Climbing has been in a weird place over the past decade as the ultimate, objective limits of sheer difficulty have become less and less salient to top climbers, replaced instead by other ways of achieving status and recognition, most of it via social media. Sure, the sport has inched forward a letter grade or so over that time. We’ve now got at least two 5.15d contenders, and a handful of V17 boulders. But given the population-level influx of new talent, the ubiquity of climbing gyms, the advances in training, the preponderance of coaches, the prevalence of youth teams with the Olympics to aspire toward, the quantity and proximity of hard routes that no longer require an international flight to attempt, and so on, it does seem like these numbers could be higher (says the fat loser typing this article who’ll never climb the warmups of the demigods achieving these grades.)
It’s possible we’ve reached the limits of human potential, that the curve has flattened out due to the physiological limits of what human fingers can grab. Or perhaps people just grew tired of seeking out those limits because pushing the frontier requires a lot of hard work and exploration, and after all, why bother? You can hack together a decent living as a climbing influencer or content creator by making consistently engaging Reels showing yourself looking hot and fit in the gym with a cool soundtrack, or dancing in cam skirts at the Creek, or bat-hanging from a jug with a glam filter on blast. This is all easier and probably more fun than trying to find the next hardest route in the world.
So much of the social-media-born discourse about and around climbing, however, feels as if it has grown old and thin. People are tired of fighting online, tired of turning over every stone at every crag to find new examples of ways to be virtuously aggrieved before their captive online audiences. Those audiences are growing bored with it, too. Bored by listening to fit, attractive, well-off people who seem to never have jobs complain that climbing is hard for reasons beyond the actual difficulty of the rock-climbing routes. The Atlantic says “Instagram is Over.” The New York Times highlights “luddite teens” who are returning to flip phones and reading hard copies of books. I see folks like Shawn Raboutou—who put up one of the hardest and coolest boulder problems in the world last year and, like a psychopath, just said nothing about it on Instagram—at the forefront of a new vibe in climbing content.
Climbing culture has become the product of its media, rather than the other way around. This led to the death of traditional climbing publications, among other conspicuous derangements of our discourse. But given that Instagram is on the precipice of feeling old and cringe, I see a vibe shift coming.
How will climbing change and what is next? Making predictions at this time of year is standard ritual for terminally online losers such as myself, but these projections go beyond mere guesswork. It’s also a reflection of my own prejudices and delusions of grandeur. Tread lightly with this cosmic acumen, folks, and have a great new year.
Gym boulders will be hard again…
Not like fake hard, with parkour tricks and fancy footwork across thousands of dollars of volumes. Route setters will begin setting problems that are actually hard again. This means screwing nothing but bad holds into the wall, and making them far enough apart from each other as to be challenging. Unbullshitable strength will once again be esteemed by the righteous, while parkour problems and kneebar routes will be appropriately scoffed at by the new elite as mere party tricks of the weak and doomed. If you’re doing it right, the problems should really, really hurt to climb. Those who won’t or can’t adapt to these new standards will be laughed out of the gyms and sent to wallow with all the other 5.13d-climbing weaklings at Rifle and Jailhouse. Let’s see a World Cup final that’s just a ladder of 4mm edges and alabaster slopers. Fuck technique in 2023. Who’s the strongest?
From crag babies to crag dolls
Climbing has enjoyed something of a baby boom over the last year, as many top climbers have decided to have kids. This is an interesting turn in the culture, an embrace of something that was once either outright stigmatized or just eschewed because it was incompatible with the highest goal of being a perpetual dirtbag for life. It’s interesting that climbing has gone trad—and I’m not talking about ground-up, no bolts, onsight. Monogamy and kids have come full circle, and now they are even seen as kind of alt and cool, so long as your kids aren’t normal boring kids, of course, but kids who grow up “wild” and get to do cool shit, like “climb” El Cap. Being able to send hard with the family in tow is the new ultimate status signifier—a sign that you can have it all.
Given that not everyone can have it all, however, nor may even want to, I predict this cultural shift taking a strange turn and colliding headlong into another alt community: Reborn dolls. Reborn dolls are hyper-realistic dolls that look and feel like real babies. There’s a whole community of people online who care for their dolls as if they are real, changing them, napping them, walking them in strollers, feeding them, etc. Here’s Kelli Maple, with her 2 million YouTube subscribers, showing what it means to be a reborn doll mom:
Remember when Jason Kehl used to bring his creepy crypto-dolls to the crags and we all laughed? This is going to seem extraordinarily prescient in 2023 as climbers, who don’t actually want to go through the hassle of having a real baby, bring reborn dolls to the crags. Be prepared to see climbers posting about sending 5.13 just one month after Poppy, their doll, arrived (in the mail). Steel yourselves to wait in line for your project because Poppy really wants to do a rope swing off the anchor. Get ready to hear complaints about not sending, because Poppy was up all night.
Shit is going to get weird out there.
Someone will send their hardest route in Ten Sleep this summer
Global warming charges ahead despite of the fact that so many outdoor influencers have “used their platforms” to “raise awareness” that “we” should be “doing more,” they say, baffled and despondent over our moral failings, as they hit Premier 1K status at 35K feet above the melting glaciers of Greenland for the fifth time that year. Because conscious-raising via social platforms can only do so much (i.e., nothing), it’s safe to predict that this summer will be as hot if not hotter than any summer ever before.
Despite the rise in temps and corresponding conditions that are unfavorable to climbing performance, it’s an even safer bet to predict that someone, from somewhere, will nevertheless send their hardest-ever route in Ten Sleep this summer.
Remember, drawing any inferences about why people with limited outdoor experience tend to thrive in Ten Sleep in the hot summer is fraught with gate keeping, gaslighting, and bigotry. Do not make this mistake. Do not attribute these curious successes to soft ratings or beta that’s as straightforward as a Kansas highway. Only hatemongers would do that. These are every day climbing miracles to behold, so just be very happy that they happen.
Whatever you do, do not downgrade.
Boot Flake will fall off
It’s bound to happen sometime.
Spot on! We could maybe look to surfing, which went through all this a couple decades ago.