Histoires Escalade
My previous Patagonia climbing season, climbing last year mostly with Marc-André Leclerc and Alex Honnold, had been my most successful yet. Among a bunch of other activity was the first ascent of the Travesía del Oso Buda, the first repeat and direct variation to El Arca de los Vientos, and a nearly complete, one-day Torre…
Three friends, an avalanche and an iPhone on Yashkuk Sar I.
Behind the scenes of our ambassadors' trickiest and most meaningful ascents.
Education through risk, consequence and building the skills to live simply.
How Tommy Caldwell is reshaping his love for rock climbing by building relationships with Indigenous stewards of Bears Ears.
For routes like Crown Royale, a lot of what goes into putting them up is falling down.
Inside the efforts to protect Chile’s Cochamó Valley from developers and overtourism.
How the worst climbing conditions can bring out the best in us.
Running Up For Air is not a race. It’s a community, a gathering of friends and a fundraiser for clean-air advocacy.
narinda heng finds out by taking public transit from Oakland to Yosemite National Park.
In the male-dominated world of alpinism, Juliana García is leading the way for a new generation of female mountaineers.
Hard alpinism in the Cordillera Huayhuash endures as the climate changes the routes.
For these Afghan women, climbing in Yosemite is a connection to home.
Footprints Running Camp is as much about finding solutions to the climate crisis as it is about running.
TM Herbert helped put up the first ascent of the Muir Wall in 1965. His son followed in his footsteps 55 years later.
One family sets the pace at a historic refuge near Chamonix, France.
Elder Wilson Wewa tells the creation story of Animal Village. Tara Kerzhner and Len Necefer consider how these stories can reshape stewardship.
An ode to Raúl Revilla Quiroz, one of the fathers of Mexican rock climbing.
A conversation between Lor Sabourin and Madaleine Sorkin.
Charlie Fowler was a world-class alpinist; what did he find out in Colorado’s Wild, Wild West climbing area that kept him coming back?
On an intergenerational new routing trip in the Sierra, Tad McCrea asks, What if your best adventure is the one you’re already on?
As we make a transition to renewable sources of energy, let’s not renew the same old mistakes.
When they urged climbers to stop using their best-selling product in 1972, Tom Frost and Yvon Chouinard laid the foundation for Patagonia’s work today.
Fifty years ago, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost and Doug Robinson set down an ethic for climbing that emphasized restraint and respect for the rock. In 2022, it’s needed more than ever.
Cydney Knapp and her husband, Bartek, knew they wanted to raise their kids to love the outdoors, so they learned how to navigate change and embraced the chaos.
Rolling Stone called him “the real Indiana Jones.” His new memoir reveals why our friend Rick has always been a great deal more.
Not totally relating to some forms of climate activism, Josh Wharton found his own way to contribute.
Nearly every Wednesday, Courtney Reynolds can be found elbow-deep in a bin of someone else’s castoffs, searching for scraps of fabric and colorful quilts to deconstruct and sew into original clothing items for her three preschool-age kids, or to sell in her online shop, Napkin Apocalypse.
Recreation in the Alabama Hills is surging at an unsustainable pace. But some people are working to ensure that it doesn’t get loved to death.
6,000 words about dressing for alpine climbing you didn’t know you needed to know.
Reflecting on a lifetime of climbing, and the risks and rewards that come with it.
Eric Bissell captured his first published image with Patagonia on a climbing trip to establish a new route on Mount Ololokwe.
A climber remembers her first experience with theunexpected on Thalay Sagar.
Eliza Earle, Austin Siadak, Drew Smith on the 2019 fall climbing season in Yosemite.
A climber takes a road trip to Bishop and Las Vegas, and breaks down the narrative of who travels and who climbs.
Last November, Fitz Caldwell (age 6) finished his first multipitch climb, Sunnyside Bench in Yosemite National Park. He did it with his dad, Tommy.
A Sierra trip with good light and only one case of altitude sickness.
Rolando Garibotti looks back at a lifetime spent in Patagonia and forward to the generation following in his footsteps.
When Vince Anderson took a break from alpine climbing, his mountaineering attitude manifested itself in a single-speed hardtail, on which he’s won some of the sport’s most grueling races.
How a father and son found a way to climb one of Utah's most sought-after ice routes in a bygone era.
Listen to the story Sometimes when I look at the Fitz Roy Range, I see a silhouetted jawline of mountainous teeth that gnash the sky. Other times, the teeth transform to fingers that don’t crush aspirations but cradle them, like a hand cupping something precious. The distinction really depends on whether I’m looking at the…
I wake early to the dazzling heat of the African sun. Perched 400 meters high on a huge granite face in central Madagascar, all I can see is black and blue, the color of the Malagasy granite meeting the sky and, coincidentally, the same color as large areas of my body from the constant abuse…
Lessons from Yosemite’s first climbing guidebook “I have this idea,” Mikey texted last October. “Let’s climb all of the suggested routes from the Yosemite red-cover guidebook.” I agreed immediately. The tattered copy of A Climber’s Guide to Yosemite Valley arrived in the mail less than a week later. First published in 1964 by the Sierra Club,…
The patchwork history of public lands that transformed the area around a small New Mexico town into a world-class bouldering area We left the Mills Canyon Rim Campground, where we’d been living for three cold January weeks, just before dawn on our last morning in New Mexico. I pulled over to the north side of…
On an incredibly clear, early autumn morning, the aging Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) van bumped along Tioga Pass Road, taking precariously tight turns at an alarming speed. Twelve of us were crammed in the back, chattering and bracing ourselves against the van’s interior walls. When the road was no longer passable for vehicles, we…
He’s on a mission to be the best climber in the world.
Fog from the distant Caspian Sea swirled around us as we left the road, crossed a narrow mountain stream on a rickety footbridge of wornwooden planks, passed a pungent corral full of dank, scruffy sheep, and started the steep climb to Alam Kuh base camp in the Alborz mountain range of Iran. Brittany Griffith, Kate…
On establishing a route in Cochamó Valley that might be too hard—but might not.
Weather has a way of complicating—and enriching—everything. By the time I top out, it’s snowing and it’s dark. I walk back as far as the rope will let me, and in the flattest spot I can find, I dig a hole and sit, bracing myself. I yell, “Rope-fixed!” repeatedly, but my partners can’t hear me…
After a failed first attempt, three friends return to India’s Mount Nilkantha to confront—and embrace—the terrible, beautiful duality of a life in the mountains.
A climber describes her passion for the wildness of the world. My brother’s cheeks smooshed against the blue velour seat and his mouth hung slightly ajar. His gangly legs stretched from door to door, covering the back bench of our family Buick. On the floor, parallel, I fidgeted over the hump dividing passenger and driver…
Patagonia mourns the loss of Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard’s former climbing and business partner, who passed away Friday morning. Tom, with Yvon, Chuck Pratt and Royal Robbins, made the first ascent of the North America Wall of El Capitan in 1964. He made other notable first ascents with Valley pioneers and others in Yosemite, the…
I’m sitting on a sunny bench in some random park in central Oregon holding my eight-month-old daughter in my arms and watching my four-year-old son launch himself down a slide. We’ve been on the road as a family for nearly a month now, and the daily hunt for a decent playground is often as essential…
Groggily I stirred in the sweaty musk of my sleeping bag. I’d spent the night on the hard concrete slab directly outside the Independence campground’s pit toilets, with the wafting stench of shit enveloping my fitful slumber. I shut my eyes, trying to forget where I was. My hips were sore, my kidneys ached and…
May 14, 2017, Mother’s Day. Dear friends, yesterday I topped out on the Zodiac on El Capitan. Some of you have loyally and patiently supported me for almost six months while I prepared for and fretted about this adventure. Some of you have no idea what the Zodiac is. No matter. Thanks for being part…
Yesterday, Alex Megos sent one of the most difficult routes in the world, completing the first ascent of Perfecto Mundo (5.15c or 9b+) at the limestone crag of Margalef in Catalunya, Spain. He called it the first hard route of his life. It marked not an apex, but rather a beginning. Which raises a wild…
On the Argentine side of the Patagonian Andes, the Chaltén Massif is a dense range of extremely steep mountains, famous for Cerro Torre and Chaltén itself (the native name for the peak also known as Fitz Roy). I have been coming to this mountain range on an annual basis since 2003, often for a three-month…
It had been a while. I don’t climb in weather like this. I stay inside and drink coffee. But I dutifully marched through the whiteout, following Simon as he navigated by compass toward the highland plateau of Cairn Gorm. He was searching for a particular block of rock, from which we would rappel into nowhere…
When I think about climbing, I don’t think about summits. I see serrated ridgelines rising and falling between earth and sky, and sunlight slipping between spires, casting the shadows of giants onto rubble-strewn rivers of ice below, curving, moving, bending with the passage of time. I remember my partners and I, roped together with no…
Pain pulses in my right foot to the rhythm of my heartbeats. I know something’s wrong, but the only option is to ignore it. The swelling presses against my shoe, but I’m afraid if I take it off, I’ll never get it back on. Still, I feel like I can’t complain. My foot is still…
As a younger climber I was totally committed to big long routes, often in the mountains and often involving a lot of suffering. The beauty of each place is what got me there, and the partnerships kept me there. I wanted to be in those big landscapes, sleeping on the wall, scoured by the wind,…
In honor of the release of A Mountaineer’s Life by Allen Steck, Patagonia Books is pleased to share this excerpt from chapter eight. Camp II was a desperate and fearful place. We spent seven days there in severe weather. We could not leave the tents without going onto the fixed lines; the weakened cornice behind us…
We are so sad to learn of the deaths of Hayden Kennedy and Inge Perkins. Malinda and I knew Hayden all his years. His parents, Michael and Julie Kennedy, are good friends who passed on to their son their love of climbing and skiing, and their ethics. The family also shared, in the presence of…
The jacket was probably red once but it’s now more of a muddy pink with an overlay of permanent scuff and smudge. The zipper, replaced four years ago, stands out a little brighter. The interior sports a size tag (Kids XXS) but has no hand-me-down label—it predates that Patagonia tradition. Around 13 years ago, it…
When I was ten years old, I was a hyperactive kid who had problems staying focused for a long period of time. One day I was sitting in class at primary school, listening to a subject that didn’t really interest me. Bored, I started playing with the scissors that I found in my school bag.…
“Picture walking through a parking lot with a ski mask rolled up on your head and a pistol in your pocket. You’re getting closer to the bank, your heart’s beating faster, adrenaline’s starting to rush through your head, and you can’t believe you’re about to do what you’re about to do,” says Roland Thompson. “When…
Dear Kaz and Irenna, Today you are 10-months old. This week, the last of winter’s snow left our garden, and the final crocus patch bloomed and closed just in time to escape your attempts to eat its purple petals. I spent our first winter together pulling you behind me in a tandem sled that gave…
A sea of a thousand rocky thumbs. Which one do you take? Balancing trustingly on ten millimeters of rocky protrusion, your index finger wraps around the top of a feldspar knob. Don’t breathe too deeply or it might push you off. You have it, but you feel your balance waver. For a millisecond you’re falling…
I’ve just returned to Seattle from a trip to the Central Alaska Range, which was shorter than most with only two weeks of camping at Kahiltna Base Camp, but more successful than some Alaska Range trips I’ve done that were three times the length. In May 2012, I attempted to solo Begguya—the third-highest peak in…
As I write these words, the future of this place we humans now call Indian Creek is up in the balance. In December of 2016, President Obama designated Bears Ears—in which Indian Creek is located—a national monument under the Antiquities Act. But lawmakers are pushing to rescind this designation in favor of privatization and development.…
Like the rest of the world’s climbing community, we at Patagonia are deeply saddened by the death of renowned Swiss climber and mountaineer Ueli Steck on April 30, 2017, in Nepal. Below, alpinist Steve House remembers his friend. “There are dreams that are worth a certain amount of risk.”—Ueli Steck Ueli was, and always will be,…
“It can’t be a route if there aren’t any holds, Sonnie,” Alex called from the ground. I could see him down there, sitting back in his harness comfortably, looking up at me, grinning. I was roughly 60 feet in the air, on the opposite end of the 9mm rope he was holding, and searching for…
Everyone in the Patagonia family is saddened to hear about the passing of Royal Robbins on March 14, 2017. Some in the company knew him personally, many of us did not. But we are, to this day, greatly inspired by his pioneering spirit and commitment to clean climbing. In honor of his friend, Patagonia founder…
Digging deep to climb the three hardest routes on Longs Peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.
I was lucky to grow up in the valley of the Haute-Durance, located in the Hautes-Alpes not far from Briançon and the border to Italy. Home was a wild and protected area where my parents introduced me to the joys of mountain trails, skiing on beautiful slopes through evergreens and climbing on pristine cliffs. Later…
I took a hex off the rack and pushed it far into the crack. The rime was thick, and the crack’s edges blurry. The hex mushed into the rime and stuck. I beat on it with my ice axe just to be sure, then gave it a swift tug. It ripped straight out. Technical winter…
One of my earliest outdoor climbing experiences was at the crags around the quaint countryside village of Dunkeld. An escarpment of Schist can be seen escaping from the deep forest high on the hill just beyond the village. It was here that I would spend many a day for ten years. The climbing here is unique.…
As I swung my tools into the unconsolidated snowy headwall and tried to catch something that would hold my weight, I looked down and saw Jason and Caro huddled together at a hanging belay. In the gathering dark, they were trying to avoid the constant barrage of snow and ice I was creating. We’d been…
The national park system may not have saved my life but it definitely allowed me to truly discover and continually define it. Following an abysmal 13th grade at an entry level university and an equally lamentable year employed in one of the most dangerous professions, I bolted west to manifest my destiny. After a summer…
The musings of a dirtbag’s disciple.
A portrait of the man who made more first ascents than any other North American climber, wrote beautiful and meticulous mountain guides of the wild areas he loved, and defined the “dirtbag” archetype in a way that no one else ever has or could.
My work with adaptive athletes began when my brother Sean was injured almost 25 years ago. He’s paralyzed from the waist down and lives life from a wheelchair where he more than rolls with it, he thrives. Ever since we topped out on El Capitan for the first time in 2005—that’s 3,000 feet of vertical…
There’s no place on Earth like southeastern Utah’s Bears Ears region. From world-class crack climbing at Indian Creek, biking singletrack in the Abajo Mountains, backpacking in Grand Gulch to floating the San Juan River, adventure abounds here. But it’s not just valuable for climbing and biking. Home to more than 100,000 archaeological sites, it is…
We are now third and fourth generation surfers. We have the confidence to leave the stereotypes behind. We’re the scroungiest dirtbags one day and then return to the urban environment as activists for change the next. Two time periods epitomize the style and sensibility of what we are working to create in the coming years.…
“Great climb, eh?” said a voice from up and over my right shoulder. “Yeah,” I replied, while clipping the anchor on After Midnight one of Mount Wellington’s most prized pitches and no giveaway at 24 (or 5.11d in Yosemite terms), “incredible, actually.” “Where you from?” the voice asked. “Canada!” I said. I looked up to…
After El Capitan, my desire for wall climbing diminished. Perhaps it was growing older, or perhaps it was just my surroundings. The Black Canyon was no longer an hour away. Yosemite was no longer in my waking dreams every day. Durango was so close to the desert, and thus the desert became all that mattered…
Rolo and a handful of stoked Patagonia ambassadors and friends will be sharing images and stories of their adventures throughout the Patagonia climbing season. Follow along at patagonia.com/vidapatagonia. If you’re planning to make a climbing trip to the area, tag your photos with #VidaPatagonia to appear on the page. The peaks of the Chaltén Massif…
The pig squeals and groans in protest as I wrestle it back onto my sweaty body. I groan even louder. Seventy pounds of ropes, cams, pins, beaks, portaledges, tents, food, fuel and everything else for a month-long big-wall expedition bulge from my haul bag, digging deep into my spine. I’ve already carried two of these…
It is with heavy hearts that we share news of the passing of two Patagonia climbing ambassadors, Kei Taniguchi and Kenshi Imai, in two separate incidents. Kei Taniguchi passed away on December 22 at Mount Kurodake in Hokkaido, Japan. Our deepest condolences and best wishes go out to her family and friends. She was 43 years…
Fire in the Belly What were we thinking? Was it arrogant of us to go straight up this blank-looking headwall? The chances that this line would go free were pretty slim. Was it the aesthetics of the blankness and steepness that had attracted us? Why didn’t we choose to follow more obvious features that were…
If you didn’t look close you just might miss it, and we do. Gazing across the Columbia River Basin into the morning light on the Purcell Mountains, we pass right by the Radium Hot Springs municipal offices. It’s not difficult to do here, where human presence is a mere asterisk on the seemingly infinite word…
As my friends and I get older, the threat of slipping into a normal lifestyle becomes more real. I have to mow the lawn, get the oil and filter changed in the car, go to the dentist. These days, given a choice, I would rather do a few sport pitches and get a good workout…
Fifteen years ago, I was drawn to southeastern Utah by the vast tracts of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and National Forest lands where I could find the freedom to explore and climb and have an adventure—rarely seeing another human other than my climbing partners or an intrepid hiker. I loved the feeling that my…
Exactly one month ago I tightened the last bolt in the last hold on the first-ever climbing boulder in Mozambique—and then climbed on it with over 1,000 Mozambican school children. Tonight, over dinner in Central Mozambique, I made a promise to climb a 12-pitch run-out granite slab with a Mozambican farmer named Elias who’s never…
I got on a plane in Vancouver around midday on April 16. I was exhausted. After a four-month season in Patagonia, my six weeks back in North America turned out much less restful than I had imagined. Conditions had been excellent, and I couldn’t keep myself from going out in the mountains a bunch. The…
“It starts as rain or snow falling on Scotland’s highest mountain—Ben Nevis. Either as rain or melting snow it percolates the thin layer of peat soil until it reaches the granite rock and unable to penetrate it, runs under the surface until emerging in Coire Leish or Coire na Ciste. The outflows from these two…
My friend Leonard Lee works in the oil industry across San Juan County, Utah, both on and off the Navajo Nation. He oversees oil and gas wells and the crews who work them. So it may surprise you that Leonard is also the Vice-Chairman of a Native American organization that intends to protect 1.9 million…
Things have changed. That old “live simply” ethos Jenna and I lived by, roaming around the desert and mountains in our ’83 Dodge Prospector van (with a sci-fi mural on the hood and velvet interior), feels a bit like a past life. Climbing these days is tightly packed between a life of airports, computers, conference…
The Copp-Dash Inspire Award, sponsored by Black Diamond Equipment, La Sportiva, Mountain Hardwear and Patagonia (with additional in-kind support from Adventure Film Festival, the American Alpine Club, Jonny Copp Foundation and Sender Films), announced the 2015 winners of the climbing grant established in memory of American climbers Jonny Copp and Micah Dash who were killed…
![Alex Megos Makes the Third Ascent of Lucid Dreaming (V15) [Updated with video]](https://www.patagonia.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/6a00d8341d07fd53ef01bb07e602af970d-768x512.jpg.webp)
Patagonia climber Alexander Megos made the third ascent of Lucid Dreaming (V15) this week on the Grandpa Peabody boulder in the Buttermilks. It was a double-milestone effort for the German phenom. “Feels like a DREAM but it’s not. Finally took down my hardest boulder ever and as well my longest project ever!” Alex said on…
On January 14, 2015, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of The Dawn Wall on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Today we’re happy to share this exclusive video of Tommy climbing pitch 15, rated 5.14c—the first footage released by the film crew on the wall. “The crux holds of pitch 15 are some…
We’ve been watching the updates with bated breath and now all of us at Patagonia are thrilled to congratulate Tommy Caldwell and his partner Kevin Jorgeson on the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite Valley. Tommy first conceived the idea of the climb in 2007 and, seven years later, summited the route…
Every autumn since I’ve known Tommy we have loaded up our van, left our home in Estes Park, Colorado, and driven to Yosemite National Park for him to work on his mega-project, The Dawn Wall, on the monolithic El Capitan. After we had Fitz we couldn’t wait to share this breathtaking place with him. This…
At the wind-scoured southern tip of Argentina, between the vast ice cap and the rolling estepas of Patagonia, rises a 10,262-foot tower of ice and rock named Cerro Torre. Considered by many the most beautiful and compelling mountain in the world, it draws the finest and most devoted technical alpinists from around the globe. Reinhold…
I anticipated the change with dread and excitement. My son was leaving the nest for college and I was determined to return to my former goal-driven climbing lifestyle. Fred Becky would be proud of me. After a night of mourning, alone under the desert stars, I promptly returned home, found my address book, and started…
It all began five years ago, as many things do these days, with a simple email to a few of us Squamish cracks hounds from a friend in Okanagan Falls, British Columbia. Hey Boys, Check out these roof cracks. I think they’ll go free. Peace out. – Doug Doug and his wife Janet are longtime…
An excerpt from The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains by Barry Blanchard.
All stories have to start somewhere. This one started over a cold beer when Marko Prezelj, Tadej Krišelj and I were sitting on the porch of Marko´s house on a warm, early summer evening discussing future plans. The debate evolved and ideas flew by when Marko briefly mentioned that together with Klemen Mali, more than…
How could we describe the feeling of taking our first shower in over two months? Mmmm… We have just hit civilization in Greenland. These last three weeks have been very exciting in many ways! Adventurous climbing, a close polar bear encounter (without anything to defend ourselves) and a very scary crossing back to Greenland which…
Update 4/1/15: Previously shown at Patagonia retail stores and film festivals, we’re happy to share the full film with you online. Warning: Contains expletives. I’m a homebody. My friend Mikey Schaefer is not. I made a conscious choice to develop a lifelong relationship with my local ranges and the urban environment right out my front…
Three weeks have passed now since we arrived on Baffin Island. [Editor’s note: Get caught up with Part 1 here.] Our first encounter with the local population already happened miles away from the coast when we met eight polar bears drifting on chunks of pack ice. It was quite a surprise running into them while…
July 15, 2014—We are off again on an exciting adventure! Reverend Captain Bob Shepton is very excited to have the Wild Bunch—Sean Villanueva, Olivier Favresse, Ben Ditto and I—back on board the Dodo’s Delight for some jamming and big walls. Already four years have passed since our last expedition in Greenland with captain Bob. This…
“Climb it for me!” he yelled as I walked out of the hospital room. I gladly would if I could, I thought to myself, but this one might just be too hard. I can’t make any promises. A few days earlier, after a nice enjoyable day of climbing, we were heading back to my friend…
Iceland is a land of extremes – stark beauty within a harsh, unforgiving landscape and an equally daunting climate. Volcanoes are still erupting, earthquakes are nearly constant, yet the geothermal water provides Iceland with most of its energy needs and natural hot springs ease the cold of winter. Eleven percent of the country is covered…
“Hueco Tanks is the best bouldering in the world,” someone boldly posted on the encyclopedic climbing resource MountainProject.com. The best? Pretty strong words. I’ve been to a lot of famous climbing areas in the world and it was going to take more than a hyperbolic online endorsement to change my reservations (not the kind you…
“Holy guacamole,” I mumbled to myself. “There are a lot of ties in this room.” Lots of exquisite dresses, too. I was at the recent American Alpine Club Annual Benefit Dinner, which begs the question of place: What was my broke ass doing in a VIP seat, wearing a borrowed bow tie, at a fancy…
After years of discussion, the Alpine Association of Slovenia (formerly Slovenian Alpine Club) established a program for young motivated alpinists in order to help them get the experience needed for achieving the goals they dream about. Mentoring seven different characters with various goals and ambitions (and our soaring egos), is not an easy task. We…
October, 2013: Yes! We (Evrard, Sean, Stéphane and I) have hit civilization and made it back from the Chinese mountains. Thank God, food tastes so good now. And what a treat it is to be able to take hot showers whenever. Sorry for the lack of news. Again, all sat phone credits had to be…
“See you down there, f***er!” writes Ole Lied – a gigantic, hard-drinking, Norwegian party animal. He dresses in dark Scandinavian leather, stuffs his mouth with snus (little tea-bags of chewing tobacco, quite popular in northern Europe), and every now and then works himself into a berserker rage, attacking big, steep mountains, and returning home with…
2004 My partner shouted at the top of his lungs, causing me to jolt to attention and look down to him and our hanging camp. We were high on El Capitan’s Shield route, and I watched helplessly as a yellow dry bag containing our garbage from the past five days – including twenty-four crushed aluminum…
I dreamed of climbing in Greenland for a decade. This summer I finally visited the southernmost reaches of that country and climbed in the Torssukatak Fjord with photographer John Dickey, Quinn Brett, and Prairie Kearney. Team Glitterbomb put up three first ascents: “Morning Luxury” (5.11-, 1400ft) on The Breakfast Spire, “Plenty for Everyone” (5.10+/11-, 1800ft)…
I am a climber, and at the risk of offending the enthusiasts of other outdoor pursuits, I’d argue that climbing is among the dirtiest, in the literal sense. Routes and problems are conceived and sent above cleared patches of dirt, moves grunted out through gritty clouds of chalk dust. Meals or snacks, if there are…
When a dream is achieved a new level of consciousness can be entered. During a road trip last year, full of California dreaming, I achieved two personal dreams: climbing El Capitan in Yosemite, and becoming an underwear model for Patagonia. Both dreams were mere sparks at first. Any climber that sees El Capitan considers climbing…
I screamed at the granite wall. The sound bounced off Yosemite’s Fifi Buttress and drowned into the roar of Bridalveil Falls. I lowered to the belay, where Katie stood at a small stance. I was six inches from a free ascent. It felt like six miles. I’d cleaned the route. Pulled out old gear. Placed…
My ADD extends beyond the fact that I can’t finish vacuuming a room before checking my email, watering a plant or making fried rice from leftovers. It’s present in my climbing endeavors as well. But I do recognize what it is about, the different disciplines I appreciate most. My favorite thing about trad climbing: the…
I have known Rich Wheater (AKA the Beater) and Senja Palonen (AKA the Spoodle) since my very first summer of rock climbing in Squamish. We were introduced by a mutual friend one morning at Starbucks (back then everyone hung out there to find a climbing partner in the morning) and they invited me to join…
I used to dread the summers on the North Shore of O’ahu, Hawai’i. Famous for its winter surf, surfers from all over the world come to see what they are made of during a certain time of year. In the summertime, the waves go away and the crowds dissipate. My friends and I dreaded the…
Take a moment and imagine yourself in Yosemite. You are climbing up a steep rock face, above the trees, with Half Dome behind you, but you do not have the security of a rope that can pull you taut from above if you get tired or slip. Instead, you are lead climbing. Somewhere down below…
All photos courtesy of Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll If you are chained to a wall in a dark dungeon famished rats will slowly nibble at your flesh. You can kick, scream and quiver all you want but the rats will sluggishly keep nipping away until they reach your heart and your body goes lifeless. Then they…
Mark Sensenbach perches on a stool, back slightly hunched, eyes down, brows narrowed in concentration. His hands, toughened by mountains and work, maneuver the rubber sole of a climbing shoe against a sanding wheel. His movements made smooth by practice, Mark runs the shoe back and forth, rotates and repeats. He draws it away from…
Any wall climber will see that something is missing in that photo, trail line. The leader trails a small line so they can pull up a haul line to haul the bag. Right where the photo was taken, at the lip of the roof, Dgriff realized that he’d forgotten the trail line. “You have to…
“Some declared it the climb of the century. But did anyone repeat GIV to confirm our illusion of it? Besides, does it make sense to declare a poem the poem of the century? Can you choose a woman of the century?” – Voytek Kurtyka writing about the Shining Wall on Gasherbrum IV There are no…
June 11, 1938–April 21, 2013 By Cameron M. Burns One of the greatest American climbers of the late 1950s and ’60s, Layton Herman Kor, died April 21 after a long battle with kidney problems and cancer. The son of a Dutch mason (Jacob Kor) who came to the U.S. in 1897 from the Oldambt area…
Here is a quick blog post that doesn’t include any cool climbing stories or photos, and will only appeal to gear nerds, like myself. I want to take a minute to rave about two new Patagonia products, the updated M10 Jacket and the new Knifeblade Pants. No one at Patagonia has asked me to make…
Guidebooks come in all forms. The kind that I like the most are more than mere guidebooks; they have bits of history, interesting information and stunning photos. They inspire me. By necessity, they can only be written by a true expert. They don’t hold my hand, but they have the essential info, the things you…
My good friend Dylan Johnson has managed to briefly escape his responsibilities as a new father and self-employed architect to come down to El Chalten for some alpine adventure. Since he is only here for a whopping two weeks, and since he arrived exactly at the end of the enormous, two-week weather window, he was…
My girlfriend, Sarah Hart, is joining me for some of this season in Chalten, and arrived on the same day that Jon took off. We had a week of bouldering in relatively stormy weather, and then yet another weather window descended upon Chalten – this time an extended one. Although Sarah’s only two previous ascents…
I came here with one goal. A New Year’s goal, despite my avowed no-resolution resolution of a year ago: Don’t un-send the Torre. My prolific spray about the single climb I’d done in Patagonia, a link-up on Cerro Torre with Colin Haley in 2007, might lend the illusion that I’ve climbed a lot here. Nope.…
Foreword By Fred Beckey We live on an astounding planet, punctuated by mountains on every continent. The mere presence of mountain ranges has long drawn the human imagination as an invisible force. Some say mountains have a “psychic gravity” enticing us into their grip. There is a magic among great peaks as a location of…
“Don’t throw that away” she said, “we can reuse it”. A small pot of dish water was clutched in my hand, as murky as the amazon, “Put it in here instead, we don’t have much left.” She was right, we didn’t. It was cold outside, a late November evening in Bishop, California and we had…
This may sound weird, but I love packing. When essentials are limited to two 50-pound bags – what a van can carry – a 40-liter backpack, or even just a carry-on, the things you think you need to take versus the things you actually do take is a fun game for me. My most recent…
Shadows crept across the pavement, clouds reflected stars and headlamps crawled slowly up the road, bicycles under a full moon at 12,000 feet. A month later – just last week, in fact – I parked my beater Honda and stood on the sidewalk outside of Supercuts, on my way home from Patagonia meetings in Ventura,…
I couldn’t help but laugh. Seeing Tommy Caldwell in a mohawk, a pair of bright green short shorts, and a hot pink sleeveless t-shirt was too much to take. In a way, he reminded me of Kelly Cordes, but I can’t put my finger on why. Anyhow, that’s another story, and this one is all…
The granite burned my forehead. I slumped my body further onto the wall, hoping it would support me. I cried. For the past two hours I seared my finger tips on the hot rock of the Boulder Problem, a twenty-foot section of unforgiving crimps that guarded my path to free climbing El Capitan’s Freerider. I’d…
Any climbing trip starts with a conversation. Kate and mine went something like this. Kate: “What’s your fall look like?” Majka: “October’s wide open.” Both of us: “Want to go somewhere good?” We considered Norway but were scared off by the rain; Germany was a strong contender but neither of us wanted to drink that…
“You’re going sport climbing at Antalya?” That was the question nearly everyone asked me when I told them that Brittany and I were headed to Turkey for a three-week climbing trip. A fair assumption – you gotta dig into a third or fourth level of research before you read about any sort of climbing in…
Middle Cathedral: the ugly stepbrother of El Capitan that sits just across the valley, shoulders slumped, hiding his dark north-facing flanks that almost never see sun. The monolith hosts many seldom-climbed classics: Stoner’s Highway, the Direct North Buttress or DMB (more commonly known as the “do not bother”), Quicksilver and Mother Earth, to name a…
![Pull Half Dome – A Paraplegic Climbing Attempt [Updated with video]](https://www.patagonia.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/6a00d8341d07fd53ef017c324e6642970b-768x533.jpg.webp)
Words by Timmy O’Neill, Photos by Justin Bastien Nothing imagined, nothing created, nothing ventured, nothing gained. These thoughts come to mind as I am painstakingly carrying my brother Sean, a t-12 paraplegic, uphill through jagged talus and clawing bushes. It is dark, I am sweating profusely and the rescue coil of rope that supports Sean’s…
Words by The Phreenix, (5.11, 800m, Phoenix Wall on Mount Dracula, Vampire Peaks, Ragged Range, Northwest Territories, Canada, North America, Planet Earth) A year and half ago, I sat at a dive bar in Kansas with Pat Goodman. Bob Seger jammed some "Old Time Rock & Roll" on a bejeweled jukebox in the background. Halfway…
Perhaps an overly dramatic title. After all, it’s just climbing, and it’s supposed to be fun. That’s the cliché, anyway. Though often a disingenuous one. Then again, part of what we love about climbing is the escape from the daily b.s. of today’s world, the immersion into a place where we can move freely in…
The incredible northern aspect of Latok I (~7200 meters) needs no introduction as one of the world’s greatest unclimbed mountain escarpments. Since the historic first attempt by an American team in 1978 (still holders of the current highpoint), the peak has seen more then 30 unsuccessful expeditions. Although it has been climbed once from the…
I am loath to admit it, but Colin Haley was right. He’s been singing the praises of the Pacific Northwest in summertime, proclaiming it better than my beloved ‘Rado. At last, I humbly concede (although they pay for it the rest of the year, with continual grayness and rain). I’m wrapping up a trip to Squamish, and…
Corsica is a mountainous French island in the Mediterranean, and according the The Lonely Planet Guide, “it’s hard to find a better combination of nature, culture and pleasure”. With a description like that, it’s pretty hard not to want to make a trip there! But as I was planning my annual spring Euro climbing vacation,…
I gotta dig down, I gotta go monk. Ever seen Zoolander? Of course you have. Me, too – about a hundred times. It’s a hilarious spoof on the world of male modeling, and there’s that classic scene of the “walk-off” challenge when, between rounds, Hansel digs deep and pulls out what’s needed to win the…
The good times are moving fast these days, zipping by as we fly through space on this big ball of rock. As a writer it is my job to record, to pause, to go back in time, if only slightly, and squeeze the juice out of divine moments, and leave something special for those that…
Dude at curbside didn’t budge from his chair. Gave me a bored look. “Can you take my bags?” I asked. He sighed. “How much they weigh?” “‘Bout 65 pounds each. I already checked ’em in online.” “Still gotta take ’em inside,” he said, barely moving. “They’re too heavy.” “You sure? Because I’m allowed three 70-pound…
Dammit Hammershark, I mumbled as CFS and I began rapping from Mammoth Terrace – 10 pitches up El Cap – to the ground, in the dark. Someone had forgotten our food bag. Granted, Hammershark had nothing to do with it, but he was outvoted. (We had to blame someone.) CFS and I were the last…
You’ve no doubt seen Tyler Stableford’s name many times in the Patagonia catalog – his iconic photos have graced the pages for years. Today, we’re excited to share Tyler’s new video project featuring Patagonia ambassador Steve House. Enjoy the film and a three-part behind-the-scenes series after the jump. We are excited to premiere our new…
