My first impression of Scarpa’s redesigned Vapor V was how comfortable they were out of the box. I sized mine tight for performance, yet these asymmetric, slightly down-turned shoes were flexible enough to walk in and remained comfortable for long sessions on my garage bouldering wall. Reviewed by Drew Thayer, Senior Contributor Retail: $158.95 This…
Love them or hate them, fixed draws are becoming more and more of a staple in the sport climbing world. They make things more convenient, saving a lot of time when cleaning overhanging and traversing routes, but they also create potential problems: the worst of those creating sharp, dangerous grooves in the biner. There have…
Amongst the hot new climbing gear released this season, something I’m most excited about is the newest ultra-light triple-rated rope, Beal’s 8.5 mm Opera. Rated for use as a twin, double, or single rope, the Opera not only surpasses the 8.6 mm Edelrid Corbie in weight by 3 grams per meter, but also earns a…
I awoke in the Indian Creek desert to the sound of a crying baby. I tossed and turned over in the back of my Subaru – it’s always a good morning when I wake up in the back of my car – and sat there basking in a new sort of nostalgia. The tribe is…
My life is now unmistakably entwined in the rhythms of grad school; work ebbs and flows, and when it flows it’s high tide. The work is engaging, so much so that boredom never really happens anymore…but of course the flip-side of that coin is the lack of quiet spaces. by Drew Thayer, Senior Correspondent In…
“The world has enough for man’s need, but not enough for man’s greed.” Gandhi Where do we look for hope, for America, the planet, for the human race? The dirtbags. They usually descend from the middle class, where they had enough, materially speaking, that their bodies could be content, but not their souls. Their souls…
At the Climbing Zine we get lots of gear to test, sometimes too much to really wear something for longer than a few weeks. The Alpha Comp was different. I kept coming back to it in my personal climbing, from high alpine routes to ski decents and local cragging. At the six month mark I realized…
I knew this whole Dawn Wall climb was big when President Obama started tweeting about it. In case you’ve been living under a rock (or on one), Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson recently completed the world’s most difficult rock climb, the Dawn Wall on the 3,000-foot monolith, El Capitan in Yosemite. by Luke Mehall, publisher of…