Gripped: The Climbing Magazine December 2023/January 2024 Vol. 25 Issue 6

The world of climbing had a big year, with historic first ascents, hard repeats, tragic deaths and a rise in insanely strong climbers. This was the year that hard trad climbing made a comeback. All around the world, climbers pushed the limits of trad climbing, from Pete Whittaker’s new 5.14+ 100-metre crack in Norway to James Pearson’s new 5.14+ gear route El Bon Voyage, to Connor Herson absolutely conquering hard trad in North America, top climbers finally took trad climbing to the next level. It seems that if 10 climbers push hard trad, then 100 elevate their sport climbing games because there were so many 5.15 ascents this year that it was hard to keep track. From Chris Sharma climbing a new 5.15c with Sleeping Lion to Jakob Schubert making…

Arc’teryx Horium Hoody $600 A classic Arc’teryx jacket that’s been revised for this winter. Nice and warm, but you won’t overheat. It’s a step up from the Atom in terms of loftiness. The double zipper allows you to zip up from the bottom while belaying. A perfect layer for every ice climber. Camp Photon Wire $11 This is one of the best full-size wire gates on the market. It’s light, affordable and is easy to clip—even with gloves on. The 30-gram weight makes it ideal for having on your ice climbing rack. Clip two of them together on a few slings and you have a great rack of extendable draws. Black Diamond Belay Parka $350 The newest belay jacket from BD doesn’t disappoint. From single-pitch cragging in sub-zero temps to…

In October, American alpinists Matt Cornell, Alan Rousseau and Jackson Marvell spent nearly a week making the first ascent of Round Trip Ticket, a 2,700-metre M7 AI5+ A0 on the north face of Jannu in alpine-style. It’s arguably one of the finest new alpine routes to be established in the Himalaya in a generation. The three climbers had already accomplished some of the most audacious first ascents in remote ranges of the past decade, but this climb is in a league of its own. We touched based with Rousseau shortly after their ascent. What was the technical crux? There are many pitches that may have been the crux. From 7,000–7,500 metres was pretty much all vertical drytooling. Fortunately, we all had enough to scrape by, and we were protected well…

No-hangs are one of the newer methods of training your fingers. This type of finger training comes in two forms. The first is an over-the-head no-hang, where the climber pulls down on the edge of a hangboard. The second involves lifting a weight off the floor. While the hangboard is an incredible training tool, it has inconsistencies. The fluctuating strength of the torso and arms provide different distributions of weight to the fingers between attempts. Although perfect form manages against this problem, true consistency is impossible to replicate. A no-hang removes these points of inconsistency by loading measured weight throughout the hand. Instead of inconsistent weight distribution between different shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers, the only place for inconsistent loading between sets exists in the fingers themselves. Tracking consistency is…

Ethan Salvo, 21, represents a new generation of boulderers in Canada. Originally from Markham, Ont., Salvo started climbing shortly before his 16th birthday, and the sport quickly became an obsession. Rising through the bouldering grades at breakneck speed, he cleaned out many of Niagara Glen’s most difficult problems and established a few hard lines of his own. He moved to Squamish in spring 2022, and since then he’s repeated and opened some of the proudest lines in town. Salvo’s climbing story as a Squamish local begins with Deadlift V14. First climbed by Squamish legend Tim Doyle in 2020, Deadlift works its way up the very steep southwest corner of the massive Octagon boulder in the forest below the Grand Wall. The line was a major goal for Salvo when he…

The first major ice route climbed in Yosemite Valley was Sentinel Falls. Kevin Worrall, Jim Orey and Mark Chapman made the first ascent of the Upper Yosemite Falls in December 1974. The full climb has reportedly only been climbed once, by Walt Shipley and Kevin Fosburg. “I was clad in corduroy bell-bottom jeans with no gaiters,” said Chapman about their first ascent, which took them three days. “We post-holed east under Sentinel Dome and then headed for the Four Mile trail, which took us to the Valley, sunshine, and food. Shortly thereafter Jim took leave of us and Kevin and I turned our sights to the obvious encore—the Widow’s Tears.” Chapman and Worral would go on to make the first ascent of the seven-pitch Widow’s Tears WI5 in 1975. It’s…