On a hazy night in 1987, two renegade climbers in Berkeley, California, quietly set anchors underneath an on-ramp to Highway 13. They rappelled down incrementally, gluingstone knobs they had collected from an excursion in Yosemite to the concrete pillars risingup at stark vertical angles.
Through several nights of undetected effort, the climbers, Jim Thornburg and Scott Frye, embellished the highway’s partitions with bulges, depressions, indentations, and protruding chips—an urban simulation of mountainside cliffs. With their ingenuity, East Bay guerilla attitude, and some very strong adhesive, Thornburg and Frye transformed these highway pillarsinto the first artificialclimbing wall in the United States.
So begins , John Burgman’s new chronicle of a sport that became some people’sobsession. is a formerClimbing magazine editor,and the book’s slightly intimidating 400 pages recounthowclimbing has evolved from a passion of dirtbags to anOlympic sport in just a few decades.
Burgmansays hewas inspired to write a history of competitionclimbing after he searched for onein 2014and only found bullet points on USA Climbing’s Wikipedia page. He spent five years researching and reporting High Drama.
The indoor climbing industry now boasts and in the United States—a shocking ascent for a once niche sport. Burgman’s bookcomes at the right time: as fans anticipate climbing’s Olympic debut in Tokyo next year,there is excitement as well as a need to reexamine climbing’s evolution. After all, the sport’s grassroots origins might seem to clash with rapid commercial growth and arenas like the Olympics.
It’s clear where Burgmanstands: he’s an advocate for the sport’s mainstream acceptance as well as a historian and a believer in presenting climbing as asignificant athletic progressionand not merely a trendborne of rebelliouspassion.
“I write about competition climbing the same way I would write about pro basketball or pro baseball,” he says.He builds his case not through argumentsbut by richdescriptionsof noteworthy athletic feats. Some,like Ashima Shiraishi’seffort to spring for an overhanging handhold during the 2018 Bouldering Nationals,are displays of Burgman’s able sportswriting:“She tried doggedly to lunge for one of the handholds above the lip … she hung in a horizontal position to recompose herself,” he writes.“If she grasped it, shewould be on her way to her first national championship.”
Burgman clearly wants readers to understand the dedication and effort that manyhave poured into climbing since its start.“There hasto be a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from different people through a lot of years to bring the sport to the prominence of the Olympics,” he says.
What will happen to climbing after the sport makes its debut next summerat theOlympics? Will millions more people hang out at climbing gyms around the world on weekday nights (once that’s allowed again)? Willsponsorships become the new normal for professional competitors?We don’t know those answers yet. But there’s no better time to pick up Burgman’shistory of climbing and its pluckyathletes. As gyms stay closed during the pandemic, his bookis the next best way to stay immersed in the popular pastime.