Doubloons is featured in a new short film, it looks like one of the coolest 5.14s in the American alpine The post An Epic 5.14 Alpine Sport Climb in Colorado appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/profiles/an-epic-5-14-alpine-sport-climb-in-colorado/

From epic highballs to historic rope-solos to run-out 5.14 trad routes, the Japanese climber was among the best in the world The post Keita Kurakami, Yosemite Soloist, Has Died appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/keita-kurakami-yosemite-soloist-has-died/

Janja Garnbret has advanced to Boulder semis at one of the biggest World Cup events of the year The post Olympians Advance at Innsbruck World Cup appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/olympians-advance-at-innsbruck-world-cup/

History has been made as Paraclimbing will debut at the Olympics in four years The post Paraclimbing to be Included in 2028 Olympics appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/paraclimbing-to-be-included-in-2028-olympics/

Francesco Berardino is quickly making a name for himself in the world of bouldering The post 20-Year-Old Climbs Three V16s in Under Two Weeks appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/20-year-old-climbs-three-v16s-in-under-two-weeks/

"Since so many modern climbers rarely leave the gym, I think the classic list of 10 essential survival items could use an update." https://www.climbing.com/places/the-10-essentials-of-gym-climbing/

In this episode, we sit down with Jarod, a long-time AAC member, to discuss a crazy accident he had at his home crag in Missouri, and how he utilized the AAC’s rescue benefit to cover the cost of his medical expenses. If you’ve been wondering if the AAC’s rescue benefit is for you, Jarod’s story helps explain how it works. We dive into the quirky concept of “girdle traverses” or mulitpitches that go sideways, and analyze his accident— the decisions he made, how traversing complicates gear placements, and the close calls he had. Funnily enough, Jarod also did a FA on that same wall—putting up Missouri’s potentially longest rock climb with Jeremy Collins, and this FA made it into the American Alpine Journal! We discuss the vision behind this 8-pitch traverse, what went into making it happen, the silliness of climbing, the unique belay tactics for traversing, and more! https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2024/6/26/protect-first-ascents-ground-falls-and-the-aac-rescue-benefit-in-action

By: Katie Ives Each book in the American Alpine Club Library is a portal to another world—of golden spires feathered with rime, fluted snow beneath indigo skies, or red-granite aiguilles above a sea of ice. Beyond these worlds, there are countless layers of other worlds encountered by readers inspired to seek their own adventures and return with their own tales. For climbing is an act of storytelling: we trace the arc of a narrative with our bodies and our minds, rising from the base of a mountain toward a climactic point and descending to a resolution. And the history of mountaineering is also the history of reading and imagination, of old dreams endlessly transforming into new ones. On July 15, 1865, English alpinist Adolphus Warburton Moore found himself on the edge of a ridge that looked like something from a fantasy novel. The slender crest of blue ice seemed to rise for an eternity. Sheer voids dropped off on either side. Neither the iron tips of their alpenstocks nor the hobnails of their boots stuck to its flawless surface.   It was inconceivable to climb. No one had yet established a route on this aspect of Mont Blanc, where the Brenva Face rose for 1,400 meters in a chaos of cliffs, towers, and buttresses, fringed by unstable seracs and swept by avalanches and rockfall.  Still, the Swiss guide Jakob Anderegg kept going, and the rest of the team, including Moore, cautiously followed. As the crest narrowed, they shuffled along à cheval, one leg on either side, aware that any fall might be catastrophic [1]. Long after they finished the first ascent of the Brenva Spur and descended by a safer route, the ice crest lingered in the imaginations of those who read Moore’s memoir, The Alps in 1864. In 1906, British author A.E.W. Mason located the climactic scene of his crime novel Running Water on the Brenva Spur—a point of no return that appeared perfect for an attempted murder of one climber by another, “a line without breadth of cold blue ice” [2]. Mason’s Running Water, like its author’s inspiration, begins with reading. Riding the train to Chamonix, his young protagonist Sylvia Thesiger becomes immersed in an old copy of the British Alpine Journal, published more than two decades prior to the novel. All night, she couldn’t sleep, remembering her first glimpse of the Mont Blanc massif beyond the curtain of a train window, recalling her sense of inchoate longing for its moonlit towers of ice and snow.  Although women climbers had taken part in numerous firsts by the time of the novel’s plot, they weren’t permitted to publish in the Alpine Journal under their own bylines until 1889, when Margaret Jackson recounted her epic first winter traverse of the Jungfrau. And there’s no female author or character in the story Thesiger reads about the first ascent of an aiguille near Mont Blanc. Yet she longs to enter its world, and when she arrives in Chamonix, she hires guides to take her on her own first climb, up the Aiguille d’Argentière. As an ice slope tilts upward, sheer and smooth as a pane of glass, she rejoices, feeling as if she’s finally dreamed her way into a scene from mountain literature, “the place where no slip must be made.” Astounded at her fearlessness and intuitive skill, a guide tells her she bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous climber from the Alpine Journal story she’d just admired.  “I felt something had happened to me which I had to recognize—a new thing,” she recalls. “Climbing that mountain...was just like hearing very beautiful music. All the vague longings which had ever stirred within me, longings for something beyond, and beyond.” Later, after she falls in love with a climber, the memory of that day suffuses their bond with a steadfast alpine glow—“ice-slope and rock-spire and the bright sun over all.”    By the end, however, the novel shifts from her journey of self-discovery toward an outcome more conventional for its era. Newly wed, Thesiger is relegated to waiting below the Brenva Spur while the male hero and villain confront each other above that narrow blue crest. Readers don’t find out, for certain, whether she’ll climb any mountains again. A sense of incompleteness remains: the mysterious promise of her alpine epiphanies and of her suppressed and inmost self seem to flow beyond the narrative’s abrupt conclusion, like the recurring dreams she has of running water.  After the publication of https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2024/6/26/the-climb-that-inspired-the-novel-that-inspired-the-climbs-the-many-stories-of-the-brenva-face-of-mont-blanc

With Father’s Day just past, we’re sharing a few stories of multi-generational climbing families that are featured in the upcoming 2024 AAJ (plus one from the archives). Joanne and Jorge Urioste are legends of Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, having established many classic routes (Crimson Chrysalis, Epinephrine, Dream of Wild Turkeys, Levitation 29, and on and on). Their son Danny is also a climber, and in recent years he too has been putting up big new routes in the sandstone canyons west of Las Vegas, often in the company of prolific new-router and AAJ contributor Sam Boyce. In December 2023, the two teamed up with Kyle Willis for a new route on the Aeolian Wall: Salami Wand Kenobi (14 pitches, V 5.11- R C2). Coincidentally, the new route incorporated three pitches of Woman of Mountain Dreams That route, Urioste explains in his AAJ 2024 report, “was first climbed in 1997 by my parents, along with Dave Krulesky and Mike Morea, and then freed by my mother and Aitor Uson in 1998.” Danny Urioste and Sam Boyce climbed another route on Aeolian Wall, a long direct start to the classic Resolution Arête, in November 2022. You can read about that climb, the Evolution Arête, at Mountain Project. Watch the AAC Legacy Series interview with Joanne and Jorge Urioste! Dylan Miller has been a frequent AAJ contributor in recent years, with many new routes and winter ascents in the mountains around Juneau, Alaska. He has three reports in the upcoming AAJ, including the story of the first known ascent of Mt. Swineford a few years back, which Dylan completed with his dad, Mike, along with Makaila Olson and Ben Still. Dylan says he owes his love of the mountains to his father: “He has definitely been a big inspiration in my life. He took me on my first adventures, and he has done so many first ascents in the area.” In AAJ 2019, Dylan described a classic Alaska adventure with his dad: the first ascent of Endicott Tower, about 50 miles northwest of the capital city. “From Juneau we flew to Gustavus, jumped on a Glacier Bay tourist catamaran, cruised up the east arm of Glacier Bay, and got dropped off in a sandy cove at the base of Mt. Wright, near Adams Inlet,” Miller wrote. “We inflated our rafts and waited for the incoming tide to suck us into the 14-mile Adams Inlet. We waded and crisscrossed the Goddess River delta, sometimes crossing swift, waist-deep rivers, and made camp for the night. We then hiked a full day…to Endicott Lake, the headwaters for the Endicott River. Here we stashed our water gear and tromped 2,000’ up through the Tongass rainforest to a pristine hanging alpine valley, where we made our base camp.” A few days later, from a higher camp, the two climbed snow, mixed terrain, and rotten rock to complete the first ascent of the 5,805-foot peak. “From the top we looked southeast to Juneau and pointed out our home, which put into perspective how far out there we really were,” Dylan wrote. After a rest at base camp, during which a friend flew in to pick up their mountain gear, they packrafted down the Endicott River, bushwhacked past a deep gorge (climbing another peak along the way), and returned to the river to float out to the sea. “In 1973, an expedition led by Carlo Nembrini climbed Illampu (6,368m) in Bolivia and then moved to Illimani,” begins a report in AAJ 2024. “After climbing that peak, they joined a search for the bodies of Pierre Dedieu (France) and Ernesto “Coco” Sanchez (Bolivia), who had been killed on the mountain. Sanchez had been considered the best alpinist in Bolivia at the time…. The Italians located the body of Sanchez, but tragically, during the evacuation, Nembrini fell to his death.” In 2022, Rosa Morotti, a niece of Nembrini’s, wrote to the guide Daniele Assolari, an Italian who lives and works in Bolivia, “about her dream of opening a new route on Illampu, 50 years after the death of her uncle.” Assolari put together a trip with Morotti and Maria Teresa Llampa Vasquez (the first female IFMGA aspirant guide from Bolivia), and in late June of 2023, the trio climbed a new line up the south side... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2024/6/20/the-line-june-2024

With the General Election just days away, what might party promises mean for the outdoors? We've studied the manifestos and consulted the campaign groups, to find out who's saying what. https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?n=772290

It's the Slovenian's final World Cup appearance before the Olympics. Find out who's she's competing against below. The post Janja Garnbret Returns to the World Cup in Innsbruck – Here’s How to Watch appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/indoor-climbing/janja-garnbret-returns-to-the-world-cup-in-innsbruck-heres-how-to-watch/

Grades were meant to guide climbers to appropriate challenges—but a new anti-grade sentiment seems to be gaining steam. https://www.climbing.com/people/do-climbing-grades-matter/

After we published what you might call a “review of the reviews” on the AllTrails page for Everest’s South Col route, admins took the page down. https://www.climbing.com/news/everest-is-no-longer-on-all-trails/

We are deeply saddened by the loss of the incredible climber, mountaineer, inventor, writer, and historian of climbing gear John Middendorf. John (nicknamed the "Deuce") was a true friend to the American Alpine Club, and his insatiable curiosity and kindness made an impression on everyone he met.  Although his contributions to climbing are many, some in particular changed the sport forever. John’s ascent of the East Face of Great Trango Tower in 1992 with Xaver Bongard epitomized his elite climbing skill—The Grand Voyage was a performance of a lifetime on one of the biggest and remotest big walls in the world, and was one of the first Grade VII climbs. John also put up new Grade VI routes on Half Dome and El Cap, along with many first ascents in Zion National Park. He was otherwise a prolific contributor to the American Alpine Journal with exploratory climbs all across the world. John, an engineer and inventor, started a hardware company, A5 Adventures, in 1986. His innovations in portaledge design, as well as Birdbeak pitons, aiders, haul bags, and other gear, unequivocally changed the big-wall game. He sold A5 to The North Face in 1997. His 1994 book Big Walls, co-authored with John Long, was the crucial reference for many wall-climbing novices. But besides being a great man in climbing, he also was a dear friend of the AAC. We deeply appreciate the generosity and knowledge he shared with the Club, his support of the AAC Library, and his contributions to the Legacy Series and the 2023 Cutting Edge Grant.  The AAC’s Library Director, Katie Sauter, reflected: “[John’s] insatiable curiosity led him to research so many avenues of climbing, often sending me questions about the most obscure references. He was very knowledgeable and wrote blog posts about a wide variety of topics pertaining to climbing history and the evolution of gear. He was generous with his time, and when he was visiting, he'd identify historic climbing gear for our collections. His enthusiasm was infectious. He was so interested in how gear was made that he even wanted to test the composition of some of our historic pitons to see what kind of metal was used.” The AAC will truly miss John Middendorf, and our thoughts are with his wife, Jeni, his children, and his other family and friends as they grieve and celebrate him. https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2024/6/25/remembering-john-middendorf

Dearest Luke, I have been meaning to write to you for some time, but I have Zine 23 fresh on my mind and some spare time, so here it goes. I don’t even know where to begin with this. My name is Tavish, and I’m a twenty-three-year-old climber from Seattle. I managed to end up… https://climbingzine.com/a-letter-to-the-zine-by-tavish-hansen/

The second, and final, round of the Olympic Qualifier Series took place in Budapest, Hungary, over the weekend, with the final tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympics on the line. https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?n=772268

While it's the hardest drytool route ever, the grade of D15 requires a lot of strength and stamina The post New Drytool Route has 145 Moves Along Roof appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/new-drytool-route-is-145-moves-along-roof/

After the Budapest leg of the OQS over the weekend Erin McNeice, Molly Thompson-Smith and Hamish McArthur have all secured qualification and will now join Toby Roberts in Paris in August. https://www.climber.co.uk/news/mcneice-thompson-smith-and-mcarthur-qualify-for-paris-games/

Adam Ondra, Dohyun Lee, and others secured their Olympic tickets in the semi-finals. Not so for Team France, who had to battle it out in a heart-wrenching final. The post Teammates Forced to Become Rivals in Men’s Olympic Qualifier Series Final appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/indoor-climbing/teammates-forced-to-become-rivals-in-mens-olympic-qualifier-series-final/

After months of work (and more than a 100,000 vertical feet of hiking) Chase Leary and Andy Puhvel finally freed ‘Keel Haul’ (5.13c; 2,000ft). The crux is pitch is above 14,000 feet. https://www.climbing.com/places/keel-haul-high-sierra-14000-feet/