Climbing Culture

It’s the same story the crow told me It’s the only one he knows Like the morning sun you’ll come…

Milton had overgrowth knots, the greasy kind, matting his beard to his wooly secondhand pullover, which sagged without shape over…

I love being challenged by the nature that has been sculpting the rock faces of our planet for many centuries.…

by Lucas Roman. This story is published in Volume 18. Banner photo by Hobo Greg Brad Gobright is pure of…

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goerte I…

I hold and turn my helmet like a classroom globe, dragging my fingers over each mark, each sign of wear.…

Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a…

Way back when, which seems like not so long ago, your guidebooks tended to be a few pages of the…

“There’s someone on that off-width you wanted to do.” I pause—midstride—and look up to see someone hanging out halfway…

Yeah, we are star matter from the big bang And that love ain’t far behind you Love ain’t…

In the rich caravan of climbers whom we meet at the crags, people come and go. Some, like the flowing…

The teenage Federale slings his machine gun over his shoulder and bends toward my bag. Cocaine? he asks. Marijuana? I…

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…