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  4. Natalia Grossman to Make Comp Climbing Return

Natalia Grossman to Make Comp Climbing Return

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  • American Alpine ClubA

    The 2025 Annual Benefit Gala: Celebrating the Climbing Life

    General News climbing
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    American Alpine ClubA
    This event was supported by Vibram, Adidas FiveTen, and First Western Trust.  At this year's AAC Gala, the energy for celebrating climbing was unprecedented. Three hundred sixteen climbers from all over the country gathered in Denver, CO, including longtime members, athletes, awardees, and climbing legends. The night was filled with bold stories of climbing, community, and history. There was a thread connecting them all: the American Alpine Club. “The AAC is a people-first organization,” Nina Williams remarked in her opening speech. She noted that the AAC’s grants, lodging, events, advocacy, library and archives, volunteers, and membership all bring people together.  AAC Executive Director Ben Gabriel noted that climbing isn’t only about the summits we reach but the partnerships we build, and as the AAC looks towards the future, we are stronger together.  As one way to celebrate the richness of the people that make up the AAC, the 2025 awards were given out for accomplishments in climbing, advocacy, literacy, and volunteerism. French Groupe Militaire de Haute Montagne of Chamonix received the David A. Sowles Memorial Award. Other award winners included Michael Wejchert for the H. Adams Carter Literary Award, Brooke Raboutou for the Robert Hicks Bates Award, Rick Wilcox for the Angelo Heilprin Citation, and Outdoor Alliance for the David R. Brower Conservation Award. Later, Jack Tackle accepted the Honorary Membership award, and Kelly Cordes accepted the Pinnacle Award during their speeches.  Recipient of multiple AAC grants, AAC member Zach Clanton told the story of his most recent climb on the Southeast Face of The Trickster in Alaska, where he and Matt Kilgerman put up The Raven-Wolf Route (5.10 C2). It was the second ascent the mountain had seen. John Svenson had first climbed it 42 years ago. “This summer, we pulled off a 6,000-foot pure rock climb on a mountain with all the mysteries intact. This was high adventure at its finest,” said Clanton.  During this climb, Clanton felt connected to past generations of Alaskan adventurers like Svenson, an Alaskan artist and climber, whose art was included in the Gala auction. The climb inspired Clanton to connect to his artistic side. Clanton went on to reflect on how the Trickster ascent represented how all of those AAC grants over the years had literally changed his life’s trajectory. When former AAJ editor and Pinnacle Award winner Kelly Cordes took the stage, we learned he was a super fan of Jack Tackle when he was a young climber in the 90s. When Tackle visited Missoula, Montana, where Cordes was living at the time, Cordes went to hear him speak. After Tackle was done speaking, Cordes got the courage to go up to Tackle.  “Jack gave me the gift of his attention and his presence, and I came away feeling not that I can be him—we all know there’s only one Jack f***ing Tackle—but deeply inspired as a person beyond the super hero I thought he was and who I now know him to be,” said Cordes.  Cordes went on to describe his inspiration drawn from the AAJ—”it was, and it still is, like the Bible to me”—and his many adventures as an alpinist.  After all this talk about Jack Tackle, Tackle himself finally took to the stage and imposed wisdom on the room.  “The three tenets I came up with as my mantra for alpinism were first, commitment. Commitment to the goal, to yourself, and to your partners. Vision, the second one, was the ability to see what is possible and make a plan to achieve it. And the last was trust. Trust in yourself and trust in your partners,” said Tackle.  Much like the chatter around a campfire after a long day of climbing, this Gala was full of high energy, sharing stories and laughter. The celebration of our climbing history and the push to pave the way for the future of climbing were inspiring. With all the laughter and catching up with old friends, there was an undertone of passion—passion for what we want to see next, passion for the importance of storytelling, and passion for uplifting one another. When climbers come together through the AAC, we make an impact.  The money raised through the liv... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/10/23/the-2025-annual-benefit-gala-celebrating-the-climbing-life
  • American Alpine ClubA

    Guidebook XV—Rewind the Climb

    General News climbing
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    American Alpine ClubA
    The snowy fortress of Mt. Logan massif had opened its door after weeks of siege. It was June 23, 1925, when Allen Carpé and five others stood atop the highest peak in Canada for the first time, the sheer pinnacle of the summit plunging down sharply to the Seward Glacier below. To Carpé, in the thin air, it felt like every moment was twice lived. And in the media storm and flurry of drama that followed, he would be called upon to set the record straight—and relive those moments yet another time. At first glance, the 100-year-old story of the first ascent of Mt. Logan might have a familiar outline—a band of men push up and up to ascend to the great heights, facing great hardship along the way. In the classic telling, we follow the expedition leader Albert MacCarthy as he spends weeks caching supplies in the dead of winter, utilizing sleds pulled by snowshoe-clad horses, and higher up on the mountain, cunning dog teams that fight whenever left alone. In the classic telling, we follow MacCarthy, American Alpine Club representative Allen Carpé, American Norman Read, Colonel Foster, and the others on the expedition as they ferry their own gear back and forth between each subsequent camp, the measure of days the number of heavy loads these men have carried to the next advanced base camp, or their proximity to frostbite. With teeth on edge, we’d read of 11 journeys through a precarious icefall as they consolidated their camp above 10,000 feet, transporting nearly a ton of equipment and food. Once high on the massif, we’d delight in the cunning trick, attributed to MacCarthy, of planting 600 bare willow branches in the blowing snow every hundred feet, to prevent against getting lost in the whiteout. Such trail maintenance would ultimately save lives and precious time, but still couldn’t prevent one rope team from losing their way during a storm that chased them down from the summit. Those men spent 42 hours without shelter in the freezing, grainy snowbanks, only realizing their mistake when they found themselves walking in circles, back on the summit plateau, the slopes ominously appearing at unexpected angles. The theme of that story is loneliness, drudgery, and the sheer force of will needed against the worst conditions that such an icy world could offer. Reflecting on these themes, Carpé writes in his own telling of the ascent, published in 1933 in the American Alpine Journal: “I think it was during these days that the awful loneliness of these great ranges was first borne in upon me with something of the force of a personal experience. Until we turned the corner into the Ogilvie glacier, we could look back down the valley and sense the presence of the lower hills and of living things. Now as we worked in toward the savage cliffs of Logan we entered a new world of appalling grandeur, and our little band seemed insignificant and very much alone. We had no support behind us, no organization of supply, no linkage at all with the outer world. We were on our own.” That telling is perhaps best left to those who experienced it. But a 100-year distance can sharpen the focus of our lens on something else—the mundane letters and newspaper stories that came afterward, that can so easily be forgotten as part of the story, and that might tell us a little something different about the legacy our climbing ancestors have left us. There are, of course, the historical accounts—a hundred pages dedicated to the planning of the ascent, scientific studies accomplished during the expedition, and the story of the climb itself, all included in the Canadian Alpine Journal. Because the AAC was not yet publishing the American Alpine Journal (it would do so for the first time in 1929), the American account of the ascent was published in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s journal. The American public, too, was in awe, with repeated articles appearing in the New York Times, the Boston Transcript, and others. But a flurry of letters from September 1925, dashed off in angry haste with cross-outs and misspellings, reveal a gap in the telling. The writer, expedition member Norman Read, repeatedly argues to his friend and reader, Allen Carpé, that the representations of the expedition in the media are “positively disgusting in its sensationalism and its falsity.” He asks Carpé to write the story the right way—to tell it in a manner ‘worthy of the fraternity of mountaineering.’ The letters are a source of 100-year-old gossip—they tell of ... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/8/14/guidebook-xvrewind-the-climb
  • American Alpine ClubA

    Your Guide to Climbing at The New River Gorge

    General News climbing
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    American Alpine ClubA
    Originally published in Guidebook XIII If you haven’t logged some ascents on West Virginia stone, that’s a gap in your climbing resume that you should rectify immediately. You won’t regret making the trek to climb on the New’s tiered roofs and bouldery, sequency walls. The New River Gorge (NRG) is one of the few truly world-class destinations in the U.S., and a trip to visit in 2025 would be an easy way to ensure your climbing year is filled with unbelievable climbing— the kind that has you yelling, “WOW I LOVE ROCK CLIMBING” halfway up the wall. The NRG boasts miles of challenging climbing on ironclad Nuttall sandstone cliffs. Many routes overlook the stunning New River Gorge, or you can travel deep into the vibrant West Virginia forest and find hidden cliffs with stellar routes. The rock is composed of 98% quartz—some even claim it’s harder than Yosemite granite. With over 3,000 established routes, the NRG has almost every type of climbing: run-out and well-bolted, slab, overhangs, cracks, techy vertical faces, corners, arêtes, trad and sport climbing, and bouldering. Technical small holds, long reaches, big moves, and old-school bolting leave many shaking in their climbing shoes. You’ll never get bored if you love finding a sequence of moves that unlocks a climb. And you’ll never feel better than when you push through the mental challenge and pull off the move. “It’s a humbling place to climb, so you have to be willing to be humbled a lot,” said Jane Kilgour, the Community & Guest Services Manager at the AAC New River Gorge Campground. The caliber of climbs makes every fall and try-hard scream worthwhile. “[The New River Gorge] is the kind of place where people come for a week, and they end up staying for three months and then moving around their plans for the year so they can return again next season,” said Kilgour. The best advice for visiting the New: chase stars, not grades. The quality of lines and routes is why climbers can’t get enough of the NRG. As an AAC member, enjoy discounts at AAC lodging facilities and dozens of other locations in the AAC lodging network. Each membership is critical to the AAC’s work: advocating for climbing access and natural landscapes, offering essential knowledge to the climbing community through our accident analysis and documentation of cutting edge climbing, and supporting our members with our rescue benefit, discounts, grants and more.  The New River Gorge National Park is on the land of the Cherokee and Shawnee, among other tribes. We acknowledge their past, present, and future connection to the land. To learn more, visit the Sandstone Visitor Center on your trip. In the 1970s, West Virginia locals began developing the New River Gorge, focusing on what would become the Bridge Area before the NRG Bridge was completed in 1977. Classics like Chockstone (5.9), Jaws (5.9), and Tree Route (5.10) were climbed in the Bridge Buttress area and graded initially as 5.7. Locals continued to put up more routes, moving on to the Junkyard Wall. Whispers of amazing climbing at the New River Gorge spread, and the 1980s brought a new wave of climbers who pushed grades and technical difficulties in the area. Rapscallion’s Blues (5.10c), Leave It to Jesus (5.11c), and Incredarete (5.12c) were put up, and with every season, more climbing areas were discovered. In the late ‘80s, sport climbing and Lynn Hill came to the New. Eric Horst put up the first 5.13 in the New, Diamond Life, and Lynn clinched the first ascent of the Greatest Show on Earth (5.13a), setting a new standard for women in the New River Gorge. Hard sport climbing ruled the early 1990s. The late Brian McCray put up difficult lines on overhanging walls, including the first 5.14a, Proper Soul. Development plateaued in the late ‘90s, as the NPS acquired most of the climbing cliffs, and a power drill ban was enacted in 1998. Currently, the NPS accepts permit applications for new routes. In the 2010s, many 5.14s were bolted and sent, including Trebuchet (5.14b), Coal Train (5.14a), and Mono... https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2025/2/10/guidebook-xiii-nrg
  • TofuseanT

    Guess the climber

    Pics and trips art pencil figuredrawing sports climbing
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    TofuseanT
    Guess the climber #art #figuredrawing #climbing #rockclimbing #bouldering #pencil #sports
  • Kevin StewartS

    Hyalite Canyon, MT

    Pics and trips film climbing montana iceclimbing
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    Kevin StewartS
    Hyalite Canyon, MT K1000 | Portra #film #iceclimbing #climbing #montana
  • Schalk CronjéY

    Spending time in the outdoors?

    General Climbing hiking climbing mountaineering ethics uiaa
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    Schalk CronjéY
    Spending time in the outdoors?Align yourself with the new UIAA declaration on hiking, climbing and mountaineering.https://www.theuiaa.org/documents/mountaineering/UIAA_Declaration_Hiking_Climbing_Mountaineering_v1.pdf#hiking #climbing #mountaineering #ethics #uiaa #responsibility
  • ClimbingZineC

    Wrestling With A Lifetime Of Fear On Hollow Flake by Luke Mehall

    General News climbing climbingzine
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    ClimbingZineC
    On the ledge that night, I felt at home and at ease. We were on the rock of our dreams. And Dave was the perfect partner. He was better at figuring out the logistics of hauling and jugging. Dave was the ying to my yang. Plus, we’d struck a deal: I would lead the infamous… https://climbingzine.com/terror-on-hollow-flake-an-excerpt-from-american-climber-by-luke-mehall/
  • climbingC

    8 Insider Tips for Climbing in the Roof-Crack Capital of the World

    General News climbing
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    climbingC
    The White Rim in Canyonlands, Utah, has some of the world's best and hardest roof cracks. But climbing there takes planning and insider knowledge—get those permits now! https://www.climbing.com/places/white-rim-climbing/