Climbing Culture

Doug Tompkins opens the door to a South American summer evening. At seventy-one—stooped and shuffling, a button-down shirt tucked into…

In my body, I’m a climber; in my imagination, I’m a rapper. The poets of my generation are MCs—embodiments of…

It’s your mom’s minivan pimped out And only seats two Because if it wasn’t hard enough to live in a…

“There were no girls when I started climbing [in England],” Alan said, in a tone more serious than joking. I’d…

The fog rolled in surreptitiously, encroaching every visible surface. It wasn’t just there one day when I woke up, the…

Last year around this time I wrote a short post called “Keep The Zine Alive”. We had lost a couple…

Note: this piece is published in Volume 17, and it is an excerpt from his book, The Desert. Both are…

The expenditure of energy on a trip of this sort is massive and one only has so much of this…

“If this climb doesn’t blow you away, nothing will,” James ventured as he hit the brakes. “I still can’t believe…

Note from the editor of the Valley of Giants book, Lauren DeLaunay Miller: A book about the women of Yosemite…

In Memory of Towyn Williams (1926 – 2016) I associate much of my childhood with a little white farmhouse in…

At some point in my early to midtwenties, I came to the conclusion that life is not about rock climbing.…

Fifteen meters up Rutabaga, a moderate 5.9 splitter at the base of Squamish, BC’s Stawamus Chief, stretches a traverse between…

“Keep dreamin’, stay hungry, and remember that there is no finish line.” This quote by Todd Skinner in the…

Is climbing as innate as sharing, copulating, greed, or even walking? Many evolutionary biologists would offer that the essence of…