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The Best Climbing Gear According to Our Editors – October

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  • Whats New With The Scarpa Vapour V?

    Videos climbing
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    EpicTVE
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDdh1Axwq5c
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    American Alpine ClubA
    March 2025 The American Alpine Club and Black Diamond Equipment are pleased to announce the 2025 Cutting Edge Grant recipients. The Cutting Edge Grant continues the Club's 120-year tradition by funding individuals planning expeditions to remote areas featuring unexplored mountain ranges, unclimbed peaks, difficult new routes, first-free ascents, or similar world-class pursuits. Five teams have been awarded a total of $25,000 for this cycle, with objectives featuring a low-impact style and leave-no-trace mentality looked upon with favor. Black Diamond Equipment is a proud sponsor of the Cutting Edge Grant and a key partner in supporting cutting-edge alpinism. Vitaliy Museyenko will be awarded $6,000 to attempt a new route on the southwest aspect of Kishtwar Shivling (6,000m), located in the Indian Himalayas. The mountain's main summit has only been reached once; the east summit was climbed in 2014, and the east pillar was climbed in 2015. Vitaliy Musiyenko will be attempting the route with Sean McLane. If they have enough time and energy in the tank, they hope to attempt another, unclimbed mountain with a similar altitude in the area. Michael Hutchins will be awarded $6,000 to attempt the southwest face of Rimo lll (7233m), an unclimbed 1600m face in the eastern Karakoram of India. Hutchins and Chris Wright discovered this objective because Wright caught a glimpse of the Rimo peaks after an expedition in 2012. Stefano Ragazzo will join them on their expedition. The team of three are all mountain guides with extensive climbing experience: Ragazzo recently rope-soloed Eternal Flame on Nameless Tower in Pakistan; Wright received the Piolet d'Or in 2020 for his team's ascent of Link Sar; and Hutchins has climbed six of seven major peaks in the Fitz Roy massif. Tad McCrea will be awarded $4,000 to attempt the southeast pillar of Latok lll (6,949 meters) from the Choktoi Glacier. Latok III has never been climbed from the Choktoi glacier but was summited from the west face in 2011. The expedition team will include Jon Giffin and Thomas Huber. The three climbers attempted the proposed route in 2024 but had to descend before bad weather moved in. Zach Lovell will be awarded $4,000 to attempt a new route on Dorje Lhakpa (6966m), located in the Jugal Himal, about 55 kilometers northeast of Kathmandu. Japhy Dhungana and Joseph Hobby will join Lovell on this expedition, which will involve over 1,000 meters of technical climbing from 5900 to 6900 meters. Dhungana and Lovell did their first new route in the alpine together in Nepal several years ago and are looking forward to another adventure in Dhungana's home country. Hobby and Lovell have also spent countless days climbing and skiing together, from the contiguous U.S. to Alaska. Lovell is honored to call both of them some of his closest friends and looks forward to spending time together as a team of three. Ethan Berman will be awarded $5,000 to attempt the southeast "hidden" pillar of Ultar Sar (7388 m), located in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan. The route is a striking 3000m line, with the lower half of the route consisting of 1500m of steep snow and ice climbing with a couple of mixed steps, and the upper half consisting of a 1500m stunning rock pillar that cuts a line through the sky all the way to the summit. Maarten van Haeren, Sebastian Pelletti, and Berman attempted the route in the spring of 2024, reaching a hanging glacier at 6000m before turning around due to dangerous snow conditions. They made three attempts total, each time climbing a bit higher while learning how to move safely through the complexities of the route. They are fired up to return to Pakistan with the support of the Cutting Edge Grant and hope to apply all that they learned last year to increase their chances of success. Applications for the Cutting Edge Grant are accepted each year from October 1 through November 30. Contact: Berkeley Anderson, Foundation and Gr... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/3/4/the-american-alpine-club-announces-2025-cutting-edge-grant-winners
  • Found in Translation

    General News climbing
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    American Alpine ClubA
    Originally published in Guidebook XIII Across the Pacific, on the small island of Taiwan, climber Maurice Chen received an email from Dougald MacDonald, the Executive Editor of the American Alpine Club. It was July 2024, and the summer air hung as heavy as mist. Attached to the email was a large document: the full version of the 2024 Accidents in North American Climbing (ANAC). Chen called his two colleagues at the Taiwan Outdoor Climbers’ Coalition (TOCC), Matt Robertson and Ta Chi Wang. Together, they began their meticulous work—marking pages, circling terms, and discussing any accident relevant to Taiwanese climbing in obsessive detail. The task ahead would be long and tedious. Taiwan is an island shaped like a yam, floating between the South and East China Seas. It sits in the shadow of two superpowers, one threatening to occupy it and another half-heartedly protecting it. A young island by geological standards, it was formed by the collision of two tectonic plates. The island is 89 miles wide and 250 miles long, with its eastern half stitched to its western half by a spine of mountain ranges. Among these ranges are 151 peaks taller than 10,000 feet, with the tallest, Jade Mountain, standing just shy of 13,000 feet. Taiwan is a land of sea and sky. The island’s diverse climate shifts from coastal tide pools to alpine tundra and back to tide pools in less than a hundred miles. Thanks to these rich natural landscapes, the Taiwanese have always embraced outdoor activities such as hiking, mountaineering, diving, biking, surfing, and climbing. The first mountaineering clubs of Taiwan were formed as early as 1905. Chen and Robertson belonged to Taiwan’s third generation of climbers, Wang to the second. The first generation of Taiwanese climbers were born during the Japanese occupation, and were early-century mountaineers, tackling the many tall peaks with traditional expedition and siege-style strategies. Mountaineering and hiking gained mainstream attention when a list of a hundred notable mountains was published in 1972, aptly named “Taiwan’s Hundred Mountains.” The serious Taiwanese mountaineer aspired to climb all hundred. By the late 1970s, mountaineering boots were the go-to climbing shoe, but tales of the Stonemasters had floated across the Pacific. Wang remembers reading an issue of Climbing Magazine that his friends and brought back from the States, but without the internet, information passed slowly. The climbing scene lagged behind the Americans and Europeans by about half a decade. Gradually, Taiwanese climbers began distinguishing rock climbing from mountaineering. When Chen began climbing in the 1990s, free climbing—primarily trad climbing—was already widespread. By the time Robertson arrived in Taiwan in 2002, sport climbing had just begun to gain traction. In the mid-2010s, the indoor climbing scene boomed, and the number of gyms tripled. Due to the limited real estate in the maze-like Taiwanese cities, most of these facilities were bouldering gyms, which gave rise to the fourth generation of Taiwanese climbers, predominantly boulderers. Published annually since 1948, Accidents in North American Climbing documents the year’s most significant and teachable climbing accidents. Get it annually as an AAC member. Each membership is critical to the AAC’s work: advocating for climbing access and natural landscapes, offering essential knowledge to the climbing community, and supporting our members with our rescue benefit, discounts, grants and more.  Chen and Robertson met at Long Dong (meaning “Dragon’s Cave”), a seacliff climbing area on the northern end of the island. Climbers have compared Long Dong with the Shawangunks in New York or Clear Creek Canyon in Colorado, but Wang waves away those comparisons—it cannot be compared because the serenity of home is an incomparable experience. Seacliffs rise out of the Pacific and waves crash behind the belayer, requiring not only knowledge of the rocks but knowledge of the tides. The lines are short and stout, punchy, getting the grade in less than 50 feet in most places. This was before the first climbing gym in Taiwan had opened, and the pair collaborated to pu... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/2/4/guidebook-xiiivolunteer-spotlight
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    GrippedG
    The wildly dynamic problem features one of the single hardest starting moves in the world The post Olympian Colin Duffy Sends Defying Gravity V15 in One Session appeared first on Gripped Magazine. https://gripped.com/news/olympian-colin-duffy-sends-defying-gravity-v15-in-one-session/
  • Aphiwit Limpanichpakdee 🇹🇭 | Athlete of the Week

    Videos climbing ifsc
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    IFSCI
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3QhpLA89CY
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    mkroehnertM
    Vor ein paar Wochen waren wir in den #Vogesen #Klettern. Erster Tag am Neuntelstein mit Granit. Zweiter Tag am Carriere de Ziegelberg mit Sandstein. Crag photos from #climbing in the #Vosges. One day Neuntelstein with granite. Second day sandstone at Ziegelberg. #RockClimbing #OutdoorClimbing
  • Seb Bouin repeats X Intergal F9a+

    General News climbing
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    climber-magazineC
    Seb Bouin recently made the third ascent of X Integral (F9a+) in Gottreux, Switzerland. https://www.climber.co.uk/news/seb-bouin-repeats-x-intergal-f9a/
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    HowNOT2H
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVA-JCRnxo