan is ideal for those who value feedback, a high-torque fit, and are consciously looking for a shoe with a synthetic upper for ethical or fit reasons (or both).

Red Chili Voltage LV ($180)

Weight: 8.3 oz
Pros:

>A forgiving fit and stretchy elastic tongue meant almost no break-in period
>High marks across the board for smearing, edging, hooking, and grabbing

Cons:

>The uppers and closure system need better integration, to increase tension down into the big toe

Made by a small European brand not often seen in the U.S, the Voltage has long been a sleeper classic. It’s one of the friendliest downturned shoes available, with a low-key fit that’s good for steep-rock neophytes, a precise and supportive toe, and a suction heel. Now it comes in a low-volume (LV) version for narrow feet. Our LV tester, Scottie Alexander, mostly bouldered in this new shoe. He praised its precision toe, giving it an eight out of ten on technical demands presented by fussy sandstone and quartzite boulder problems, a seven out of ten for edging, and an eight out of ten for grabbing and smearing. “This shoe gets the soft-versus-edging balance as close to optimal as any shoe I’ve worn, and it does so out of the box,” he noted. However, Alexander thought the soft uppers and orange knit tongue were too flimsy to properly impart tension from the double-Velcro-closure straps (especially the upper one, which he felt was misaligned with the plastic eyelet). Red Chili either needs to stiffen the uppers or remove the straps altogether and recast the shoe as a slipper. On the other hand, my wide feet felt happily snug in the regular Voltage, which features a socklike upper and stretchy knit tongue.

Bottom Line: The Voltage LV is a good steep-climbing and bouldering quiver for narrow-footed climbers determined to enjoy a more comfortable fit.

Scarpa Quantix SF ($189)

Weight: 8.1 oz
Pros:

>Extremely precise toe box held both shape and bite over months of use
>The combination of a stiff forefoot with overall flexibility and a soft PAF heel made this shoe a jack-of-all-trades
>A precision all-arounder, marked by its light weight

Cons:

>Pumpkin-orange color may not be for everybody
>Toe-hooking patch is so small that it’s nearly nonfunctional

The most remarkable thing about the Quantix SF is how much precision you get for such a light, low-key shoe. °ä±ôľ±łľ˛úľ±˛Ô˛µâ€™s digital editor, Steve Potter, concurred—we both gave the Quantix SF a perfect ten for edging, thanks to a sharp, pointy toe box that digs into micros. However, unlike other precision masters (say, the brand’s Boostic), the Quantix SF is not overbuilt. The forefoot is stiff—despite having a gummy XS Grip 2 outsole—but the rest of the shoe is super malleable, so you can drop your heels to vary your angle of contact with the rock. It was superb at toeing incuts on a steep wall, particularly when using low feet, yet also solid on slabbier edging. Potter put this versatility to good use on a granite V7 block in the Adirondacks that started with overhanging smears, compression, and heel hooks, finishing on a tech-nine slab that required a pistol squat on a slanting three-quarter-inch edge. The Quantix SF “bends enough to allow you to stand on your toes without the surface of the shoe changing its alignment on the foothold,” he said. My ultimate test was a 50-meter lead at Staunton State Park. The bottom half was slabby 5.10, while the top half required precision edging—with all that rope weight dragging you down. On the upper crux, the shoe flexed as it was meant to, but stayed locked in on the tiny holds nonetheless. Two dings, in my opinion: the toe-hooking patch is just a thin strip, so you don’t get much stickum, and the toe box’s beak-like shape means toe hooks hurt.

Bottom Line: The Quantix SF is a sleek, airy, low-profile best friend for sport climbers, boulderers who climb like sport climbers (or cross over into sport climbing), and anyone attempting hard trad.

Tenaya Indalo ($215)

Weight: 11.3 oz
Pros:

>Well-balanced and precise forefoot structure locks in on small holds
>Forgiving fit for a performance shoe
>Sets up great grabbing, overhanging edging, and smearing, thanks to the XS Grip half sole
>Molded heel cup excels at hooking

Cons:

>Toggles on Draxtor closure system are hard to adjust, due to small components

Like the La Sportiva Solution, the Tenaya Indalo is a downturned, slightly asymmetrical, semi-stiff quiver and bouldering shoe that scored good to great on just about everything. As someone with wide, high-volume feet, I was initially skeptical about the Indalo. It’s a pointy shoe, and I figured I’d have to contend with dead space in the toe. But Tenaya nailed it this time, building just enough softness into the microfiber upper and lateral stretch on the bilayer perforated tongue so wide feet can spread out and fill the toe box. The Indalo shone on a hyper-techy, gently overhanging granite project at a secret crag near Estes Park, Colorado, which I ultimately sent in this shoe, after a month; I was able to dig into the smallest divots and micro-edges (the dual-construction double midsole—a 0.5-millimeter textile-and-thermoplastic layer superimposed on a braided-polypropylene layer—is just stiff enough) but also toe down and grab sloping footholds. Yes, the toe box is long, but it’s also just the right amount of heavy, and the feedback was off the charts. I also dug the thermally-molded heel cup and its full-wrap rubber panels, which kept me locked in around arêtes and on bouldery moves. Tester Anthony Walsh appreciated the stretchy, thin-mesh tongue for hot gym sessions, and he noted that the vegan material “didn’t tear or fray despite yarding on them far too hard a couple times.” My single complaint is that the Draxtor closure system, while highly effective at letting you customize fit, is hard to adjust with fat or pumped fingers.

Bottom Line: This is an amazing, quiver-of-one shoe for sport climbers who lean toward technical, gently overhanging routes and mega-steeps. It’s a bit soft for dead-vertical edging-fests, but still has enough big-toe bite to squeak by on spots of slabbier terrain.

How to Buy

With brands offering so many rock shoes, including “families” of shoes (lace, Velcro, and slippers all built on the same last), it can feel overwhelming to pick out a new pair. Really, there are no wrong answers; only the wrong fit or the wrong shoe for the wrong job. Here are some parameters to help refine your search.

Intended Use

This is a big one, with two facets: you should know both how you intend to use the rock shoe and what the brand’s intended use was when they designed it. These don’t necessarily need to match up, but it’s better when they do. First consider what you want the shoes to do for you, then take a look at the product information to see where there’s overlap. Rock shoes are super niche these days; shop accordingly.

Gym Bouldering and Board Training (Moonboard, Tension Board, Kilter Board, Grasshopper Board, Etc.)

For gym bouldering or board sessions where you’re frequently removing your shoes, you want a slipper or a Velcro-closure shoe that makes for easy on/off. You’ll also want a versatile shoe that performs both on radical steeps and for volume smearing on comp-style problems. To that end, look at soft shoes with only a mild downturn; you need jib-standing power, but you’ll mainly be smearing, hooking, scumming, and glomming, whether it’s on the holds or the actual wall surface.

Gym Lead Climbing

It’s rare to see people wearing lace-ups in the gym, as they’re often too stiff and too cumbersome to take on and off frequently. Instead, you want a softish, jack-of-all-trades performance shoe, usually a slipper or Velcro version that’s one notch stiffer than your gym-bouldering shoe. A semi-stiff all-arounder gives you options on your gym’s lead terrain, which typically varies from vertical to very overhanging. Some climbers like shoes they can keep on for the duration of their session, and there are now purpose-built models for exactly these scenarios (including the ).

Performance Sport Climbing

This is likely the largest category on the market, with each brand offering multiple options. Sport climbs come in all flavors, from radical cave ascents on tufas to techy granite faces and arêtes to pocketed limestone. Consider where you’ll be climbing frequently. What attributes do you need the most? A pointy toe for micro-divots and pockets? A neutral (i.e., not downturned) last and a stiff outsole for performance on vert and slab? A slight downturn and medium-sticky rubber for grabbing power on semi steeps? Major downturn, radical asymmetry, and squishy rubber for cave climbs? Or are you looking for a “quiver of one,” pretty good at all disciplines and/or able to excel in just one or two?

Bouldering

There are countless high-end bouldering shoes out there. Most are designed to encase the foot in rubber, for fluency with futuristic, non-big-toe-focused moves like heel-toe cams and toe scums. These tend to have an aggressive fit—an asymmetrical “banana” shape and a radical downturn—to help you bite into small holds on overhanging terrain. They are not meant for edging-intensive climbs or long-duration wear.

Trad Climbing/All-Around

In general, these shoes are flat-lasted so your feet and toes sit in a more neutral, less activated position, for the longer-term comfort you’ll need on traditional and multi-pitch climbs. Trad shoes are meant to be stiff and supportive, so that the small muscles in your feet and calves don’t fatigue on long, vertical leads. Trad shoes will also often have higher heel cuffs or ankle protection, for wider cracks. They can be very precise, but will typically lack flexibility and sensitivity.

Fit and Break-In Period

Fit is personal and varies from shoe to shoe and genre to genre. If I really love a particular shoe, I may even buy two different sizes: a looser, more forgiving fit for warm-ups, long pitches, multi-pitch climbs, and gym sessions; and a tighter pair for sport climbs and boulder problems at my limit—short-duration wear. Here are a few rules of thumb.

Go by Volume

Some brands make shoes that favor wide feet, and some that favor narrow feet. So you may discover that some shoes just work better for you. That said, many climbing shoes now come in regular and low-volume (LV) models, or may be labeled as men’s or women’s versions (women’s fit usually translates to LV). It pays to try on both options. There may also be a difference in midsole support between the two: a thinner or half midsole for lighter climbers (often marketed to women), and a stiffer, full-length one for heavier climbers.

Know How Brands Size Their Shoes

Some brands design their shoes to correlate with your street-shoe size; others design them to be sized down. Check the manufacturers’ websites, or go to a shoe demo or retail store, before you commit. For my wide, high-volume feet (street size ten), I’ve figured out the corresponding size by brand, which may help you on your search:

Black Diamond: 9.5

Butora: 9.5

Evolv: 10

Five Ten: 10

La Sportiva: European 40.5 or 41

Mad Rock: 9

Red Chili: 9.5

Scarpa: European 41-42, roughly two to four European sizes off street shoe size

Tenaya: European 41

Unparallel: 10

Again, these are just rough guestimates, but after intensive shoe testing for the past 15 or so years, they continue to serve me well.

For women’s sizing, I asked Heather Weidner, who wears a women’s street-shoe size eight (equivalent to a European size 39). For the sizes she’s sure of, she said:

La Sportiva: 37.5

Five Ten: 39

Scarpa: 39

Recognize the Right Fit

You never want your climbing shoes to fit so tightly that you immediately lose circulation—not even during break-in. In a shoe that fits perfectly, your big toe will sit flat or slightly curled at the very tip of the toe box, and your heel will slide all the way into the heel cup. If your big toe or other toes are so curled that you can barely weight the shoe, or if your heel doesn’t drop down fully into the pocket, the shoes are too tight. At the same time, you don’t want loose or baggy shoes, except maybe for warming up and long gym sessions. If a shoe is too comfortable out of the gate, it’s likely too big and will slip on smaller holds, especially as the shoes stretch. Most synthetic shoes only stretch a little (to become a quarter size larger), while those with leather uppers can stretch up to a half size, so take that into account when making your purchase. Finally, with performance sport and bouldering shoes, listen for a vacuum whoosh noise when you put them on—that signifies a good, conforming fit.

Don’t Skimp on the Break-In Period

Some models—especially high-performance shoes that run $200 and up, with their numerous sewn panels, special materials, and tension rands—are meant to have a long break-in period. Most performance shoes come with plastic sheets, to facilitate sliding tight, new shoes on over your heels. (You can even climb with the plastic hanging out the back. does it!) I’ll usually wear a tight pair at home (including the plastic sheets) for a night or two in front of the TV, then do a few gym sessions in them, then finally take them on the rock when they’re more pliable and better shaped to my feet.

The post The Best Climbing Shoes of 2023 appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Climbing hardware is tricky to review because, well, gear is pretty damn good these days. Many manufacturers rely on iterations of the same tried-and-true conventions, so it can be hard to find standouts. Still, some items are slowly shifting the narrative, from high-tech iterations on classic gear that approaches perfection, to products made following a greener manufacturing process, to niche items we didn’t even know we needed. Below, you’ll find our picks for the most interesting new climbing hardware of the season.

The Winners at a Glance

Editor’s Choice: Ocun Hawk QD Wire Bio-Dyn Ring Quickdraw

Edelrid HMS Bulletproof Belay FG Eco locker

Fixe Hardware 10mm Dyneema Anchor Sling-240cm

Grivel Plume HMS K3GH carabiner

Metolius Captive Quickdraw

Metolius Ultralight Master Cam

Petzl Nano Traxion pulley

Petzl Spirit Express Quickdraw

Trango Superfly Evo Autolock locker

Wild Country Zero Friends cam

How We Test

Number of Testers: 6

Number of Products Tested: 22

Number of Vertical Feet: 35,000-plus

Number of Years Climbed by Our Most Veteran Tester: 49

Least-Punishing Testing Venue: “Valmont Canyon,” aka the corridor in east Boulder, Colorado, that’s home to the city’s four rock gyms

Most-Punishing Testing Venue: The Bugaboos, British Columbia

Worst Weather: An epic thunderstorm at the Monastery, Colorado, that had two testers (and one dog) cowering under boulders while the gully flash-flooded

We tested 22 products, then narrowed down our final selection to 11 finalists. Our six testers put each piece of climbing gear through its paces in as many venues as possible, including the climbing gym (for things like belay carabiners); front-country cragging in Colorado (the granite around Estes Park, the sandstone of the Flatirons and Eldorado Canyon, the limestone of Rifle), North Carolina, Squamish, and Kentucky; and alpine, backcountry routes in the Bugaboos and Canadian Rockies. Our testers ranged in age from their late 20s to early 60s, all with years and even decades of climbing experience.

The goal when testing any climbing hardware is to determine how well it performs for its intended use—so, for example, we sent the Metolius Ultralight Master Cams with our resident alpinist, Anthony Walsh, who put them to work on trad climbs in the Bugaboos. Since I’m primarily a sport climber myself, I tested things like quickdraws and wire brushes on the local crags. Although we considered factors like weight and appearance, the main criteria with hardware are always reliability and durability. Our goal is to answer questions like, “How well does this gear do what it’s supposed to?” and “Does it perform over weeks and months of hardcore use?”

Meet Our Lead Tester(s)

Matt Samet, former editor of Climbing, has been an avid rock climber since the mid-1980s, the era of high-top rock shoes, Hexentrics, and early camming devices. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he primarily sport climbs, boulders, and trains in the gym. He’s been testing climbing gear for the past 20-plus years. Two other key hardware testers were Anthony Walsh, a digital editor at Climbing based in Golden, British Columbia, who has a deep love for Canadian granite—be it the smooth gray rock of Squamish or the alpine splitters of the Bugaboos. And Duane Raleigh, the North Carolina-based, former editorial director at Climbing and a climber of nearly five decades, who’s seen gear come and go during his tenure in climbing media.

The Best Climbing Hardware of 2023

Editor’s Choice: Ocun Hawk QD Wire Bio-Dyn-Ring Quickdraw ($110 for a five-pack)

Weight: 2.7 oz
Pros: Bio-Dyneema is an ecologically friendly, light sling with dogbone material for weight-conscious climbers; Easy-clipping action on the wiregates was welcome on crucial clips—lots of tension and spring
Cons: White coloration, also found on regular Dyneema, could be confusing in a fixed-draw situation, in which you’re not sure whether the draw was dyed and has faded (and is thus a safety risk) or whether the dogbone was white in the first place.

We’re big proponents of Dyneema—it’s great for saving weight on multi-pitch climbs or when starting up a long onsight while carrying a ton of draws. But, as with so many synthetic materials used in climbing, standard Dyneema comes from non-renewable fossil fuels. Bio-Dyneema, on the other hand, presents a better alternative: It’s made from waste products upcycled from the pulp and timber industry, but with regular Dyneema’s weight, strength, and UV resistance. (Ocun, for now, is the only company using bio-Dyneema for their dogbones.) The draw we tested the material on, the Hawk QD Wire, rates to a very high 25 kilonewton breaking strength—i.e., more than enough holding power, and plenty of toughness for high-wear situations (like the dogbone sitting over an edge or while alpine climbing). “They’re little, they’re light, they’re strong—like Mighty Mouse,” said one tester. The wiregates have fast, snappy action—while in a pump crisis on a roofy climb at the Solarium in Kentucky, the same tester slapped the draw on, dropped the rope in, and kept going, all within a few critical seconds.

Bottom Line: This is a more eco-friendly, multi-use quickdraw that works for all genres and all climbers, but is especially good for alpinism given its light weight and freeze-resistant wiregates.

Edelrid HMS Bulletproof Belay FG Eco carabiner ($40)

Weight: 3.1 oz
Pros: Steel insert in the basket aids carabiner longevity; Spring bar consistently prevented cross-loading; Gate action is stiff and snappy; not anodized for greener footprint
Cons: The gate is so stiff and snappy, and the keylock closure so small, that one-handed use can be painful on your thumb

We’re so used to seeing anodized carabiners that we were initially taken aback by the old-school aesthetic of the gunmetal-gray HMS Bulletproof Belay FG Eco—and going bare gets rid of toxic chemicals in the anodizing process. Once we got past the looks, however, we loved the carabiner for belaying at the crag and gym—it’s nice to have a big, beefy HMS locker. The ample basket (plenty of room for your device to cant from side to side) and the steel insert there—a trademark of Edelrid’s Bulletproof carabiners—are big selling points, as this main wear point on a belay carabiner often scuffs or thins on a standard aluminum basket. But you can barely ding this steel. On the flipside, this makes the Belay FG Eco heavy, but it’s a big clipper meant for cragging and gym use anyway. Testers liked the stiff, snappy gate, though the keylock closure was rugged on our thumbs, given how hard you have to press down to slide it open; we also kept snagging on the nose. It seems like the ergonomics could be refined there.

Bottom Line: Minus some thumb wear, this is a strong, eco-minded, anti-cross-loading belay carabiner that’s ideal for gym use and cragging.

Fixe Hardware 10mm Dyneema Anchor Sling-240cm ($26)

Weight: 3.1 oz
Pros: No anchor-equalization “knot fuss”; Supple Dyneema is easy to knot; Packs down small for harness and backpack carry
Cons: More expensive than a cordelette

A sling is a sling is a sling, but this light 240-centimeter anchor sling from Fixe solves an issue we didn’t realize had been bugging us: namely that of the knot in our cordelette always ending up in the wrong damned place—hanging up on a carabiner—when we equalize a trad anchor. Made of supple ten-millimeter Dyneema that’s a snap to knot (and that unknots easily with some minor back-and-forth tugging after it’s been weighted), Fixe’s anchor sling coiled for easy harness carry (you can quadruple it for shoulder carry too), and, thanks to the the low-profile, three-inch-long bartack, was much easier to work with than an unwieldy cordelette knot. On a tricky, spread-out cam anchor atop a Colorado granite dome, one tester was glad he had the sling—the anchor equalized first go, and he was on rappel before he knew it. It’s rated to 22kN.

Bottom Line: This is a compact, easy-carry anchor-equalizing solution for multi-pitch and alpine climbing that does away with the dreaded “knot fuss” you get with cordelettes.

Grivel Plume HMS K3GH locker ($15)

Weight: 1.5 oz
Pros: Compact and lighter than a screw-gate locker—great for alpine and multi-pitch climbing; Opposed double-gate closure system reduces the risk of accidental opening
Cons: Gate closure takes some getting used to and is a tight fit with certain belay devices

With its two opposed wire gates, the HMS K3GH doesn’t look like a “locker,” lacking the twist-lock or screw gate we’re accustomed to seeing. (It actually looks like a giant paper clip, which makes it a great conversation starter.) Yet, it is a locker. The Twin-Gate system is interesting: You pop open the outer gate, floss the eye of your belay device or the ropes over it, and press down on the inner gate to get it all the way in. While testers initially struggled to pull this off one-handed, they reported they eventually got quicker. The HMS designation means this piece is suited for belaying with either a belay device or a friction hitch (Münter), and it did both well, with just enough room in the basket for a Grigri, though it was a somewhat tight fit getting the device on. (The HMS K3GH has a gate-closed strength of 23 kN and a minor-axis strength of 7 kN.) The HMS K3GH would also be a useful tool in fast-and-light situations, such as part of an anchor system on an alpine climb.

Bottom Line: The HMS K3GH brings locker functionality to a small, light package, making it ideal for multi-pitch and alpine climbing (particularly for building anchors), though it works just fine for belaying, too

Metolius Captive Quickdraw ($30)

Weight: 3 oz
Pros: Captured-eye technology on both pro-side and rope-side carabiners is 100-percent effective at preventing carabiner rotation; Snappy gate action; Steep angle on basket creates room for rope plus fingers for fast clipping
Cons: Dogbone could be thicker for scenarios where one needs to grab the draw

Metolius has always put great thought, effort, and energy into the safety engineering of its gear (e.g., the Safe Tech Trad Harness with two belay loops, or locking Anchor �Draws). The company’s new Captive draws continue that tradition, solving the issue of quickdraw carabiner rotation, which can happen when a draw is clipped to your harness or, more annoyingly, up on your project when you pull the rope. Throughout our testing, whether on granite sport and mixed climbs in Colorado or clip-ups in the Red River Gorge, Kentucky, none of our testers could get the carabiners to rotate, even when whipping the rope down through a long, steep line of draws. So you can leave them up on crux clips with total confidence. The six-inch sling length is nice—good for mitigating rope drag—but the sling itself is skinny, making it tougher to grab when your arms are pumped.

Bottom Line: The Captive is an especially great redpointing clipper that eliminates the carabiner rotation. And at three ounces, it’s also light enough for onsight use.

Metolius Ultralight Master Cams ($275 for #1–4 set, $285 for #5–8 set)

Weight: 1.6–4.5 oz
Pros: Remarkable weight savings (20 percent) over the original Master Cams makes these ideal for long-approach, multi-pitch climbing and alpine routes; Flexible stems are good in horizontal placements; Range Finder feature helps with assessing placements, especially for newer trad leaders
Cons: Flexible stem makes it harder to place the cams when pumped, especially in the larger sizes

Understood as a genre—and not simply a goal for all gear—“ultralight” has its place, namely on longer climbs where weight savings add up. Our tester Anthony Walsh put the Ultralight Master Cams through their paces in perhaps the perfect venue, the Bugaboos of British Columbia. “The approach was multiple hours, and our packs were loaded with two-and-a-half days of food, fuel, and a lot of climbing gear,” said Walsh. “I brought a single set of these Master Cams and, while stuffing them into my overloaded pack, I noticed how low-profile they are compared to my other camming units.” This build paid off on the harness, too, where Walsh noted how light the cams felt on one side versus a competing brand’s ultralights on the other. “The route we were trying was long and technically easy, with few opportunities to place gear,” he said. “When there was a crack to plug a cam, we were usually at a comfortable stance. This sort of terrain is where the Master Cams shine.” Walsh felt like the trigger action required extra pressure to retract compared to other ultralights, though once partially retracted, the action was smooth. He found the cams’ narrow head particularly appealing on thin granite cracks and seams, especially in the smaller sizes where you want deeper placements. The biggest ding is the minimalist thumb loop, which, along with the pressure-sensitive gate action and flexible stem, made it harder to place the units when pumped, a drawback more prevalent in the larger sizes.

Bottom Line: The Ultralight Master Cams are great for gear-intensive rock and alpine routes with long approaches, where you can take your time with placements.

Petzl Nano Traxion Pulley ($100)

Weight: 1.9 oz
Dimensions: 48mm x 52mm x 21mm
Pros: Ultra-light and portable hauling option; Tiny—takes up almost no space on a carabiner; Silky smooth progress-capture action
Cons: Small size makes it easy to fumble when you’re pumped silly; Lacks the cam-open lockout feature of the Micro Traxion

One of our testers owns every generation of Petzl’s Traxion progress-capture pulleys and uses them primarily for toprope soloing, something climbers have been doing for more than a decade. (Petzl lists rope ascent as one use of the Nano Traxion, plus they offer their own for solo toproping on their website.) The idea is that the devices cam against the rope in one direction, letting you pull slack through (or ascend a fixed line, as in a toprope-solo or rescue situation) without having that slack drop back down through the device. Each iteration has gotten smaller, and now we have the Nano, which weighs next to nothing and is about the size of a Matchbox car. It’s easy to bring one along on a multi-pitch climb. One tester used the Nanos to haul bolting gear and a day pack on long climbs, and they clamped down reliably. He also used one as a secondary, backup device for toprope soloing (they work on ropes from seven to 11 millimeters), and it slid ably along under his Micro, even on his fatty 11 millimeter static line. As someone with big fingers, our tester’s one caveat would be that the Nano can be fussy to remove up at your anchor, especially when you’re wicked pumped.

Bottom Line: This is an indispensable tool for weight-conscious, multi-pitch free climbers hauling the crag pack from belay to belay, or as a backup (secondary device) for toprope soloing.

Petzl Spirit Express Quickdraw ($24 for 11cm, $25 for 17cm)

Weight: 3.1 oz (11 cm), 3.4 oz (17 cm)
Pros: Lighter weight than previous iteration; Bolt-side carabiner is less prone to flipping due to smaller dogbone eye; Clips just as smoothly, if not better, than the previous version; Gates have improved ergonomics
Cons: Premium pricing may be too high for casual climbers

Petzl Spirits have been a gold standard in performance quickdraws for years. Known for their buttery gate action and light, ergonomic handling, you’ll see them hanging on routes at almost any serious sport area. The latest iteration builds on that legacy with two big visible tweaks. The carabiners (straight-gate and bent-gate) are slightly smaller, shaving weight off their previous counterparts (eight grams per draw with the 11 centimeter dogbones; or, for a rack of a dozen 11 centimeter draws, 96 grams—roughly the weight of one more quickdraw). There are a few other updates as well: The clipping divot in the straight-gate is closer to the keylock nose, which makes for better handling but no snagging; the size of the keeper eye in the straight-gate side of the dogbone is smaller, reducing flipping; and the bent-gate has a friendlier curvature that makes for faster clipping action. One tester, pumped out of his gourd on a 30-degree-overhanging cave climb at the Red River Gorge, was beyond grateful to have a draw that clipped so quickly.

Bottom Line: These are stylish, premium quickdraws for hardcore sport, trad, and alpine aficionados, with fast-clipping, ergonomic action that’s notable for how light the draws are.

Trango Superfly Evo Autolock locker ($17)

Weight: 1.9 oz
Pros: Nearly perfect balance in hand (weight-to-size-to-thickness) makes this a user-friendly belay carabiner; Twist-lock gate closure is fast, responsive, and reliable; Carabiner has ample room to accommodate any belay device
Cons: The edges on the semi-circle cutout on the twist-lock mechanism (the sleeve) are a tad sharp, and would be better milled down.

There are so many lockers on the market, it can be difficult to single any out for special notice—they all have the same function and they all do their job pretty well. What stood out with the Superfly Evo, however, was the marriage of utility, balance, and bright, flashy style. Two of our testers noted how well balanced the carabiner is: It’s just the right thickness to feel natural in hand while belaying, while the twist-lock gate is reliable and responsive. The barrel is a good, grabbable size—it just feels solid under your thumb. “Many locking carabiners, particularly auto-lockers, seem to suffer from a lack of friction on the sleeve or have over- or undersized sleeves,” said one tester. “The Superfly seems to walk a perfect line of these two attributes, making repetitive operation seamless.” Also noteworthy are the bright color schemes—with the fluorescent turquoise-and-green Superfly Evo, you’ll never have any trouble finding the carabiner and belay device amidst the chaos of your crag pack.

Bottom Line: The Superfly Evo is an ergonomic crag companion for belaying and gym climbing. It’s also small, portable, and multi-functional enough for other general locking-carabiner use (anchors, etc.).

Wild Country Zero Friends cams ($230 for 0.1–0.3 set, $230 for 0.4–0.75 set)

Weight: 1.8–2.91 oz
Pros: Buttery-smooth trigger action; Cable stem flexes but still has enough heft to reduce floppiness, allowing for deep placements; Extendable sling reduces the number of draws you need to carry
Cons: Spendy (though $5 cheaper per cam than a competing brand’s thin-crack pro)

Duane Raleigh was the perfect tester for these cams—he’s been climbing for 49 years, since the pre-cam era—so he’s seen every generation of spring-loaded camming device since the original Wild Country Friends came out in the late 1970s. He took these sleek, thin-crack pieces out to a local granite area, the Narrows, near Carbondale, Colorado, to test on its bottoming cracks and funky seams. “The Zeros were excellent in micro placements,” he said. “The stem flexes to keep rope drag and flex to a minimum, yet is stiff enough for easy triggering.” He also appreciated the teeth machined into the cams’ non-anodized working faces, noting how well these helped placements stay put. By comparison, Raleigh said, he “used cams with anodized cam faces and they skipped around; I hated them.” As with comparable, high-end thin-crack pro (Metolius Master Cams, Black Diamond Camalot Z4s), the Zeros will ding your wallet, but after months of testing, the trigger action remained buttery, justifying the cash outlay for a full set.

Bottom Line: The Zero Friends are for trad climbs with thin pro and where a narrow head width and semi-flexible stem are key, as in Eldorado seams, Yosemite thin cracks, and Gunks horizontals.

How to Buy

Climbing gear is such a vast category, but we always come back to the obvious: What is your intended use for the gear? And: Is the gear built for that use?

Weight

For climbers, the primary consideration with hardware is almost always weight. You have to schlepp the gear to the cliff, and then clip it to your harness or carry it in a multi-pitch pack. Thus, a school of thought that lighter is better has emerged, and manufacturers seem to be constantly on the hunt for ways to lighten their gear; in fact, they’ll sometimes offer a regular and an ultralight version of the same product.

Durability

What buyers sometimes fail to consider, however, is that lighter doesn’t by default equal better; it just equals better in certain situations, typically for alpine climbing, multi-pitch climbing, or onsight cragging where you’re placing pro or hanging draws. And there’s the physical reality that lighter gear—hollowed-out or drilled-out metal, thinner-diameter slings and ropes, smaller pulleys and belay devices, etc.—will be less resistant to wear-and-tear, thus prone to wearing out more quickly, or even, under extreme forces, failure. In certain cases, beefier gear that’s more resistant to friction may in fact be better, and usually only adds a pound or two of weight in your pack, a minor consideration for front-country climbing.

Materials

Finally, there’s been the recent acknowledgement that the ores we use to make metal aren’t infinite, and that the nylon and other synthetic fibers in our slings, quickdraw dogbones, and ropes comes from another nonrenewable resource: oil. There’s also the fact that the dyes and processes used to make our gear bright, smooth, and sexy—as with anodization—create toxic byproducts, and may not be necessary. So if environmental impact is a consideration for you, there are now more options than ever.

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I could see them soloing toward my belay 90 feet up the Second Flatiron outside Boulder, Colorado, a man and a woman, the woman shaky, sweaty, moving uncertainly, her feet clad in blown-out approach shoes. Nonchalant, her friend stood above her on the slab pointing out holds. “You’ve got this,” he’d say. “The next hold is a jug”—as if they were merely playing add-on at the bouldering gym. As if one missed move wouldn’t send her sliding down to crater, broken and ragdolled, where my wife sat nursing our baby in the shade of a rock.ĚýAs if one missed move wouldn’t send her careering past my two boys, starting up toward me on the rope.

I used to think that the opening scene in Vertical Limit was far-fetched. I mean, how does one party fall down a face and strip off other climbers below? Or perhaps better: How often does this really happen?

Well, in the Flatirons, where group and “guided” free solos have become a thing, with hundreds of people doing the easiest east-face routes on the formations on a daily basis, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more—or that I haven’t heard of it happening yet.

Picture a conga line of unroped climbers—ten of them, twenty!—in a row on a flat, inclined slab. Perhaps there’s a “trip leader,” a person who’s done the route before. Some climbers wear rock shoes, move well, and have experience; some wear approach shoes, laced up tightly; some wear running shoes—maybe it’s their first time doing this. And some (the scary ones) wear unlaced, white-soled tennis shoes that slide down a foot for every two feet of progress. As they catch themselves on a jug an instant before taking a lethal, 500-foot cartwheeling tumble, they turn to their friends and say, “That was sick!”

It’s a casual day out. I mean, if these things truly were dangerous, they wouldn’t be all over Instagram and Mountain Project and YouTube. Or the rangers would have fenced them off. No one ever dies soloing 45-degree slabs, right?

All the while, .

As the two climbers came up on my belay, I flattened myself to let them pass. Seventy feet down, my boys bickered. I’d tied them in about 20 feet apart so I could belay them on the same rope, but they were moving at different paces: “Dad, Ivan’s pulling me off!” and “Dad, Alex is going way too slow!”

After decades of traffic, the first pitch of Freeway is polished, its cracks rounded smooth, the smears glassy. I’d worried that my boys would struggle there. I hollered down that I’d lower them and we could try a different start, one farther right with a gentler angle. After a couple of minutes, they were back on the ground. In the interim, the two climbers had passed me, climbing up into a wide, diagonalling crack. There the woman had frozen, her knee jammed in the fissure, her friend standing on a rounded ledge just above.

Back in my twenties and early thirties, I soloed the east faces of the First, Second, and Third Flatirons on a regular basis. They’re fun—you can cover hundreds of feet in minutes, earning brilliant views over Boulder and the Indian Peaks. I’d often link them with nearby bouldering and slot traverses for a full-body pump.

https://www.climbing.com/people/free-soloing-no-rope-climbers-who-have-defined-it/

Then, at a certain point, as I experienced increasing anxiety due to an insidious tranquilizer addiction, I began to have panic attacks during my solos. Bullheaded, I persisted anyway, until one day in 2005 on the direct east face of the First Flatiron, soloing with my friend Rolando, I had a meltdown 100 feet up. Rolo climbed up and right to suss a bailout, chalking holds for me. Trembling, hyperventilating, sweating, eyes popping, I clung to the grips until I reached a small ledge. As bad as the experience had been for me, it had to have been worse for Rolo—looking down, powerless, wondering if I was about to die, as seems every year or so on these often underestimated formations.

“I’m not feeling this today,” the woman, still lodged in the crack, told her friend. “How much farther is it?”

“A long way,” he said with a chuckle.

“You know,” I said. “I have a rope and a harness here.” The woman looked down at me, considering her options. I gauged her trajectory were she to fall—a grinding, 15-foot slide right onto my belay. I had three good cams in, but still.

“I’m gonna bail,” she said. “I’m 100 percent not feeling this.”

“You’ve got this,” her friend said. “It’s not that bad.”

“How about we get her on a rope?” I said, before the conversation could go any further, before the unspeakable happened. Before her “friend” talked her into a very bad decision.

The woman slid down the crack, and I pulled her into my belay as the man soloed off. I pulled off my harness and helped her get it on, then clipped her in. It was her birthday, she told me, and she’d asked to be taken up the Second Flatiron as a gift. She was visiting from the Midwest and hadn’t been climbing much, plus she was feeling the altitude.

“I’m so mad at myself,” she said. “I really wanted to do this.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I’ve been gripped on these faces more times than I can remember”—and I told her the stories. “It happens to us all,” I said as she rappelled.Ěý“I’m just glad you’re OK.”

My boys and I summited the Second Flatiron that day, climbing seven pitches to where Freeway steps down off a small spire onto the trail. It was a hot late-May day, but as the air cooled and the shadows of the Flatirons crept out over the ponderosa, the formation got busier and busier, until on the final two pitches we were stopping to let huge packs of soloists go by. Everyone was friendly and encouraging of the boys (“I wish my dad had done this with me”), but it was a shit show, and not all the climbers were dialed, many moving with hesitation.

As we met my wife and daughter at the notch, my younger boy, Alex, breathlessly began to recount our adventure. He’d slipped on a water-polished groove on the fifth pitch, and I’d caught him—a very short fall. “The rope saved my life!” he exclaimed. “Those people without ropes are stupid.”

I wasn’t sure what to say—I’d essentially soloed the route, too, dragging the cord behind me to belay up my boys on each pitch. But I’d felt solid, I supposed; we all do, until our foot slips. It’s kind of like what Mike Tyson famously said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

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Back in the day we’d make “dad draws”—quickdraws with lockers on either end. We used these for toproping sport routes or for first bolts with tough moves over bad landings where, if the rope should somehow unclip itself from a regular carabiner, a fall would be catastrophic. Of course, now that I am a dad, I use dad draws without irony. The goal is always to come home to my kids, even if they probably broke something in the house (again) while I was out climbing and likely aren’t even sorry.

Metolius has come up with a commercial dad draw, the Anchor �Draw, that puts lockers on both sides of a 7″ dogbone in a smart, well-designed way that makes dad draws both sexy and fun to use. The smart comes from the “captured-eye carabiners,” special screwgates with a threading eye that keep the lockers oriented vertically—with the load along their strongest, major axis. This they did 100 percent reliably, and I quickly made them my go-to anchor draws for sport climbing and bolting, where you fix a static line to the anchors. Meanwhile, the well-designed comes from the lockers’ (and draws’) sleek, low-profile feel. These are not clunky, old dad draws but are instead the size of your standard draw, and at a relatively light 3.8 ounces (compared, say, to the 2.9 ounces for Metolius’s Inferno II draw), they are easy to rack and carry.

I’ve been using them for months now, and they’ve held up extremely well to repeated use: The purple carabiner, which I’ve been running the rope through, has some wear to the blue anodized paint but is not the least bit grooved in the basket. The hanger-side carabiner has no signs of nicks or cuts. All of the screwgates are still as smooth as ever. And the dogbone still looks great, despite repeated toprope and bolting sessions. Basically, if you’re going to be toproping off sport anchors, you’d be remiss not to carry these—they’re light, low-profile, and save wear on your regular quickdraws and on anchor hardware.

Basics

The Metolius Anchor ‘Draw is an anchor and first-bolt quickdraw that incorporates two screwgate locking carabiners on either end of a 7″ nylon dogbone. The lockers are kept oriented vertically through their “captured eye” technology—essentially a hole in the carabiner the sling has been passed through before being bartacked down. The draws are CE/UIAA certified and hold 22 kN (4,950 lbf) of force.

Pros

• Light and easy to carry at 3.8 ounces—they don’t weigh much more or take up much more space than a regular quickdraw
• Screwgates are big and easy to use
• Hard wearing and built to last
• Give major peace of mind when toproping or for hard climbing at the first or second clips

Cons

Not sure what happens if/when you need to resling a new dogbone through the captured eye—maybe you can send them back to Metolius? I wasn’t sure which end was for the rope and which was for the hangers, so I ended up going with purple for the rope, using the mnemonic “Red is for rope”—red is pretty close to purple, right?

Our Thoughts

At only $30 each, the Anchor ‘Draw is a no-brainer investment for safety and peace of mind when toproping off sport anchors or on routes with hard climbing down low, where you want the added security of a locker on your gear and on the rope. They carry light and sleek, and are easy to bring up on your harness, even for onsight burns.

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You’ve Got a Problem on Your Hands

THE TERM BOULDERING, with its connotations of unroped monkey play on low rocks, scarcely conveys the skill and athleticism required for this century-old climbing discipline, which has exploded in popularity over the past 20 years, thanks in part to the development of high-quality foam-and-nylon crash mats. Top boulderers practice a bouldering route—or “problem”—for days, weeks, or even months, repeatedly falling onto the pads, learning the nuances of every handhold, rehearsing body positions, and then putting it all together to make “the send.” In 2010, two new boulder problems were awarded the highest grade possible: V16. These were the first such problems identified in the U.S.; only a handful of other, equally difficult tests have been proposed elsewhere in the world.

The first of the climbs—the Game, an eight-move line in Colorado, on the underside of a prominent talus block below Boulder Canyon’s Cob Rock—was completed by Daniel Woods on February 10, 2010; it has since been repeated and downgraded to V15. The other, Lucid Dreaming, on the Grandpa Peabody boulder outside Bishop, California, was sent by Paul Robinson on March 30, 2010. His remains the only successful climb, and though the 24-year-old Robinson has said Lucid Dreaming might be only a V15, he’s certain that it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. Robinson worked on the climb over a three-year period, falling hundreds of times during practice trips made from his home in Boulder, Colorado.

Many people watched Robinson rehearse the route, but he finally nailed the ascent without witnesses or cameras. Any chance he’s lying? No way. Thanks to Robinson’s track record and his frequent presence on the rock, the only doubts have been expressed in a few snarky comments in the blogosphere. Here’s how he pulled it off.
Ěý

Paul Robinson’s V16 route Lucid Dreaming

THE NUMBERS
Boulderers use a different rating scheme than the better-known Yosemite Decimal System, an ascending scale that ranges from 5.0 to 5.15b and marks the difficulty of roped rock-climbing routes. The V scale, codified by John “Verm” Sherman around 1991, is somewhat more fluid—it rates ­individual moves or sequences, a more subjective animal—and with ­repeat ascents a problem’s grade can fluctuate until a consensus emerges. (The first and repeat “ascensionists” arrive at the rating based on comparisons with similarly difficult climbs.) Robinson first proposed a V16 for Lucid Dreaming because, as he explained on a blog, it features “by far the two hardest moves I have ever completed”—two single movements, each rated V12/V13, linked one into the next. At the time, Lucid Dreaming had repelled other top climbers, including Chris Sharma and Woods.

THE ROCK
Lucid Dreaming traces the left side of the south face of the 60-foot Grandpa Peabody boulder, the king daddy of dozens of egg-shaped rocks scattered above a dirt track near Bishop called Buttermilk Road. The rock here is quartz monzonite, a punishing stone made up of sharp crystals. The climb moves out on the boulder’s 45-degree-overhanging underbelly, then onto a scoop (rated 5.12) and a low-angle slab (5.9) to the top-out point at 55 feet. The toughest moves come right away, on the belly. Here, Robinson began with a sit start (seated in the dirt) and moved into an upside-down three-finger spike with his right hand. From the spike, he reached left to a microscopic pinch grip—a so-called belief hold just one-sixth of a finger pad wide—from which he leaped to a three-quarter-pad crimp edge, his feet Supermanning away from the overhang. Robinson picked this climb because, while it had already been completed from a higher, standing start, it hadn’t been done from the sit—the portal to the toughest moves. The small, sharp holds also favor Robinson’s style, which climbers call fingery or technical.

1. THE REGIMEN
A problem this hard demands superhuman contact (that is, finger-to-rock) strength, extreme flexibility, precision gymnastic timing, and focus. Robinson, five foot ten with tendons like steel cables, is known for his freakishly strong fingers, his high strength-to-weight ratio (he weighs 130 pounds and can do three one-arm pull-ups with each arm), and his composure. “I had to dig past any sort of concentration and dedication I’d ever had to make this climb a reality,” he says. In the months leading up to the send, Robinson worked on key points like endurance and dynamic movement at the climbing gym. He honed his core muscles—abdominal, oblique, iliacus, and psoas—on the 55-degree overhang at the Colorado Athletic Training School in Boulder. He also did 100 sit-ups and 50 push-ups after each gym session.

2. THE REHEARSAL
“The holds are so ingrained that they’re definitely something I’ll never forget,” says Robinson, referring to the motor programming he developed for the crux pinch and crimp, three moves into the climb. To optimize his feel he stacked three crash pads, which allowed him to reach up and fondle the rock. “I would memorize the holds, get into position on the pads, put one foot on, and mock-go to the pinch or mock-go to the crimp,” he says. Because he couldn’t risk a fall on the 5.12 traverse, which begins 25 feet off the ground, he practiced this section five times on rope. On his successful ascent, he placed a half-dozen crash pads below the boulder. Though these protected the hardest climbing down low, they were of little value as he went higher.

3. THE SKIN
In bouldering, skin-to-rock friction is everything, so you have to preserve your epidermal layers. Robinson won’t let his hands get wet on climbing days, knowing that his skin soaks up moisture and becomes prone to tearing. To prevent cracking, he uses antibacterial cream but not lotion. Another factor: atmospheric conditions. Too hot or humid and your skin forms a sweat layer; too cold or dry and it gets slick. When Robinson did Lucid Dreaming, it was 40 degrees out, with light humidity from a gathering storm. He says the tackiness helped on the pinch, which has a glassy finish.

4. THE DREAM
Predawn on March 30, Robinson was asleep at his hotel in Bishop, and for the second night running he was having the same dream. He was in his hometown of Moorestown, New Jersey, and his father, Chip, who’d died in 2009, sat watching him train on the garage-wall “woodie.” But now the wall held only terrible pinch grips. Robinson jolted awake, checked the weather report, called friends to go climbing (all were asleep), and then drove solo up to Grandpa Peabody.

5. GAME TIME
Robinson parked, hiked up the hill with his crash pads, warmed up on a set of holds around the corner, and then tried Lucid Dreaming alone, minus the 20-odd onlookers usually gathered below the popular boulder. The first time, he grabbed the pinch poorly, dropping off automatically, as he’d done so many times before to save precious skin. On his next effort, he grabbed the pinch “decently well” but only half-stuck the crimp, swinging out and falling.

6. THE EXECUTION
Robinson rested, dipped his hands into his oversize chalk pot, and then tried a third time, climbing smoothly and snagging the pinch perfectly. His mind, he says, “shut off for a little bit,” and muscle memory took over as he cocked for the dynamic leap, or “dyno,” to the crimp. The dyno is what climbers call a low-percentage move—a precise coordination of physics that comes together only one time in several—and it had become Robinson’s nemesis. Through trial and error, he’d learned that if he didn’t jump hard enough, his fingers couldn’t settle onto the hold, but that if he jumped too violently he would pendulum off and shred his fingertips. This time Robinson leaped just right, slightly bending his right arm when he caught the crimp and using his core to hold the swing at the apex for a half-second longer. He swung back in, put his feet on, and continued up the route.

7. THE VICTORY
Now Robinson climbed through middling-hard crimp moves to a rest before the 5.12 traverse. Because it was so cold, his hands weren’t even sweating. “I got the mini-jug [rest], composed myself, looked at what I had to do, and gunned it,” says Robinson. “There was no going back—it was do it, get to the top, and that was all I could think about.” A drizzle fell on the final slab as a storm socked in the valley. Alone on top, the climber gave a victory whoop, took in the surrounding rockscape, and then rappelled down a rope he’d left tied there. Back on the ground, Robinson called his friends; awake now, they drove up to congratulate him.

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Dean Potter, 39, is the modern master of risk-taking on rock, a towering physical specimen who speed-climbs the biggest walls in Yosemite, flies off cliffs wearing a wingsuit and a parachute, scales steep, technical rock faces without a rope, and walks on bobbing slacklines set thousands of feet above the ground—sometimes without any kind of safety device. Among climbers, he’s equally famous for his king-of-the-dirtbags ethos (he’s been known to live in a cave), his intense demeanor, and a rebellious streak that has made him a counter­cultural icon, irritating some and inspiring many more. Potter was married in 2002 to fellow climber Steph Davis, from whom he divorced last year, and these days lives just outside Yosemite Valley with his dog, Whisper. For our oral history, former Climbing editor Matt Samet spoke with family, friends, and the man himself to get a glimpse of a life lived way over the edge.

Dean Was Trouble from the Start

Potter began climbing in 1988, at 16, doing most of his apprenticeship near his home in New Boston, New Hampshire, on the granite cliffs of Joe English Hill, a 1,273-foot mountain that sits on federal land controlled by a local Air Force base.

Dean Potter: In the early days at Joe English, my friend John and I climbed a lot by pushing on each other’s feet and pulling on each other’s hands. Later, some older guys—the Adams brothers—ran into us and said, “Damn kids, you guys are going to die!” They told us to get a harness, and they said you can’t use a laundry line for climbing. We were doing top ropes with stuff we got from John’s father’s garage.

Patricia DellertĚý(Dean’s mother): I wasn’t aware of Dean’s love of climbing until his high school years, when he was going over to Joe English Hill. I didn’t know he was climbing on the cliff, because it’s a military reserve, a satellite-tracking station. He was in there illegally. I thought he was just climbing the boulders below.

Potter: My parents didn’t want to believe their son was 200 feet up, free-soloing. They liked to go on long walks and runs, and they would go right by Joe English. Later they’d say, “Hey, we saw someone climbing up there.” They would describe what they saw, and I’d be wearing the exact same outfit. And I’d say, “Oh… Nope, wasn’t me!”

Charley Bentley (early climbing partner from New Hampshire): The first few times I climbed with Dean, in 1991, I was on a different level, but he closed that gap quickly. At the end of spring, he moved to North Conway and was living in the woods between Cathedral Ledge and Whitehorse. He probably climbed every day on granite, which is a really slippery, technical rock that hones your footwork. By the fall, he was climbing 5.13’s. I don’t think Dean understood how shockingly fast he’d progressed.

Tommy CaldwellĚý(top American rock climber): In Yosemite Valley in April 2004, Dean had climbed 20 feet up in a tree to spot us on this highball crack, and I was 25 feet up, getting tired. Dean’s like, “Just grab me!” I reached back and grabbed his arms, swinging off him. You wouldn’t usually leap off a boulder and grab somebody who’s perched in a tree, but Dean is superhuman that way.

Wayne Crill (friend who in 2009 pioneered the Peyote Button, a scary, technical BASE jump on the north face of the Eiger, with Potter and another jumper, Ian Augenstein): I got to know him by BASE-jumping ­together in the Moab area around 2000 or 2001. Dean would walk barefoot everywhere. He would jump with shoes on but hike out barefoot.

Potter: Many of my hardest climbs were done with one or both feet barefoot. My feet look like hooves—like, fake-leather bottoms and funky toenails—and I scrub them with a big stiff-bristled nylon brush you’d use for scrubbing the side of your house. Even now, with snow on the ground, I’ll cruise around outside barefoot to toughen up my feet.

Dean’s School of Hard Rocks

After three semesters, Potter dropped out of the University of New Hampshire and went west. He spent most of the nineties scraping by as an ­unsponsored ultra-dirtbag, usually living in or around ­Yosemite Valley (often in his van); in Hueco Tanks, Texas; Estes Park, Colorado; or Moab, Utah.

Mark PelletierĚý(early climbing partner from New Hampshire): In 1991, I was ­living with a friend in Missoula, Montana, and Dean came up to visit. He was living behind the couch, and we were adamant that he contribute, because we needed the cash. He got a night job at a golf-bag factory with a bunch of cranky old women who talked about what kind of underwear they were buying. He hated it. One night we’re hanging out, and we hear something. I look over the couch, and Dean’s hiding there. He’d had it with these psycho women. We spent the night heckling him about how he couldn’t hang out with old women making golf bags.

Bronson MacDonaldĚý(early bouldering partner): He’d save every dime and then go down during winters to Hueco Tanks, the boulderer’s mecca. In 1992, he was the head honcho of the climber bivouac at Pete’s Country Store. Dean was extremely anal—kind of like an old hen, making sure everybody picked up after themselves.

Jim HurstĚý(climbing, slack­lining, and filming partner who shot footage of Potter’s on a 1,000-foot, 5.12+ Eiger route called Deep Blue Sea): I first met Dean when he was cooking at Pete’s. I think of Pete yelling, “Dean, get the fuck in here!”—complaining because Dean was making these blueberry pancakes with piles of ­blueberries for his climbing friends. Before Dean got the job at Pete’s, he was living on saltines and condiments. I think he liked mustard.

Potter: I got the job as cook at Pete’s because I couldn’t bear being on food stamps anymore. Basically, I worked for a $3-a-night place to sleep, plus breakfast and dinner. I ­remember sitting with my friend Jim Belcer one Christmas Eve, eating salt sandwiches, and we were saying, “Man, this is dumb—this is a salt sandwich.” Now, somehow, I romanticize it. But at the time I wondered, What’s gonna happen when the salt runs out?

MacDonald: In the summers, he would come stay with us in Estes Park. One time we were all sitting on the front porch, looking out at Lumpy Ridge, and a lightning storm rolled in. Lightning hit Dean’s car, blew out the windshield and all the windows and fried the electrical system. Everything he owned was in it—in a sense, that was his money. And Dean was like, “I think this is a sign.” And we were like, “Well, pretty much, it was a lightning storm that just came in and hit.” But he totally believed there must have been a reason. I have no idea what that reason was, but maybe he’s discovered it.

Dean Can Be Intimidating

At six foot five and 185 pounds, Potter has the physical presence and strength to match his demeanor. He’s known for popularizing new training techniques, like slacklining, and pioneering sports, including freeBASEing (climbing without ropes with only a parachute for backup) and BASElining (highlining with a parachute on).

Potter: These days I’m training by doing my “ups” fanatically. I’m up to 1,540 exercises, about three or four times a week. It takes two to two and a half hours. I start with 20 push-ups and 100 sit-ups. Then 50 back arches, 30 squats, 20 regular curls, and 20 reverse curls. Then I do ten side-­fingertip pull-ups and ten regular pull-ups. Six sets, with as little rest as possible.

Leo HouldingĚý(climber who, with Potter, made the ­second ascent of the dangerous Yosemite route Southern Belle in October 2006): In centuries past, Dean would’ve been the guy leading the charge. He is intelligent, disciplined, and committed to mastering his arts of climbing, slacklining, and flying. He is a warrior ­constantly searching for the next peaceful battle.

Alex HonnoldĚý(like Potter, a top free soloist): I first talked to Dean at the brewpub in Moab four years ago, when I was doing a bunch of his routes out there. I was mostly afraid that he was going to crush me with his ham-sized fists. He’s ­intense. But he’s the nicest dude when you actually talk to him.

“Chongo” Chuck TuckerĚý(slacklining guru at Chongo­nation.com and Potter’s slacklining mentor): The first time Dean tried slacklining, in 1993, he walked the whole 40-foot line. By the end of the day, he was able to mount, take steps, and turn around. Later, when Dean announced that he attributed his success to the slackline, the climbing world embraced it as a training tool.

Cedar Wright(fellow Yosemite climber and, with Potter, former member of Yosemite Search and Rescue): Dean used to set up these long slacklines 10 or 12 feet off the ground in the trees. I remember we had this 120- or 130-foot-long line. And for me, I was at my limit—one time I tried, got the wobbles, winged off, and landed on my back. I was lying there gasping, and Dean was pointing his finger at me and laughing hysterically. That about sums it up.

Hank CaylorĚý(climber and BASE jumper): I was with Dean on his first ten BASE jumps, off the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, in July 2003. He’s so big that trying to outfit him with protective gear was like trying to squeeze a giant orangutan into a helmet. Nobody makes gear that fits him. You can see a video of 100 people jumping, and you can tell which one is Dean. He looks like a perfect X, just grabbing the air with his hands and feet.

Dean Is Mental (In a Good Way)

Potter’s preparation for performances like his Deep Blue Sea climb involve what many describe as a preternatural ability to focus—along with the mood swings that can ­accompany this gift.

Potter: For two summers, I lived up on the Eiger for close to 40 days. It was in a tent under this overhang near the start of Deep Blue Sea. I would drink the water that dripped from the ceiling. It would be drip, drip, drip, and two hours later your water bottle would be full. I was sleeping in my tent, waiting for the clouds to part, meditating for big portions of the day, doing yoga to stay limber, and just watching the swirling clouds and living like plankton on that rock.

Peter MortimerĚý(founder of , which has documented many of ­Potter’s exploits): Right before he was about to freeBASE the Eiger, you could see he was in an almost altered state. His eyes were distant, and he was breathing deep. He did this sort of a shaking thing—ullullullullull—and you could tell that this guy had transformed his body and mind into the world of doing this climb.

Wright: Dean can be one of the most hilarious, fun-to-be-around people, and then the next minute can be a very dark, intense individual. He’s had some nicknames. He used to be Mean Dean because he had a reputation for being a little aggro. And then he was Scheme Plotter because he always had some crazy, wild exploit he was planning. Now they call him the Dark Wizard.

Sean Leary (Potter’s partner in setting the November 2010 , a 2,900-foot climb on Yosemite’s El Capitan): The first time we speed-climbed the Nose, in September 2010, we were sitting there waiting for it to get light out, and I’m spouting off about other stuff, kind of nervously. Dean’s just quiet, then he says, “I’m focusing on the Nose.” And that’s it. I thought: Oh yeah, good point. Let’s focus on the Nose.

Nick RosenĚý(partner at Sender Films): I was at the top of the Nose filming Dean and Sean when they broke the record. First Dean comes up. He said later he thought he was sprinting, but he was just shuffling. And then Sean comes up, making this inhuman panting. I go find Dean, who’s collapsed behind some boulder, unable to talk or stand up. Their legs were all bloody, and they’d burned holes in the toes of their brand-new climbing shoes.

Brad LynchĚý(director of The Aerialist, a 2007 documentary about Potter’s feats): Dean gets into this space where he’s super slothlike and it doesn’t seem like he’s going to do anything, but then he’s able to rally like nobody I’ve climbed with. He can flip the switch in this amazing way.

Potter: I do turn into quite the sloth. I’m saving every last bit for the send, and often I won’t talk. I go into a ­meditative bubble. Everything I eat, I’m imagining the food dissolving and going into the right muscles. I was in a similar state in 2002 when I free-soloed Super Couloir and made the first ascent of California Roulette on Patagonia’s Fitz Roy. I lived in a cave because I couldn’t deal with normal inter­action. I couldn’t deal if I saw fear in somebody else—if they feel it, it enters me.

Deano and the Man

Potter has had run-ins with the National Park Service, most notably in Yosemite Valley—where he’s been known to BASE jump, despite the fact that it’s illegal—and in Moab after his 2006 free solo of Delicate Arch, inside Arches National Park. That climb triggered new fixed-hardware regulations at Arches and cost Potter two of his biggest sponsors, Black Diamond and Patagonia.

Rosen: In Yosemite since the 1960s, climbing has very much been a way to rebel against conformity, a kind of outlaw activity. You have the national parks’ very buttoned-down, conservative culture, and then you have Dean, the guy who more than anyone has inherited this legacy. He is the Outlaw King of Yosemite.

Royal RobbinsĚý(Yosemite climbing pioneer and big-wall legend): Dean’s a very bold fellow with a lot of confidence, and it’s well placed. He’s doing things I wish I could do. There is a similar spirit, a willingness to get out there and try. It’s all in the trying. That’s the way I would make my mark if I were in the game today. At least, I would dream of it.

Wright: I first met him in 1998, the year I joined ­Yosemite Search and Rescue, when he was throwing crazy parties. One night we had this huge bonfire and laid plywood over it, and we had a bicycle with no pedals. Two people would grab the bike and launch somebody over the fire, and you’d just take it to the balls. We also had this little cart from the YOSAR site. Somebody was pushing Dean around in it, all drunk, and a ranger was hiding in the woods. They ran over the ranger with the pushcart—they nailed him. And then they were yelling, “Ranger!” Dean ran off and hid.

Potter: I’d be combative ­because I’d feel—and I still feel—that being free is the most important thing. But now the rangers just see this guy who has been here for 18 years, a guy who busts his ass every day practicing his art. And though I do some things that are illegal, if the rangers ask, I am honest. If I fly over their car and they have to chase me, they chase me. But if I don’t rub it in their face, they don’t go out of their way to hunt me.

Jason Keith (policy director for the , a nonprofit advocacy group for rock climbers): Arches National Park responded directly to Dean’s climb of Delicate Arch and banned all new anchors within days of the Delicate Arch controversy. Basically, I got called in by a park superintendent and had to make the case defending climbers in general, and then do the same in a meeting in Washington, D.C., with an ­associate director at the National Park Service.

Potter: After Delicate Arch, the Park Service slandered me—they said I harmed the rock, which I definitely did not. Despite all the slander, I didn’t break any laws. They did subpoena all the companies who sponsored me to see if they’d put me up to the climb. Two of my sponsors dropped me and dropped Steph, too. It was pretty gutless. Their decision to drop her was one of the reasons we divorced.

Dean Is Lucky to be Alive

Any adventurer’s life sees close calls, but Potter has walked the edge more than most.

Hurst: Basically, what he did at the Eiger involved free-­soloing with a weight on his back. One time he went up, and he had a lot of pressure on himself to do the climb. And then these clouds came in, and suddenly he’s free-soloing in the clouds. If you fell, you wouldn’t have any way to orient yourself—you know, which way to go when you came off—­because the visibility was only a couple hundred feet.

Leary: It was in September 2010, during our second time trying the Nose. I had put this cam in, but I must have kicked it when I went past. Dean didn’t look at it—he pulled on it and it came loose. I was on a ledge up high, and the rope started whipping out. Dean fell 20 feet, hit this little ledge, started windmilling his arms, and started to fall back again. I was like, Oh shit, the unthinkable is happening! I grabbed the rope and squeezed. Dean would have fallen another 100 feet if I hadn’t.

Mortimer: He’s fully aware of how dangerous this stuff is. It’s very calculated, and I think that informs the way he approaches these climbs and jumps.

Potter: I’ve been focused on solo-walking slacklines without a tether. I don’t do a lot of gymnastic tricks. If I fall when I’m high up, my trick is to catch the line so I don’t plummet thousands of feet and splatter on the rocks below. It’s incredibly scary out there—maybe some of the scariest stuff I do.

Hurst: Dean actually has a lot of fear, a lot of thinking that goes like, “Oh, this could go wrong and I could die.” He has nightmares before doing stuff. For Dean it’s a process, and he works really hard at it. He doesn’t have the natural ability to turn it all off.

Jimmy PouchertĚý(BASE-jumping mentor and partner): Mexico’s Cave of the Swallows is like an open-topped, inverted, 1,200-foot ice cream cone, so huge that cloudsĚýform inside. One day in 2003, Dean and Heinz Zak had fixedĚýa ­rappel rope, and when we were jumping they pulled it over maybe 20 feet from the wall. Up top we’d been sleeping in bags in a palapa, and it was raining a bit. Dean’s rig was sticking out from the palapa, so half of it got wet. I jumped in first, and then watched Dean, a speck dropping in free fall. Just past the midpoint, he deployed his parachute. Probably because it was unevenly wet, it rotated about three times—a malfunction known as line twists. Dean was kicking and slowly unwinding from this as he came closer to the side. Just before he hit, he got out of the line twists and turned sharply away—right into the rap line. His canopy collapsed, and he grabbed the rope out of instinct. So he’s 200 feet up with his canopy draped over him, clinging to a wet ten-­millimeter rope. I’m yelling, “Don’t let go, don’t let go!” Dean starts sliding down, and I’m yelling to tell him how far he is from the ground because he’s completely blind.

Potter: When I fell in that cave, I fell into depression, and I think that’s the biggest injury I’ve had—this post-traumatic stress syndrome. I lost so much of my willpower to go for it. Having that accident made me question my motivations. I was in a very low-energy place for at least two years afterward.

Pouchert: Dean slid all the way down and ended up as a pile of fabric on the ground. I pulled the canopy off to find him with his hands clenched in front of him and an empty stare. I said, “Let’s see them,” and he unclenched his hands. The friction had cauterized his wounds, so they weren’t bleeding—there were just these big, deep, ten-millimeter grooves. I had been so sure that he was going to die ten seconds earlier that I planted a big wet one right on his forehead.

Dean Wants to Fly Without a Net

Potter holds the : an 8,900-vertical-foot soar off the Eiger in 2009 that lasted nearly three minutes. He has talked about landing a wingsuit BASE flight without using a parachute to slow himself down for landing—an incredibly risky feat that nobody has come close to accomplishing.

Pete Swan (equipment designer): I keep joking that we will see it, but that there will be a couple of dead French kids first. Dean and I have spoken at length about the idea and have some concepts.

Potter: I’ve slowed myself to around 65 mph downward speed, but then, when I put the wingsuit on, I fall at less than 25 mph. I’ve also come to this more medium speed, when I’m going about 35 mph downward and forward at about 40 to 50. I’ve flown by parachutes when I’ve skydived, and they’re dropping on me, descending at a faster rate. Anybody who’s seen that was like “Yo, Dean, you can land that—you were going slower than a parachute.”

Crill: You could work up to it slowly—probably at glaciers and snow slopes in Europe. You could get familiar with the angles and then fly the line over and over again. And slowly get closer and closer to the surface and then eventually make that commitment.

Katie Ives (editor, Alpinist magazine): As an aerialist—Dean’s term—he’s creating these fleeting visions of senseless, useless, dangerous, and transcendent wonder. Dean wants to shock people out of their routines and preconceptions, to get them to feel the wildness of the world again.

Potter: Lately, I’ve been so fascinated with the “states between” that a big part of my concentration is on the emptiness. Visually, I can see the drifts. I’ve been up on top of El Cap this winter, either climbing by myself or with Sean, and the light would be perfect. I’d gaze out at the 3,000-foot drop and just see the air currents, the substance of the air.

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I’VE SEEN MY OLD PSYCHIATRIST TWICE, at a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado. It’s hard not to notice him, since this is the man who tried to kill me. Or maybe he’s the man who stood by and watched, bemused, while I nearly killed myself with prescription tranquilizers, and then did less than zero to help me stop. Each time he’s bought a morning brew and slumped in his car, sipping coffee and ogling women. It occurs to me that I should walk over and say something caustic. But at that early hour—with me still sick, wheezy, and shaky, three years into my ordeal of psychiatric-med withdrawal—it isn’t worth the effort. He’s who he is, and I’m in hell, and never the twain shall meet.

Samet, medication free, in Boulder, Colorado

Samet, medication free, in Boulder, Colorado

My name’s Matt, and I’m a recovering addict. I’m 38 and I live in Boulder, where, up until recently, I was the editor of Climbing magazine. I’ve been climbing for 22 years, sometimes at a semi-professional level but mostly just for fun. Still, I love it; I crave it. Climbing is the cause of and cure for all my maladies. It’s the thing that made me obsessive, anorexic, and so anxious that I really thought I needed all the pills—most notably, fast-acting benzodiazepine (“benzo”) tranquilizers like Ativan, Klonopin, and Xanax. Over the years, I’ve shredded body and mind with poisons and palliatives, and sweated out the mess: benzos, booze, marijuana, muscle relaxants, opiates, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anti­psychotics, coffee, sugar, computer games, food, puke, shit, piss, blood. Fueled by my hunger for climbing—and my fear of it—I wanted to drink it all in, to kill the sucking void.

Along the way, I’ve seen the insides of four psychiatric hospitals, starting in 1986, at age 15; been on and off the psych medicines Ativan, Depakote, desipramine, Klonopin, Lexapro, lith­ium, Neurontin, Nortriptyline, Paxil, Serzone, Trileptal, Valium, Wellbutrin, and Zoloft; and destroyed my car’s steering column and stereo, a countertop, a cell phone, a pinkie finger, and two computers in fits of chemical rage. I’ve also touched heaven—climbed 5.14, scampered across long alpine ridges solo, gone high up and ropeless on finger-ripping overhangs.

Climbing and addiction. Ultimately, they’re the same disease, a singular, brilliant, blood-blasting, pathological breakdown. But here’s the thing: I’m completely sane. I always was. And though I brought my own problems to the addiction party—call it a youthful appetite for too many extremes—it was the benzos that nearly claimed my life.

I FIRST CLIMBED AT AGE 12, in the Cascades with a family friend named Bob, who didn’t mind schlepping an overzealous city kid up the gentle but broken peaks. When I was 15, back home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my parents—divorced five years but not estranged—transferred me from a cushy private school, where I’d kept finding trouble as a fledgling skate punk, to our district’s central-city public school. As I walked those clamorous halls, with my guard always up, a clutching paranoia set in: With my little mohawk, safety-pin earrings, and bourgeoisie “street smarts,” I was no match for the real toughs, gangs of whom had already jumped us skater kids on the streets. I stopped attending class—my anxiety too strong to overcome—and my parents rebelled at my rebellion. Two weeks inside a mental hospital (and five months as an outpatient) converted my fear into a manageable panic, but I still saw the world as a place of violent, elemental chaos. I began to climb regularly then, through the local mountain club and the outdoor-education arm of the hospital’s Challenge Program. I loved it. On the rocks, the rules were clear and fair, the goals immediate.

Earlier this year, while thinking about various fun ways to spend the spring climbing season in California, Tommy Caldwell settled on a doozy: First, he and a partner would try the most continuously difficult big-wall free climb they could find, a 28-pitch route up Yosemite's El Capitan, called Magic Mushroom, which looked to rate a 5.14. Then, if all went well, Caldwell would return to lead every rope length himself, during a 24-hour supported speed run.

The origins of the project went back much further than that, though, and it's fitting that Caldwell's grand notion came to him when he was collapsed inside a tent, completely wasted after 24 hours of climbing few others could have even attempted, much less pulled off.

It was October 2005, on a warm, dry day in Yosemite, and Caldwell had just stacked up a pair of 3,000-foot free climbs on El Cap, making all his vertical progress using nothing but the strength of his body and limbs, the gear there only to protect him in case of a fall. His wife, renowned climber Beth Rodden, along with a pack of friends and climbing media, had met Caldwell up top, where his arms were so flushed with blood and lactic acid that they'd gone numb. Three weeks later he developed cluster headaches, and for more than a month his left elbow refused to straighten.

Caldwell had set out at just past 1 A.M. on October 30, starting on the Nose, a 2,900-foot 5.14a and the first line ever climbed on El Cap, back in 1958. (See “Number Crunching,” page 108, for a guide to climbing's rating system.) It was originally done by a cantankerous road surveyor named Warren Harding as a direct-aid climb, in which the climber puts weight on his protection hardware as he ascends, standing in stirrups called etriers to place each subsequent piece. Harding and various partners had needed 45 days over two climbing seasons. Caldwell, with belaying assistance from Rodden, did it in 11 hours. While he spidered up the wall, she managed the ropes rapid-fire in his wake, using self-ratcheting ascending devices called jumars as she pulled out the protection he left behind hand-placed metal widgets called nuts and cams. After jumaring the length of the rope, she'd stop to belay his line at each new anchor as he led off onto the next rope-length pitch.

At 1:36 P.M., Caldwell went back down to El Cap's base and swapped partners, moving on to the 5.12d Freerider with Chris McNamara, a California-based climbing-guidebook publisher. Around 9 P.M., 28 pitches up Freerider, Caldwell came to a final obstacle on a smooth, 5.12 dihedral a 90-degree, open-book-shaped convergence of two vertical faces. McNamara watched as Caldwell, after two falls, began to “stem” his way up the smoothest part of the dihedral, placing his legs in a splits-style bridge position, crab-walking as he applied force on the opposing walls. He made it through on his third try, going on to summit at 12:26 A.M. on Halloween.

The physical toll of this twofer was clear: Up in the summit tent, Rodden stood watch for two hours, waking Caldwell periodically to make him eat, so he'd have energy for the treacherous scramble and rappel down the East Ledges.

Even in his exhausted daze, Caldwell realized something: He could have pushed harder. Seventy percent of the climbing had been “only” 5.10 or 5.11 no-brainer stuff for an elite climber. What he really craved was an El Cap climb so relentless, pitch by pitch, that to do it in less than 24 hours would demand not only his best physical efforts but also a complicated mental and logistical game.

It would take him another three years to find the right target, and the project he settled on Magic Mushroom was a challenge for the ages. I'd heard about Caldwell's ambitions, and I wrote him to propose that he let me watch him plan and train from start to finish. He agreed, and I got a backstage pass while he rehearsed the climb of his life.

Caldwell was born on August 11, 1978, in Loveland, Colorado, the younger of two children. Lean at five foot nine and 150 pounds, he has the “climber V” highly developed latissimus dorsi muscles and much of his upper-body strength is concentrated in his shoulders. Watch him on rock and you see a whippety, swaybacked technician, his feet sticking to the stone as surely as if he were kicking steps in snow. (Contrary to popular belief, climbing isn't only about upper-body strength the best climbers rely mainly on savvy movement, propelled by the feet, legs, and core.)

Caldwell came to the sport through his father, Mike, who lured him at age three up his first multi-pitch route, above Estes Park, Colorado, with the promise that they'd fly a kite when they topped out. A senior guide at the Colorado Mountain School, Mike moved his family to the windy, spartan town and set out to raise an all-star. Tommy earned “credits” for training push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups applying these toward candy bars and, later, rock shoes. He was only 12 when he first climbed the Diamond, a sinister 1,000-foot wall on nearby Longs Peak.

Throughout the nineties and into the new century, Caldwell left his mark all over Colorado. But he's best known for his unique rapport with El Capitan, a granite wall so intimidating that it sends many accomplished climbers scurrying back to earth. El Cap 100 million years old, two miles wide, scoured to near perfection by glaciers is home to 90-odd aid climbs and 17 free climbs. Over the years, roughly two dozen people have died there in rappelling mishaps, jumar accidents, and falls, or as a result of massive Sierra storms that can turn the cracks into cataracts or freeze ropes into unusable cable.

Caldwell first caught the El Cap bug in 1997, at 19, during a spectacular failure of a trip with his father, when he attempted to free the Salathé Wall, a 30-plus-pitch climb on the southwest face. The Salathé is hardest on the headwall, a golden shield of rock slashed by a 200-foot crack that consistently overhangs five degrees past vertical, 2,500 feet off the ground.

“I didn't have the stamina, and we didn't have the logistics,” Caldwell says. “I'd be climbing with a 30-pound rack, a triple set of cams on one side and four sets of nuts and Tricams on the other.” The pair topped out after seven days, with the younger Caldwell having been, he said, “completely bouted” on the hardest free pitches, despite his 5.14 sport-climbing background.

Caldwell had tried the SalathĂ© “on sight,” starting from the ground and attempting each pitch with no prior knowledge of how to do it. What he didn't know is that big-wall free climbers often spend time studying a route in advance, rehearsing it and setting up gear stashes. It's not uncommon to aid-climb or rappel the hardest pitches first, placing top ropes to make move-by-move rehearsal easier as the preparations continue. Climbers write down each gear placement and pocket these lists to consult on the fly; store food, water, and sleeping bags to obviate the muscle-crushing drudgery of hauling it all up from the ground; and tote or stash multiple pairs of rock shoes, some sized amply for easier pitches and others toe-crunchingly tight for the hardest leads.

Armed with this newfound knowledge, Caldwell returned in early 1998, humped 80 pounds of gear up the East Ledges, and rapped into the Salathé Headwall to rehearse the crux crack. He returned that April with Mike Cassidy, a climber he'd met in Yosemite Valley, and free-climbed the Salathé in a three-day push.

Since then, Caldwell has spent upwards of 500 days on El Cap, freeing 12 of its routes five of those being first free ascents. In 2007, to be closer to what he calls his “obsession,” he and Rodden took eight months off from climbing to build an airy, three-story, peaked-roof home in Yosemite West, only 12 miles from their theater of operations.

In early 2008, Caldwell set his sights on Magic Mushroom, which was first done as an aid climb in 1972 by Canadians Steven Sutton and Hugh Burton. The route follows thin but direct cracks and flared dihedrals up a steel-gray swath of rock that rises to the left of the Shield Headwall, a mammoth, gold-streaked swell on El Cap's southwest face. Caldwell's friend Adam Stack had tried and failed to free the line in 2004 and 2005, after El Cap veterans Alex and Thomas Huber, brothers from Germany, had inspected it on rappel and declared it impossible as a free climb. Caldwell had been working on a free version of Mescalito, a line near the Nose, but it had so many upper-5.13 and 5.14 pitches in a row that he couldn't see doing it quickly. Magic Mushroom seemed feasible by comparison.

Most of El Cap's free routes follow the more obvious natural crack systems. To free-climb them, you have to be adept on all crack sizes, from “sickly tips” (pinky locks) to “off-width” (wider than the fist but not big enough to shimmy up inside) to narrow chimneys that require full-body squeezing and groveling. Many of the hardest free cracks in Yosemite feature “pin scars” boxy, finger-size holes left behind by the original aid climbers, who repeatedly hammered pitons into the rock.

To protect against the sharp crystals in the cracks, free climbers often wrap their mitts with athletic tape. Where the cracks pinch down, they need to be strong on the glacier-polished grooves, slabs, and dihedrals, sections so glassy and holdless that climbers talk about “oozing” upward. El Capitan, with its notorious glacier polish and diamond-hard granite, has many such sections.

Big-wall climbers, free and aid alike, use well-refined tools to make wall life more tolerable: portable ledges for sleeping; ballistic-nylon haul bags filled with food, clothing, and water; lead lines and haul lines; hauling pulleys and jumars; hanging stoves; headlamps; and wall gloves. Even so, wall climbing is miserable and scary. The wind howls, you're dive-bombed by swallows, and, from just 500 feet up, giant trees on the valley floor look like matchsticks. To succeed, it's essential to have a solid, motivated partner.

For his first attempt on Magic Mushroom, Caldwell drafted Justen Sjong, 35, a professional climber based in Boulder, Colorado, who, like him, would try to free-climb every pitch. Prior to this year, Sjong had freed three El Cap routes, including one 5.13d first ascent, the preMuir Wall. All told, he estimates he's spent 300 days on the cliff.

Originally from Washington State, Sjong strayed into climbing at 19, transforming himself from redneck boulder scrambler to hardcore purist. Back in his Washington days, he kept a three-by-two poster on his bedroom wall that listed his climbing goals and read, in big, red letters, WAKE UP, DUMBASS YOU CAN'T GET GOOD BY SLEEPING. He apprenticed at the rain-soaked Index Town Wall, a granite bluff 50 miles northeast of Seattle. He'd drive there to aid-solo at night, by headlamp. He'd climb in the ubiquitous rain, with his jacket sleeves duct-taped to his gloves and wearing green rubber overalls, kneepads, and a fur hat with earflaps. In Colorado, to prepare for the cold mornings on Magic Mushroom, Sjong awoke early on winter days to self-belay on 300 feet of meat-locker-cold rock in Eldorado Canyon.

Magic Mushroom would be his and Caldwell's first major wall together, and they decided to go “team free”: They'd swap the lead position, but each would have to free-climb all the pitches. If one climber stalled, the other would have to wait, patiently belaying. In other words, one partner's failure could derail the whole effort, and Sjong told me his main worry was slowing Caldwell down.

To understand what it takes to free a big wall in a day and why anybody would want to it helps to look deeper into El Capitan's climbing history, which has involved endless experimentation, the occasional quantum leap, and a basic human need to go faster.

Until Warren Harding came along, climbers essentially ignored El Cap, because its sheer size outstripped their knowledge and tools. But his '58 ascent opened the door, and over the past 50 years, every climbable square foot has been picked over. Another major advance climbing the Nose in a day was made by a team of three top climbers moving together up the wall, in 1975. In 1988 came the first free ascent of the Salathé Wall. Another big year was 1993, when Lynn Hill freed all 33 pitches on the Nose.

Caldwell wanted a route that would push him to the limit while pitting him against the clock. “The whole idea of doing something like this in a day seems arbitrary,” he admits, but he says there's a sense of history to it, along with a tangible rush that comes from climbing such a big rock so quickly. “There's this buildup of adrenaline, emotion, fear, and excitement,” he says. “It's the most intense experience I've found in climbing.”

To do Magic Mushroom in less than 24 hours, Caldwell would have to marry his free-climbing skills with speed, organization, and superhuman fitness. To get into peak shape, he returned to a model he'd self-prescribed for the 2005 double day. That year, living in Estes Park, he'd first spent three weeks building a power base, to give himself the muscular “snap” needed to whip through the hardest sequences. He did this by bouldering, either on the overhanging gneiss of Rocky Mountain National Park or on a climbing wall at his parents' house.

Next, he spent a week working on stamina the ability to pull off hard moves even when pumped. Caldwell then added weight lifting, campusing arms-only motion up a special dowel board designed to build the upper-body strength needed to nail dynamic precision moves on the rock and a three-hour, 20-mile, 4,000-vertical-foot bike ride to 12,000 feet. By the end, a full-bore training day involved two hours of bouldering; a drive to a Colorado wall called the Monastery, where Caldwell would hammer out half a dozen climbs between 5.12b and 5.14b; a session in Estes Park's fitness gym; and that evening bike ride.

In California during the winter of 2007 2008, Caldwell flung himself at Yosemite's hardest boulder problems, toughening his skin and strengthening his grip on the blocks' sharp holds. He threw in endurance work at a rhyolite cliff near Sonora, pumping out five or six pitches of 5.13c to 5.14b per day. He used the home gym to perform laps on artificial holds, sling iron, campus, and do pull-ups. He also cycled on the steep, two-lane roads near Yosemite West.

When Sjong came out, in April, Caldwell was almost too ready for a climb that would require slowing down to make a team push. But Caldwell knew that if the team effort worked out, he might just be ready to climb the whole thing in a day.

It's April 15 a good six weeks before hot summer weather slams shut the El Cap free-climbing window and Caldwell and Sjong are in Caldwell's garage, sorting gear after their first two days of exploratory climbing on Magic Mushroom. It's early in the season, and hardly anyone else is on the wall; there's no competition for this climb. Nonetheless, Caldwell and Sjong keep their heads down, avoiding any preemptive announcements of their plans to anyone but wives and close friends. Their strategy during the month they'll spend learning the route is simple: Hike to the top of El Cap, spend the night, and then, at first light, rappel in and rehearse the upper 1,500 feet, where overhanging headwalls rear above the apron of less-than-vertical slabs below.

High on the wall, they'll evaluate the free possibilities, learn the moves, and plan the placement of hardware. They'll start early every afternoon at around two o'clock, the sun smacks this part of El Cap, heating the stone and causing the climbers' hands to sweat, reducing friction. They'll climb in two-day blocks and then descend to rest at Caldwell's house, refueling on Rodden's home-baked chocolate-chip cookies.

So far, moving individually, self-belayed by hauling pulleys called Mini Traxions, the pair has assessed a 1,000-foot section of obtuse, flaring chimneys (“bombays”) that begins two-thirds up the wall. Organization and studious ropework have been key to rigging the worker lines. Sjong says you can't just drop a 1,000-foot rope it can hang up on ledges or in cracks, and it might have to be cut. Instead, the climbers tie their static lines (non-stretching rope) into a belay station every 150-odd feet, using a knot Caldwell calls a super 8. This is a figure-eight-shaped knot tied on a doubled-over length of rope, with loops big enough to clip in to each anchor point separately, equalizing the load.

Down in the garage, Caldwell and Sjong discuss the protection they'll use on the near-crackless chimneys. They want to have adequate free protection that won't significantly alter Magic Mushroom.

Adequate usually means placing a piece every body length or so, given that any fall will involve plummeting twice the distance from the piece below you. The chimneys are an airy place, where the climbers are enclosed in a granite fold that opens into the void. As they're learning on the wall, the “runouts” the distance between each piece of protection will sometimes require them to climb 15-foot stretches between tiny cams.

The chimneys are subtle features requiring a contortionist's grab bag of nightmare tricks: blind, behind-the-head, straight-armed presses that morph into wide stems; painful knee bars, in which the lower quadriceps is cammed against the rock; heel-palm opposition, in which both feet are kept, toes down, on one wall while the palms are extended as if in supplication. Sjong says he'll wear only cotton on the climb, since it snags well on the granite, providing extra friction.

“What are we missing?” Caldwell asks. He's pillaged the gear reservoirs behind the garage wall, emerging with highly specialized pitons that they'll hammer into the chimneys. On the floor sit ten Peckers of various sizes wafer-thin, beak-shaped pins that fit into hairline seams. Caldwell has also pulled out a dozen-odd Bugaboos and Knifeblades (flat-bladed pitons with forged, offset eyes, also for use in tiny cracks); seven angles (traditional, spear-shaped pitons, for slightly wider cracks); two Realized Ultimate Reality Pitons (square mini-hatchets, half the size of a credit card); a debolting tool essentially a re-milled piton resembling a tuning fork, for removing unreliable old bolts; a hand drill, two bits, and a blow tube for clearing rock dust from the bolt holes; and six bolts and hangers, to use in place of removed hardware.

They look over the spread. Caldwell jokes that it would be much easier to aid-climb the thing. “To be fit to free-climb takes a lot of work,” he says. “I mean, you could drink a gallon of wine every night and still aid up El Cap.”

“You're not supposed to do that?” counters Sjong. They both laugh, knowing that the aid climbers' road map is what has allowed them to make these explorations in the first place.

“Those chimneys are going to be scary,” Caldwell continues. Once they hammer a few pitons in the chimneys, the guys figure they can lead the rest of the route on traditional gear the nuts and cams that the leader places and the second removes.

Atop El Cap, the climbers found a partially damaged portaledge, which they put in place below the chimneys, 18 pitches up. They'll spend the next three weeks or so on the wall, eventually trying the hardest pitches on top rope and then on lead. While they're in this worker-bee phase, they'll also ferry supplies down from the summit.

Through a spotting scope, I watch the boys try the route that first week, then head home to Colorado in late April. On May 5, one week before Caldwell and Sjong are to attempt their final push, Caldwell sends me an update.

“Since I last e-mailed, we spent four more days on the route,” he writes. “We figured out the gear, hammering in the required pins, and led most of the hard pitches. It is coming together nicely. I feel like our stamina is increasing and our bodies are adapting to the vertical world. We end the days with more energy, and even our hands are swelling less.” Still, Caldwell says he's worn down his fingernails until they bleed, and Sjong has bruised his coccyx and buttocks shuffling up the bombays.

Caldwell continues: “I was thinking about how the article is about the science of climbing and how we have had to analyze every ripple, every spot of texture. This climb really seems to be about finding the places on the faces that tilt one degree in the right direction and therefore are more solid to stand on. Deciding on the exact position to switch from chimneying to stemming to laybacking .” He winds up by writing that he feels lucky to be climbing at a time when so many El Cap routes remain to be freed.

The next day, Sjong e-mails the gear list. It's three pages, detailing the rack for each block of leads and then giving a pitch-by-pitch breakdown all in all, hundreds of placements. The climbers will head up with this rack, one 9.2-millimeter lead line, and a 5mm “tag” line a thinner auxiliary cord used to pull up a heavier worker line, for any heavy hauling. They've cached food, water, and provisions in a few key spots.

From May 12 through May 16, Sjong and Caldwell live on the wall. On day one, the climbers move smoothly through the first 13 pitches nearly half the route stalling slightly six pitches up, on a 5.13b/c traverse that they haven't practiced enough. They spend the night on Grey Ledges, a small, two-tiered, sleeping-pad-width platform roughly 1,500 feet up. The second day starts with a harsh warm-up: a pitch of 5.13b, where both climbers fall. But they sort it out and make it to the fixed portaledge at pitch 18, below the yawning chimneys. Here they pick up three days' worth of fresh supplies a gallon of water per climber per day, food, Neosporin, sleeping equipment, and warm clothes.

On day three, their pace slows they do only three pitches. Sjong falls four times on his hardest lead, a 5.13d chimney to a rounded layback, before succeeding, and Caldwell falls once on the hardest pitch, a 5.14a, before he makes it. Sjong tries this one for two solid hours, to no avail. (He'll call the pitch his “asterisk,” since he never climbed it continuously without falling, doing it instead in two sections.) He says he and Caldwell didn't get emotional about the hold­up it was simply a case of what Sjong calls “the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker.”

That afternoon, the climbers set up their sleeping bags as sunscreens over their portaledge, using Sjong's iPod Shuffle to listen to what Caldwell, who's naive about such things, calls “death metal” (Guns N' Roses, Led Zeppelin, Metallica). The next day, they rest, a boring proposition with only the Shuffle for entertainment.

On the fifth day, May 16, the climbers top out, moving surprisingly quickly through the final crux, a 120-foot, 5.13d finger crack called the Seven Seas, which cuts through a double-overhanging apex to a slightly overhanging headwall crack.

And with that they've completed the hardest overall big-wall free climb in the world, tougher even than Dihedral Wall, an El Cap 5.14a a few hundred feet left of Magic Mushroom that Caldwell freed in 2004.

Back at the Caldwells' house later the next day, Sjong jumps into his EuroVan, bound for Boulder. The moment he's gone, Caldwell heads downstairs to train. The two-person climb left him feeling exhilarated, wanting more. It's an energy surge partially explained by what Caldwell calls “the flywheel effect.”

“As you start to really learn El Cap's friction,” he says, “you can climb knowing exactly how much weight to put on your feet without tiring your arms.” Now he knows he can free the entire route in under 24 hours. Magic Mushroom has fresh chalk marks to help point the way, and he knows all the sequences and gear. Still, the line has 11 pitches of 5.12 and 10 of 5.13 to 5.14. Failure is a real possibility.

On May 31 at 5 P.M., Caldwell and Rodden uncoil their rope in the oaks below Magic Mushroom. Rodden stops Caldwell to daub on sunscreen and ask if his knot is good. Caldwell has timed their departure to coincide with three important windows: having enough daylight to complete the 5.13 traverse on pitch six; beginning the stacked pitches of 5.13/14 in the chimneys at first light; and arriving above those, poised for the 5.13d Seven Seas pitch, in concert with El Cap's cooling midday updraft.

The plan is this: Caldwell will lead on a 60-meter, 9.8mm dynamic (stretchy) rope. Atop each pitch, he'll clip the super-8 knot into the anchor; Rodden will then speed-jumar. Once at the anchor, she'll stay tethered to her jumars five feet down, a dynamic setup that keeps her from being yanked abruptly skyward if Caldwell falls while she's belaying.

Caldwell is going superlight. He will rack the gear in order of placement and bring only what he needs; use one-ounce carabiners; and carry Spectra slings, made of featherweight climbing-spec nylon. He'll harness-rack the gear until the chimneys, at which point he'll clip it in to a Spectra sling over his shoulder, to prevent it from rubbing the rock. Rodden will carry a stripped-down backpack stuffed with jackets, top layers, a sausage-and-cheese sandwich, and spare headlamp batteries. The pack also holds Caldwell's “ninja shirt,” a black hoodie that grips the rock well and has brought luck in the past.

Along the route, Caldwell has left four caches in place. The first, at one-third height, contains energy bars, sports-drink mix, a 1.5-liter bottle of water, and supplemental protection. The second, halfway up, holds a gallon of water. The third is at the fixed portaledge, 18 pitches up, where the pair will nap below the chimneys. Here, Caldwell has crammed into a haul bag two sleeping bags and pads, more bars, Power Gel, a Red Bull, a stove, oatmeal, recovery-drink mix, cashews, long underwear, a puffy jacket, a 100-gram bag of climbing chalk, and another gallon of water. He's also stashed a pair of La Sportiva Miura rock shoes, new but slightly broken in. The final cache sits below the 25th pitch: another gallon of water and a Red Bull.

Caldwell estimates that the legwork in the chimneys puts 250 pounds of force on his feet, quickly rendering the shoes soft and imprecise; he wants to start the hardest leads with a fresh pair. He knows he'll have to be bold, climbing quickly and decisively so as not to bog down. But he's a veteran as long as he stays on top of the protection and ropework, even when tired, he won't face any falls longer than 40 or 50 feet.

Rodden is key to the ascent. “She's really good up there she's fast, she knows the systems really well,” Caldwell says. “But, probably more important, she understands what I'm going through physically and emotionally.” Rodden, for her part, knows Caldwell won't buckle or freak. With only one rope between them and no easy retreat, this matters.

“I've never seen Tommy scared on El Cap, nope,” says Rodden, who recalls him once leading two 5.12 pitches in a snowstorm to get them off the wall. “Up there, he's in his element. Ever since he could walk, he's been in the mountains.”

Caldwell will move through the night, headlamp-climbing through one 5.13b crux, the Bird Beak pitch. There, he'll lead the opening 30 feet (the hardest) with only the three pieces he needs, and then, tethered to a small cam, he'll drop a loop of rope to haul up protection for the remainder. Failure has crossed his mind: “I've never done something like this that has this many hard pitches,” he says. “I could just run out of power.”

Which is precisely what happens.

On June 1, 20 hours after starting, Caldwell and Rodden reach the Seven Seas pitch. Caldwell has freed everything thus far, but here, 110 feet off the belay (and 2,600 feet above the ground), he falls three times on the route's last really hard move, a long, technically precise reach to a flake. Rodden spends four cold, cramped hours belaying on this pitch alone. Hanging off his harness back at the belay, Caldwell takes 30-minute naps between attempts. Rodden massages his blasted forearms, which have started seizing after only two moves, forcing his hands open.

Caldwell drinks a Red Bull. Nothing. The climber is exhausted, and the sun's come around, too, blinding him, heating his shoes so they roll unhelpfully, and making his hands sweat. He decides to give up, and the pair jumars to the top, summiting 23 hours and 45 minutes after starting.

Up on the summit, Caldwell doesn't moan or blame the gods. His big toes have gone numb (they'll remain so for weeks), and his hands and feet are so swollen that the small climbing wounds in the flesh (“gobies”) have countersunk. But he's ready for another go.

Six days later, on June 7, Caldwell and Rodden return. Caldwell has gone back midweek, relearning the pitches and reprovisioning. This time, the pair tops out in 20:02. This time, Caldwell leads every pitch free, taking only five falls total, having to redo two 5.13 pitches but not the Seven Seas. No climber anywhere has achieved anything like this.

“From my perspective, Tommy Caldwell's ascent of Magic Mushroom all-free in a day is state of the art, an unimaginable perfor­mance of passion, overpowering will, and Olympian talent,” says John Harlin III, editor of The American Alpine Journal. “For 50 years, El Cap has been the granite crucible the world knows what happens here and who does it, because this is the gold standard. And right now the standard-setter is Tommy Caldwell.”

Caldwell says he entered a “super-relaxed” state during the climb, which allowed him to move more quickly and precisely, reaching the pitch-18 portaledge with time enough for a three-hour nap. And he wasn't, he adds, especially pumped on the Seven Seas. Up there, within earshot of Rodden's shouted encouragement, Caldwell snagged the flake to finish the pitch, then raced through a final, 5.13a rope length to the summit slabs.

After crashing out back home, Caldwell had enough energy to return the next day, hike the East Ledges, and take down fixed lines and gear caches. “Which leads me to believe,” he says, “there must be room for more.”

Number Crunching

The A-B-C's (and D's) of rock-climbing.

To rate the difficulty of rock routes, North American climbers use a numerical scale called the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS), refined at California's Tahquitz Rock in the 1950s. Roped, technical rock climbing is considered “fifth class” and was originally a closed scale broken down into 5.0 through 5.9. (Steep hiking is second class; highly exposed scrambling that might require a rope is fourth.) When climbs harder than 5.9 emerged circa 1960, the system expanded to include 5.10, and then 5.11 and up through today's 5.15. In addition, 5.10-and-beyond climbs take one of four a, b, c, or d sub-ratings, with d the hardest. Other ratings might be appended for the length of the route and the reliability and spacing of protection.

As you move higher in the YDS, the rock invariably steepens, the holds shrink and grow farther apart, and there are fewer rests. In Yosemite, known for its sheerness, the ratings can also reflect a pitch's overall physicality, if not its hardest move. Here are some seminal Yosemite climbs at each of the higher grades:

5.10 Wheat Thin (5.10c): This 60-foot climb involves continuously laybacking along the edge of a flake, the climber shuffling his hands and walking his feet up, often at waist height with no hand-free rest ledges.

5.11 Butterballs (5.11c): Eighty feet long, this route is dead vertical, with a finger-width (0.75 1.25 inches) fissure splitting a blank face, and some relief in the form of small foot edges. The climber ascends by finger locking: inserting his fingertips, thumb either up or down, and then twisting to complete the grip.

5.12 Tales of Power (5.12b): This thin, 60-foot crack overhangs for 20 feet. It requires a sustained section of butterfly jamming, in which the climber must contrive a hold by making a modified “A-OK” sign, stacking the middle and ring fingers atop the tip of the thumb and inserting this digital wedge. Your feet go in the crack, too, camming with a twist of the ankle.

5.13 Phoenix (5.13a): A past-vertical, 140-foot crack that's conquered via tight hand jams hand inserted into the crack and then flexed, to oppose the fingers and the back of the hand.

5.14 Houdini Pitch, the Nose (5.14a): On this dihedral, you have to press your body against its walls and engage in a 180-degree contortionist's turn, scootching inch-by-inch like you would up the inside corner of a building.

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