Climbing is a game of risk and luck. Preparation and experience will mitigate a large portion of that great unknown, but there will always be elements to the game that are out of our control. I suppose that that’s precisely what makes any game worth playing. But the...
Andrew Bisharat
Andrew Bisharat is a writer and climber based in western Colorado. He is the publisher of Evening Sends and the co-host of The RunOut podcast.
Fresh Goods: Books Worth Reading
I've been devouring books lately, everything from fiction, to narrative non-fiction, to self-help to interviews with writers. But I thought I'd plug these three recent releases, because I've enjoyed them all. Interestingly enough, these books all directly, or...
Striven: The Cristian Brenna interview
Cristian Brenna, one of the most veteran World Cup climbers always placed in the top 10, but never achieved his goal of winning overall.
Dura Dura Done
What a tremendous couple of days for sport climbing. Yesterday Chris Sharma sent the hardest route at Santa Linya, with his FA of Stoking the Fire (5.15b). Today, 20-year-old Adam Ondra got the hard-won FA of Dura Dura (5.15c) at Oliana—a route that we can pretty much...
How to Climb 5.14 (The Simple Way)
Climbing 5.14 is a lot easier than you think—unless you already climb 5.14, in which case you know that that statement is complete, utter bullshit. But that doesn’t mean that the average climber who is desperate to tick the benchmark grade won’t do something as stupid as click on a blog post titled “How To Climb 5.14” and actually believe that therein lies revelatory information that will actually, magically, fast-forward him toward what was once the pinnacle of climbing difficulty in 1985. Today, there are more 5.14’s than there are whack emcees. And every day, more of them are put up. Statistically, your odds of climbing 5.14 actually increase every day even if you do nothing at all. But this isn’t what we want to hear. We want to be proactive. We’re Americans, dammit! You think Manifest Destiny was some kind of abstract Zen Koan? Hell no. Roll up your […]
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China Rising
It was on the last night, at a packed outdoor restaurant beside a car-choked road, that Dave Graham taught me the most important lesson I learned during my entire two-week experience at the 2011 Petzl RocTrip China. “You can only say ‘broccoli’ so many times before...
Point of No Return
From the beginning I wanted to write about climbing. Climbing was such a powerful experience when I got into it and was doing even the most fundamental things, like topping out a boulder problem, or pushing through the nervous, excited fear of my first trad leads,...
Does Hard Climbing Matter?
I spent the last couple of weeks climbing in Spain with the likes of Chris Sharma, Daila Ojeda, Joe Kinder, Colette McInerny, Jen Vennon, and a thousand 5.14-climbing Spaniards. Chris has a few new projects that he’s psyched about. One is just to the right of the now...
Who’s Husslin’ Harder?
Has anyone else noticed this little back-n-forth conversation we, as climbers, like to have with each other? You may recognize it from your visits to any crag anywhere. It’s mindless, everyday human chitchat; only it’s masquerading as a vehicle for delivering all our...
How Not To Climb 5.12
Gradeism is a recently identified disease afflicting the modern climber. Experts say gradeism causes shocking behavior in climbers such as “chasing grades” in order to “get better.” Regular people call this wanting to make progress. Climbers call it wrong. Until now....
Learning Patience And Sending
Brooklyn was doing great, considering that she had just had surgery the day before. As for me? Not so much. When Brooklyn came home from being spayed, our befuddled 80-pound, 7-month-old puppy wobbled, whined and circled the living room in a post-anesthetic haze. But...
The Joy of Taking Your Gear For A Walk
Back when I was a grommet, studying at a university in Boston, I used to spend the weekends up in New Hampshire climbing things well over my head. Sport climbing and bouldering were for hangover days; otherwise, I’d be keen on the long trad stuff. The longest and...