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A victory at the NACS Lead competition in Salt Lake City marks a key milestone in her post-surgery recovery
The post Natalia Grossman Wins Gold in Comp Climbing Comeback appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Natalia Grossman Wins Gold in Comp Climbing Comeback - Gripped Magazine

A victory at the NACS Lead competition in Salt Lake City marks a key milestone in her post-surgery recovery

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

Jonathan Siegrist has made the third ascent of Midnight Way on the Paradise Wall
The post Jonathan Siegrist Climbs 5.15a in Squamish appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Jonathan Siegrist Climbs 5.15a in Squamish - Gripped Magazine

Jonathan Siegrist has made the third ascent of Midnight Way on the Paradise Wall

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

Yesterday, the French climber became the second climber in history to flash V15
The post Jules Marchaland Achieves Second-Ever V15 Flash appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Jules Marchaland Achieves Second-Ever V15 Flash - Gripped Magazine

Yesterday, the French climber became the second climber in history to flash V15

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

“I wanted to do this one because it’s the epitome of big wall free climbing.” – Emily Harrington
The post New Film Girl Climber Screens on IMAX appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

New Film Girl Climber Screens on IMAX - Gripped Magazine

“I wanted to do this one because it’s the epitome of big wall free climbing.” – Emily Harrington

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The Italian climber sent both a V14 and V15 in a single session
The post Stefano Ghisolfi Has His Best Bouldering Day Ever appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Stefano Ghisolfi Has His Best Bouldering Day Ever - Gripped Magazine

The Italian climber sent both a V14 and V15 in a single session

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

The granite test-piece is one of Canada's most difficult boulder problems
The post Zach Galla Topping The Singularity V15 in Squamish appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Zach Galla Topping The Singularity V15 in Squamish - Gripped Magazine

The granite test-piece is one of Canada's most difficult boulder problems

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

In this week's Friday Night Video, Connor Herson takes on one of the world's hardest crack climbs: Magic Line (8c+), in Yosemite Valley.First established by Ron Kauk in 1996, the climb has seen only five ascents since that time. Connor Herson spent the spring and fall season of 2024 working the route, making quick links through the d...

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Siebe Vanhee has made the first flash ascent of 'Muy Caliente!' (E10 6c), at Stennis Ford, in Pembroke, Wales.

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Dylan Chuat has made an ascent of Move (9b+), in Flatanger, Norway.The route was established by Adam Ondra in the summer of 2013, when he described it as'one of my hardest' routes, and gave it a grade of '9b/b+ or just HARD 9b'.

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Climbers are hoping to reach Natalia Nagovitsyna on Pobeda Peak before all hope is lost
The post Rescuer Dies as Climber’s Ordeal Continues appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Rescuer Dies as Climber's Ordeal Continues - Gripped Magazine

Climbers are hoping to reach Natalia Nagovitsyna on Pobeda Peak before all hope is lost

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

The route is one of the hardest single-pitch trad climbs in the world
The post Connor Herson Climbing Magic Line 5.14c in Yosemite appeared first on Gripped Magazine.

Connor Herson Climbing Magic Line 5.14c in Yosemite - Gripped Magazine

The route is one of the hardest single-pitch trad climbs in the world

Gripped Magazine (gripped.com)

In 2009, Kei Taniguchi from Japan became the first woman to win a Piolet d’Or (along with climbing partner Kazyua Hiraide) for a new route up 7,756-meter Kamet in India. Tragically, neither Taniguchi nor Hiraide are still with us. In AAJ 2025, we’re publishing a story by Akihiro Oishi, Taniguchi’s biographer, who set out to complete a route she had attempted years earlier in Nepal. We’re sharing part of Oishi’s story here.

“Mr. Hagiwara, what mountain is this?”

The question was asked by Kei Taniguchi as she looked at a picture taken by Hiroshi Hagiwara, editor of Rock and Snow, in 2013. The photo showed the unclimbed northeast face of Pandra (6,673 meters) in eastern Nepal.
In 2016, Taniguchi attempted Pandra with Junji Wada, retreating from two-thirds height (AAJ 2017). On return to Japan she wrote, “I’ve opened Pandora’s Box. I will definitely go back to check what’s inside.” Tragically, a month later, she fell to her death from Mt. Kurodake in Japan.
I interviewed many people to compile a book about Kei’s life, called A Piece of the Sun. In the final chapter, I hoped to incorporate a scene in which some of us, including Wada, climbed Pandra. However, Wada was seriously injured just before our team was due to leave Japan, and the expedition was postponed. Finally, in 2024, eight years after Kei’s accident, I went to Pandra with Suguru Takayanagi and Hiroki Suzuki to complete Kei’s route. Wada had become a family man, starting a new life.
We arrived at our 5,100-meter base camp on October 12. The approach to advanced base and the face itself had changed significantly in eight years due to global warming: The northeast face looked far drier than in pictures taken by the French team that completed the first route up the face. [In October 2017, one year after the attempt by Taniguchi and Wada, French climbers Mathieu Détrie, Pierre Labbre, and Benjamin Védrines completed Peine Plancher (1,200m, WI6 M6; see AAJ 2018).]
After acclimatization, we left advanced base for Pandra at 7 a.m. on October 25. It took three hours to reach the foot of the wall, after which we climbed to a bivouac site at 5,500 meters, where we pitched the tent using a snow hammock. The climbing to this point, following the line taken by Taniguchi and Wada, had involved crumbling rock and brittle ice.
On day two, we climbed three pitches of excellent, steep alpine ice, dubbed the Pandra Great Icicle. Above, a couloir with poor protection and belays cut through the center of the face, and at 5,800 meters we made our second bivouac.
On the 27th, we headed directly toward the summit. [From around this point or below, in 2016, Taniguchi and Wada traversed to the north spur; the 2024 team continued direct and joined the line of the 2017 French route, which came in from the left.] At around 6,000 meters, the French party had found a pitch of M6. Takayanagi, who is about ten years younger than us, onsighted that pitch easily—he should achieve great things in the Himalaya. At 6,200 meters, we found a bivouac site beneath a rock outcrop.
The next morning, we left our bivouac gear and headed for the top. Takayanagi climbed an overhang that was much more difficult than the M6 the day before. We then climbed ice and difficult sugar snow, with little meaningful protection, to reach a snow cave at around 6,500 meters after dark. We shivered through the night in just the clothes we were wearing.
With Suzuki in the lead, it took only 30 minutes to reach the top the next morning. Suzuki shouted, “Whoa, we did it!” I’ve been climbing with him for 20 years, but this was the first time I’d heard a serious roar. By 4 p.m. we had returned to our snow cave, and the following day we rappelled to the base.
We named our route A Piece of the Sun. It will continue to burn in our hearts and guide us toward greater mountains.
                  —Akihiro Oishi, Japan, with help from Kaoru Wada, Hiroshi Hagiwara, and Rodolphe Popier
2004 Taniguchi and Kazuya Hiraide complete a

The Line: A Climb for Kei Taniguchi — American Alpine Club

In 2009, Kei Taniguchi from Japan became the first woman to be awarded a Piolet d’Or (along with climbing partner Kazyua Hiraide) for a new route up 7,756-meter Kamet in India. Tragically, neither Taniguchi nor Hiraide is still with us. In AAJ 2025, we’re publishing a story by Akihiro Oishi, Taniguc

American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org)

Consider the following true story:
It’s the mid-2000s and two friends are on a long, multi-pitch sport climb. They’re excited—it is the climbing vacation to paradise they’ve dreamt about. They’ve been on clean, hard limestone all week. They’re prepared and plenty experienced for this climb.
The leader has reached a belay stance and is getting ready to bring up their partner. They are building an anchor on two shiny new bolts. As the leader flakes the rope, they see the first bolt on the next pitch is close, and they decide to clip the rope into it—giving their partner a little more of a top-rope in the last moves and setting them up for swinging into the next pitch. The follower gets to the anchor and clips in. What a climb! They both lean back to laugh.
Both anchor bolts break. They fall.
Only that extra bolt on the next pitch holds, keeping them from dying, but all three bolts were shiny and brand new.
Corrosion isn’t always visible, and there are a few different kinds of severe corrosion that result in scary failures like the one described above. These have been known for a long time in industries like construction and nuclear power, but it has only been in the last 20 years or so that we’ve recognized them in climbing anchors. These failures don’t require a lot of corrosion, just a very small amount. The two main types are Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) and Sulfur Stress Cracking (SSC), but there are others as well. For a number of reasons, these are really terrifying problems in climbing safety: they can happen very quickly without any easy-to- spot outward signs; they are difficult to predict; and they happen on stainless steels that climbers and route developers commonly think of as bomber. Like in any other part of climbing, assumptions can kill.
Starting in the late 1990s, climbers started talking about this issue. The problem seemed particularly obvious in coastal climbing areas, but it began to crop up elsewhere as well. Companies were quietly adjusting the alloying content of their wedge bolts, scientific papers were being written, and developers were beginning to use glue-ins and titanium. And ultimately, the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA) Safety Commission (SafeComm) started looking into the issue in a rigorous way.
The UIAA is where the buck stops with global climbing safety. It is a union of climbing federations from 73 countries that works on things like mountain medicine, protecting climbing areas globally, organizing Ice Climbing World Cups, and standardizing training curricula and safe practices. It is where gear failure from all countries gets analyzed. It is where climbers, manufacturers, and labs come together to make climbing safer. As the national organization for climbers in America, the American Alpine Club is the U.S. representative to the UIAA.
To address the SCC issue, the SafeComm worked for almost 15 years to develop a new Rock Anchor Standard that tests the complete anchor—UIAA123. In the summer of 2025, we updated it at our 50th anniversary meeting with guidance on welding.
SCC starts with a pit on the surface of the material. This could be a small defect in the steel, damage caused by placing the bolt, or something left over from manufacturing. Pitting corrosion can also start the process. Pitting corrosion causes deepening pits to form in the surface and is typically fueled by the presence of chlorine. In all these types of corrosion, chlorine isn’t consumed, it is just something that facilitates the corrosion’s progress. That means it doesn’t take very much to make this happen—a high concentration, but not a large amount.
Once there is a deep enough pit, the process changes—in some cases it will stop here, but in others, the corrosion will develop into SCC and a crack will begin to extend from the bottom of the pit. This crack drives forward through the shaft of the bolt via a complex mechanism that doesn’t cause the outside of the bolt to corrode. In a short time, the bolt could break with body weight but show little sign of this danger.
Sulfur Stress Cracking (SSC) is similar in effect, but not in process. For now, we’ll focus on SCC.
Stress Corrosion Cracking requires three things: a susceptible material, a suitable environment, and sufficient stress in the material. None of these things are quite as straight-forward as they seem and the rate of cracking can ...

Guidebook XV—Policy Spotlight — American Alpine Club

A Little Rust is All It Takes By Stephen Gladieux, AAC delegate to the UIAA Safety Commision Consider the following true story: It’s the mid-2000s and two friends are on a long, multi-pitch sport climb. They’re excited—it is the climbing vacation to paradise they’ve dreamt about. They’ve been

American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org)

Dear AAC Community,
It’s easy to think that, as climbers, all of our success stories are individual. After all, when it comes down to executing that final crux on your project, it’s you alone that reaches the top. But one of the things I love about the AAC, and the stories in this edition of The Guidebook, is how individual success is supported by community. The summit is not a vacuum; when we reach the top, our accomplishments are because of ourselves and also those whom we’ve leaned on and learned from.
In these pages, you’ll see that support unfold. In our Member Spotlight, “The Quiet Stories the Land Can Tell,” Rob Mahedy, normally a solo adventurer, learns through a battle with cancer what it means to accept support from his community in order to pursue the summit of Mt. Hayes in Alaska. In our Rewind the Climb story, “A World of Appalling Grandeur,” we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt. Logan—a joint expedition between the Alpine Club of Canada and the American Alpine Club that made a huge splash in the newspaper headlines of 1925, in a world that was just imagining that humanity could stand atop Everest. In a splendid deep-dive into corrosion in bolts, called “A Little Rust is All it Takes,” Stephen Gladieux illuminates the importance and impact of the UIAA Safety Commission, for which he is a representative for the AAC. Through SafeComm, the AAC is able to join forces with representatives from nations across the world and work together to formalize standards for climbing equipment and safety practices.
Our final story, “Balance,” is a feature about Brooke Raboutou, who will receive the Robert Hicks Bates Award this year for exceptional accomplishments by a young climber. It’s in her story that I see this interweaving of community so clearly. Brooke’s accomplishments do stand by themselves—silver medalist in the 2024 Olympics for bouldering & lead, an ascent of Box Therapy (V15) in addition to multiple V14’s, and now the first woman to climb 5.15c with her recent send of Excalibur. I have seen Brooke grow from a bright, curious team kid into the warm, determined athlete she is now. The seed of Brooke’s success grew and flourished under the sunshine of overwhelming support from her family, coaches, fellow athletes, and friends, who push and encourage her. She has developed her incredible strength and talent in part because of her environment. As a result, Brooke’s spirit is so vivid that she inspires her community— myself included—to cultivate that same spirit in themselves.
An interesting note: Brooke was nominated for the Bates Award before she sent Excalibur (5.15c) and became the first woman to climb the grade. Excalibur, then, is simply another example of her momentum. There are still frontiers for women to face and break in climbing, but as a community, we are no longer asking whether a woman can climb a given grade. We are just asking—when?
I bouldered with Brooke recently in Bishop, and we made a day of touring the classics. No need to prove anything; we weren’t chasing the most difficult climbs. Instead, we focused on climbing for sheer beauty and joy. What I see in these stories of perseverance and adversity, of pouring one’s life into climbing safety and education, and in Brooke’s story, is that beautiful impulse of climbing for the soul. I see that same impulse bring so many AAC members together.
I hope you enjoy these stories of your fellow members and that they inspire you to shine brightly, connect with others, and pursue your climbing aspirations this summer.
Nina Williams
AAC Board President

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Guidebook XV—AAC Updates — American Alpine Club

A Message from AAC Leadership Dear AAC Community, It’s easy to think that, as climbers, all of our success stories are individual. After all, when it comes down to executing that final crux on your project, it’s you alone that reaches the top. But one of the things I love about the AAC, and the st

American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org)