Climbing.

OpeningUp.

Climbing is the discipline of moving over rock, ice, or built holds against gravity, with or without protection, alone or roped. The disciplines have separated; the underlying motion has not.

For most of human history, climbing mountains was something one did because the mountain was in the way. The Romantic-era invention of climbing for its own sake — the conviction that a peak is worth ascending because it is there, in Mallory's much-quoted formulation — is roughly as old as the steam engine. The technical, ethical, and equipment-related arguments that followed have produced a discipline that splits into mountaineering, alpinism, rock climbing, sport climbing, bouldering, free soloing, and competition climbing. The threads cross.

This deck moves through that history: from Saussure's prize for Mont Blanc through Yosemite's golden age, the eight-thousanders, the free-solo turn, and the Olympic climbing that began in Tokyo in 2021.

Chapter IBefore alpinism.

Mountains were climbed long before they were climbed for sport. The 5,300-year-old preserved corpse known as Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, demonstrates that humans were operating above 3,000 metres in the late Neolithic. The Inca built shrines on twenty Andean peaks above 5,000 metres; the 6,739 m summit of Llullaillaco contained the frozen mummies of three sacrificed children when archaeologists reached it in 1999.

The medieval European tradition was different. Mountains in Christian Europe were treated as obstacles, frontiers, or demonic; deliberate ascents were rare and treated as eccentric. Petrarch's 1336 climb of Mont Ventoux — described in a letter to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro — is sometimes called the first recreational ascent, but the framing is anachronistic. Petrarch climbed for the view; he did not invent a sport.

The shift comes in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment-era valuation of nature, the Romantic interest in the sublime, and a Genevan natural philosopher's prize.

Chapter IIMont Blanc, 1786.

In 1760, the Swiss naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure offered a cash reward to whoever could find a route to the summit of Mont Blanc (4,808 m), the highest peak in the Alps. The prize sat unclaimed for twenty-six years.

On August 8, 1786, two Chamonix locals — Jacques Balmat, a crystal hunter, and Michel Paccard, a doctor — reached the summit. They had no rope, no ice axes (Balmat carried a long alpenstock; Paccard a barometer for science), and no real precedent. The descent was hard; both men suffered snow blindness.

The 1786 ascent is the conventional birthdate of modern alpinism. Saussure himself summited the following year, 1787, with a party of guides. Within fifty years, a Genevan-British-French network of alpine clubs, summer guides, and printed route descriptions had produced the modern infrastructure of mountaineering: certified guides, hut-to-hut routes, written logbooks, and an emerging ethic of how the ascent should be done.

Chapter IIIWhymper, 1865.

The decade from 1854 — Sir Alfred Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn, often cited as the start of the Golden Age of Alpinism — to 1865 saw the first ascents of nearly every major Alpine peak: the Eiger (1858), Monte Rosa (1855), the Aletschhorn (1859), the Weisshorn (1861), the Grandes Jorasses (1865). The British-led Alpine Club (founded 1857) was the first such organisation in the world.

The most famous ascent of the period — Edward Whymper's 1865 first ascent of the Matterhorn (4,478 m) — was also its disaster. On July 14, 1865, Whymper and six companions reached the summit. On the descent, the rope between them broke (or was cut, in a contested account); four men fell to their deaths. The accident, debated for years afterwards in coroner's inquests and the press, became the founding tragedy of European mountaineering.

Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871) is the period's enduring memoir. The Matterhorn deaths produced the first sustained public discussion of mountaineering risk, a discussion that has not ended.

Chapter IVMallory and Everest.

The first three British Mount Everest expeditions — 1921 (reconnaissance), 1922 (the first attempt, with George Finch reaching 8,326 m), and 1924 — brought the world's highest mountain into the popular imagination. The 1924 expedition included George Mallory, an English schoolmaster and the most famous climber of his generation.

On June 8, 1924, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine set off from Camp VI on the North Ridge for a summit attempt. They were last sighted by Noel Odell at approximately 12:50 p.m., described as "going strong for the top." They never returned.

Mallory's body was found in 1999 by Conrad Anker's expedition, lying preserved on the North Face at 8,160 m. Irvine's body has never been found, but in 2024 a foot — almost certainly Irvine's — was discovered on the Central Rongbuk Glacier. The Vest Pocket Kodak camera that might settle whether the pair reached the summit before falling has not been recovered. The question of whether Mallory was the first to summit Everest is, ninety-nine years on, unresolved.

Chapter V1953.

The 1953 British Everest Expedition, led by John Hunt, succeeded where eight previous attempts had failed. On May 29, 1953, the New Zealand beekeeper Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest at approximately 11:30 a.m. The news reached London on June 2, the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.

Hillary, knighted within weeks, would go on to lead the New Zealand contribution to Vivian Fuchs's 1958 Antarctic crossing and to spend the rest of his life on Sherpa-aid projects — schools, hospitals, airstrips — through the Himalayan Trust. Tenzing, by then forty years old and on his seventh Everest expedition, became the first non-Western climber to be internationally famous. Tenzing's autobiography Tiger of the Snows (1955) and Hillary's High Adventure (1955) are the founding documents of the popular Everest literature.

The 1953 ascent is the climbing event that most non-climbers can name. Its success closed one era of Himalayan exploration and opened another: the question of how the world's highest mountains should be climbed.

Chapter VIThe eight-thousanders.

The fourteen mountains above 8,000 metres — all of them in the Himalaya and Karakoram — were summited for the first time over the seventeen years from 1950 to 1964. Annapurna (1950, French expedition led by Maurice Herzog), Everest (1953), Nanga Parbat (1953, Hermann Buhl solo), K2 (1954, Italian expedition), Cho Oyu (1954), Makalu (1955), Kangchenjunga (1955), Manaslu (1956), Lhotse (1956), Gasherbrum II (1956), Broad Peak (1957), Gasherbrum I (1958), Dhaulagiri (1960), Shishapangma (1964). Cold War politics shaped the order — the French got Annapurna, the British got Everest, the Italians got K2, the Chinese got Shishapangma.

The first person to summit all fourteen was Reinhold Messner in 1986. The first to do so without supplemental oxygen was also Messner. The first woman was the South Korean Oh Eun-sun in 2010, though her Kangchenjunga summit is disputed; the first uncontested woman was the Spaniard Edurne Pasaban, days later in 2010.

The 2023 phenomenon of Nepali climber Nirmal Purja completing all fourteen eight-thousanders in six months and six days reset the bar for speed-ascent ambition.

Chapter VIIThe savage mountain.

K2 (8,611 m), the world's second-highest mountain, has the highest fatality rate of any of the fourteen eight-thousanders — approximately one death for every four successful summits, against Everest's roughly one in fifty. Its technical difficulty (no easy route exists), its weather (unpredictable Karakoram storms), and its altitude (the Death Zone occupies the entire upper third of the mountain) combine to make it the most dangerous of the giants.

The 1986 K2 disaster — thirteen climbers died over a single summer season — was a watershed in mountaineering's relationship with risk. The 2008 K2 disaster, in which eleven climbers died on a single August night when an avalanche on the Bottleneck couloir cut the fixed ropes, was the second-deadliest single day in eight-thousander history.

The first winter ascent of K2 — long the holy grail of alpinism — was made on January 16, 2021, by an all-Nepali team led by Nirmal Purja and including Gelje Sherpa, Mingma G, Mingma David Sherpa, Mingma Tenzi Sherpa, Pem Chhiri Sherpa, Dawa Temba Sherpa, Sona Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, and Dawa Tenjin Sherpa. They sang the Nepali national anthem at the summit. The achievement, much-celebrated in Kathmandu, was a corrective to a decade of Western-dominated narrative.

Chapter VIIIMessner.

Reinhold Messner (b. 1944 in South Tyrol) is the most consequential mountaineer of the twentieth century. His 1970 ascent of Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face — the world's largest mountain wall — with his brother Günther was tragic; Günther died on the descent in circumstances Messner has been litigating in books for fifty years.

Messner's 1978 Everest ascent without supplemental oxygen, with Peter Habeler, established that the world's highest peak could be climbed by self-sufficient alpinists. His 1980 solo Everest ascent — alone, without oxygen, by a new route up the North Face — remains arguably the single greatest mountaineering achievement in history. His 1986 completion of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks (the first person to do so) was eight years ahead of any other claimant.

Messner's polemics — against the Himalayan oxygen-and-fixed-rope industrial expedition style; against the commercial Everest operators of the 1990s; against the redefinition of "first ascents" by speed records — have shaped public understanding of what mountaineering ought to be. He served a term as a member of the European Parliament (1999–2004), runs the Messner Mountain Museum complex in South Tyrol, and at eighty continues to write.

Chapter IXThe Yosemite revolution.

Big-wall rock climbing, as a discipline distinct from mountaineering, was largely invented in Yosemite Valley between 1958 and 1975. The November 1958 first ascent of The Nose on El Capitan by Warren Harding, Wayne Merry, and George Whitmore — forty-five days of climbing spread over eighteen months, with massive use of bolts and pitons — opened a route that has since become the most-climbed long route in the world.

Royal Robbins, Harding's rival, made the first continuous ascent of The Nose in seven days in 1960 — establishing the ethic that would dominate the next decade. Robbins's 1957 first ascent of Half Dome's northwest face, with Mike Sherrick and Jerry Gallwas, had been the previous benchmark. The Robbins-Harding rivalry shaped the period's central debate: Harding's bolt-heavy siege tactics versus Robbins's clean, lightweight, top-down ethic.

The cast: Yvon Chouinard, who would parlay his blacksmith's piton business into Patagonia; TM Herbert; Tom Frost; Layton Kor. The 1968 Robbins-Frost-Pratt-Chouinard first ascent of The Salathé Wall — done ground-up with no bolts placed, in nine days — is the period's signature achievement.

Chapter XBouldering.

Bouldering — short, hard climbs on low rocks, without ropes, with crash pads for falls — emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1950s. The American mathematician John Gill, working primarily in the Tetons and South Dakota's Needles in the 1950s and 1960s, is generally credited as the discipline's founder; he brought a gymnast's training and a chalk-bag (his innovation) to short, technically severe problems.

The European bouldering movement — particularly at Fontainebleau, the sandstone forest south of Paris — has a longer history but a slower professionalisation. The Bleausard tradition of grading by colour-coded circuits goes back to the 1930s; serious competitive bouldering at Fontainebleau dates from the 1980s.

The contemporary scene is dominated by Daniel Woods, Nalle Hukkataival (whose Burden of Dreams in Lappnor, Finland, was graded V17/9A in 2016 — the first of that grade), Shawn Raboutou, Simon Lorenzi, and the Japanese cohort that has dominated international competition (Tomoa Narasaki, Sorato Anraku). The grade frontier — the question of where the hardest possible boulder problem sits — is open and continuously being pushed.

Chapter XIThe European sport-climbing turn.

The 1980s European emergence of sport climbing — short, hard, bolted routes climbed for difficulty rather than first-ascent objective — split the discipline. The French climbers Patrick Berhault, Patrick Edlinger, and the Verdon Gorge generation drove the grade frontier from 7c in the early 1980s to 8c by 1985.

The first 9a (5.14d) — Wolfgang Güllich's Action Directe in the Frankenjura, 1991 — established a grade that would not be exceeded for nearly a decade. Action Directe is still considered a benchmark; only roughly a hundred climbers in the world have done it.

The first 9b (Chris Sharma's Realization/Biographie at Céüse, 2001), the first 9b+ (Adam Ondra's Change in Flatanger, Norway, 2012), and the first 9c (Adam Ondra's Silence in Hanshelleren Cave, Norway, 2017) chart the discipline's continuing grade-pushing through the present.

Chapter XIILynn Hill, 1993.

Lynn Hill (b. 1961, California) was the dominant competition climber of the late 1980s — winning over thirty international titles between 1986 and 1992 — and the most consequential American rock climber of the modern era. Her 1993 free ascent of The Nose on El Capitan was the climb of the century.

The Nose, first climbed on aid in 1958, had been considered impossible to free-climb for thirty-five years. Hill, after a year of attempts and a four-day push in September 1993, became the first person to free the route. The crux Changing Corners pitch — 5.14a — required a sequence Hill discovered by trying body positions no taller male climber would have considered. Her 1994 one-day free ascent of the route — climbed in 23 hours — confirmed the achievement.

"It goes, boys," Hill is reported to have said at the top. The repeats took fifteen years. Tommy Caldwell freed the route in 2005. As of 2024, fewer than five climbers had freed The Nose in a day.

Chapter XIIICaldwell & Jorgeson, 2015.

The Dawn Wall of El Capitan — the southeast face, named for catching the first morning sun — had been climbed on aid since 1970, but the question of whether it could be free-climbed had haunted Yosemite climbers for forty years. Tommy Caldwell began working it in 2007. He brought in Kevin Jorgeson in 2009.

The free-climbing project occupied seven years of seasonal effort. The crux pitches — Pitch 14 and Pitch 15, both 5.14d — required a level of finger-strength and skin-management that had no precedent on a route that long. The skin on Caldwell's fingertips became one of the project's logistical concerns; he taped his hands every morning.

The push began on December 27, 2014. Caldwell sent Pitch 15 on January 9, 2015. Jorgeson, struggling with Pitch 15 for ten days, finally sent it on January 14. They topped out on January 14, 2015, after 19 days on the wall. The achievement was front-page news in major papers worldwide. The 2018 documentary The Dawn Wall captures the project's emotional shape.

Chapter XIVFree Solo, 2017.

On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan via the Freerider route — a 3,000-foot wall, graded 5.13a, with sustained difficult climbing the entire way — without a rope. The ascent took 3 hours 56 minutes. It is, by general consensus among climbers, the greatest free-solo climb that has ever been done. The chance of a fatal fall was essentially complete.

The 2018 documentary Free Solo, directed by Jimmy Chin and E. Chai Vasarhelyi, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. Its production raised the question, much-debated in climbing circles, of whether the camera crew's presence had compelled or enabled the climb. Honnold has consistently said the climb was his own intention; the film depicts the multi-year preparation in detail.

Honnold's pre-Freerider career — the 2008 free solo of Half Dome's Regular Route, the 2014 Triple Crown of El Capitan + Half Dome + Mount Watkins in 19 hours — had already established him as the world's most accomplished free-soloist. Freerider was the project that the rest of his career had been preparation for.

Chapter XVOndra.

Adam Ondra (b. 1993, Brno, Czech Republic) is the strongest sport climber and competition climber of his generation. His career resume is unmatched: the first ascent of the world's first 9b+ (Change, 2012), the first 9c (Silence, 2017), two World Championship titles in lead climbing (2014, 2019), one in bouldering (2014), the 2016 first ascent of Vasil Vasil (graded V16/8C+).

The Silence first ascent in Hanshelleren Cave, Flatanger, Norway in September 2017 is the highest-graded sport route in the world. Ondra worked it for over a hundred days across two and a half years; the route's signature kneebar rest, achieved in a near-horizontal cave, is a defining moment of contemporary climbing technique.

Ondra also competed at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (held in 2021), finishing sixth in the combined-format men's event — a controversial format that combined speed climbing, bouldering, and lead. The format was changed for Paris 2024, partly in response to athlete complaints led by Ondra. He is also a vocal advocate for the sport's growth and ethical conduct.

Chapter XVIHayes, 2017.

Margo Hayes (b. 1998, Boulder, Colorado) became the first woman to climb a confirmed 9a+ (5.15a) when she sent La Rambla in Siurana, Spain, in February 2017 at eighteen. She repeated the achievement on Biographie at Céüse later that year — the second 9a+ done by a woman, by Hayes herself.

The grade had been the subject of debate for years. Josune Bereziartu's 9a ascents in the early 2000s and Sasha DiGiulian's 2012 ascent of Pure Imagination (graded variously 9a or 8c+) had been the previous benchmarks. Hayes's two 9a+ sends, both on widely repeated and graded routes with multiple male ascentionists confirming the difficulty, settled the question.

The handful of women now operating at the 9a+ and harder level — Hayes, Anak Verhoeven, Laura Rogora, Ashima Shiraishi in bouldering, Janja Garnbret across all disciplines — represent a generational change in what the female grade frontier looks like. The trend is continuing.

Chapter XVIITokyo 2020.

Sport climbing made its Olympic debut at the Tokyo 2020 Games, held in 2021. The format combined three disciplines — speed, bouldering, and lead — into a single combined event, with finishing positions multiplied to determine the overall ranking. The format was widely criticised by climbers; the speed discipline, in particular, is a different sport from the other two.

The men's gold went to Alberto Ginés López of Spain. The women's gold went to Janja Garnbret of Slovenia. Garnbret's victory — she dominated bouldering and lead, the speed event determining only the top of the podium order — was the result expected by every serious climbing observer.

The Paris 2024 Games split speed into a separate event, and combined bouldering and lead into a "Boulder & Lead" combined. Garnbret repeated her gold in the combined event; Aleksandra Mirosław of Poland won speed gold with a world-record time. Garnbret's two-Olympic-cycle dominance is the definitive sporting record in women's competitive climbing.

Chapter XVIIIJanja Garnbret.

Janja Garnbret (b. 1999, Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia) is the most decorated competitive climber in history. Her career record through 2024: six World Championship gold medals, fifty-five World Cup wins, two Olympic gold medals (Tokyo 2020 combined, Paris 2024 boulder & lead), the 2019 World Cup season in which she won every single bouldering event entered.

Her style is distinctively complete. Where most competition climbers excel in either bouldering or lead and tolerate the other, Garnbret is the world's strongest in both — a profile that the combined-format Olympics suited perfectly. Her outdoor climbing has been more selective; she sent American Hustle (8C+) in 2024, her hardest outdoor problem to date.

Garnbret's public stance against eating-disorder culture in competitive climbing — articulated in 2020 essays and on her social media — has been one of the discipline's most consequential athlete-led reforms. The IFSC subsequently introduced minimum-weight rules and pre-event medical screening. The change is widely credited to her advocacy.

Chapter XIXThe gym boom.

Indoor climbing gyms, a marginal phenomenon before 2000, are now the dominant entry point into the sport. The first commercial U.S. gym (Vertical World, Seattle) opened in 1987. By 2024 there were over 700 commercial climbing gyms in the United States and over 4,500 worldwide. The growth rate, around 12% annually through the 2010s, has slowed but not stopped.

The gym is structurally different from the outdoor sport. The walls are designed; the holds are deliberately placed; the routes are reset every few weeks. The competitive scene has migrated almost entirely indoors. Most contemporary professional climbers train almost exclusively in gyms.

The cultural consequence has been a sharp generational shift. The pre-2000 climbing population was small, predominantly male, and predominantly outdoor; the 2024 climbing population is roughly thirty times larger, more gender-balanced, and predominantly gym-based with occasional outdoor trips. Whether the new gym-derived climbers will sustain the discipline's outdoor tradition, or whether the gym sport will become the dominant form, is genuinely open.

Chapter XXSpeed.

Speed climbing on the standardised 15-metre IFSC speed wall is a different sport from the rest of competitive climbing. The route is fixed worldwide; competitors train it for years; the times are measured to thousandths of a second. The current men's world record (4.74 seconds, Veddriq Leonardo, Indonesia, 2024) and women's (6.06 seconds, Aleksandra Mirosław, Poland, 2024) put the discipline closer to athletic sprinting than to any other form of climbing.

The training is specialised. Speed climbers do almost no other climbing; they treat the standardised route as a fixed motor-skill problem. The Indonesian and Polish national teams dominate; the historical American and European powers have struggled to compete because their athletes also try to do other forms of climbing.

The 2024 Olympic separation of speed from the combined event was widely welcomed. The format change clarifies that speed is a sport in its own right, and removes the absurd 2020 situation in which a 9a-climbing sport climber lost overall medals to speed-climbing specialists who could not lead a 7a.

Chapter XXIThe Sherpas.

The Sherpa people — an ethnically Tibetan group concentrated in the Khumbu region of Nepal — have been the operational backbone of every successful Himalayan expedition since the 1920s. The 1953 success on Everest was Tenzing Norgay's; the 2021 winter K2 first ascent was made by an all-Nepali team; the entire infrastructure of fixed ropes, ladders, and route maintenance on the Khumbu Icefall is built and rebuilt every season by Sherpa work crews.

The compensation question has been contested for a hundred years. Sherpa wages on Everest expeditions in the 2024 season ranged from $5,000 to $15,000 per season — substantial in Nepal but a small fraction of what the climbers paying $50,000–$200,000 to be on the mountain are spending. Insurance for Sherpa workers — particularly the Icefall Doctors who establish the season's route — was minimal until the 2014 Khumbu Icefall avalanche killed sixteen Nepali workers and prompted the most serious labour reform in Himalayan history.

The 2014 disaster, the 2015 earthquake-triggered Everest avalanche (24 dead, mostly Sherpa), and the steady increase in Sherpa-led commercial expeditions (Nirmal Purja's Elite Exped, Mingma G's Imagine Nepal) are reshaping the economics of high-altitude climbing in slow but unmistakable ways.

Chapter XXIIThe Everest industry.

The 1996 Everest disaster, in which eight climbers died on May 10–11 across multiple commercial expeditions, was the moment commercial Himalayan mountaineering became a public-policy issue. Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997) and Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt's The Climb (1997) presented competing accounts of the disaster that have been argued ever since.

The commercial-Everest industry has only grown. The 2019 season produced the photograph of the queue on the Hillary Step — over two hundred climbers waiting in line at 8,800 m — that became the symbol of how crowded the mountain has become. The Nepali government issued 478 permits at $11,000 each in 2024, a record.

The fatality rate on Everest is substantial — over 330 deaths since the 1953 first ascent — but the per-summit fatality rate is lower than on K2 or Annapurna. The bigger question is the ethical one: whether a mountain that has become a commercial summit-fee operation, with route-fixing done for clients who could not establish a route themselves, is meaningfully being "climbed" in the sense Mallory or Messner used the word.

Chapter XXIIIThe hard alpine.

Away from the eight-thousanders, contemporary alpinism has consolidated around a small group of climbers operating at the frontier of what is technically possible. The Piolet d'Or award (founded 1991) recognises the year's most significant ascents; the criteria explicitly favour lightweight, technical, exploratory climbs over commercial or summit-collecting expeditions.

The dominant figures of the 2010s and 2020s: Marko Prezelj (Slovenia, multiple Piolets); Vince Anderson and Steve House (the 2005 Nanga Parbat Rupal Face direct line); Mick Fowler (continuing prolific output into his late sixties); Hayden Kennedy (until his 2017 suicide following the death of his partner Inge Perkins); Tommy Caldwell (post-Dawn Wall ventures into Patagonian alpinism); Hansjörg Auer, David Lama, and Jess Roskelley (all killed by an avalanche on Howse Peak, Canada, in 2019).

The casualty rate at the discipline's frontier remains brutal. The names listed above include several deaths. The technical achievement and the personal cost have not separated; they may not.

Chapter XXIVTwenty-five works.

• 1871Scrambles Amongst the AlpsWhymper
• 1922The Assault on Mount EverestMallory et al.
• 1955Tiger of the SnowsTenzing Norgay
• 1955High AdventureHillary
• 1956AnnapurnaHerzog
• 1959The Hard Way UpBuhl
• 1979The Snow LeopardMatthiessen
• 1983Touching the VoidSimpson
• 1986K2: The Savage MountainHouston & Bates
• 1989The Beckoning SilenceSimpson
• 1997Into Thin AirKrakauer
• 1997The ClimbBoukreev & DeWalt
• 2000Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite RockclimberRoper
• 2003Mountains of My LifeBonatti
• 2004Mountains of the MindMacfarlane
• 2010The BondAnker & Roberts
• 2012Alone on the WallHonnold & Roberts
• 2014The Push (Dawn Wall)Caldwell
• 2014Meru (film)Chin & Vasarhelyi
• 2017Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred BeckeyCamp4 Collective
• 2018Free Solo (film)Chin & Vasarhelyi
• 2019The Mountain in My ShoeVarious Sherpa testimonies
• 2020Beyond PossiblePurja
• 202114 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible (film)Bauer
• 2024The Third PoleSynnott

Chapter XXVWatch & read.

↑ Free Solo (2018) — Honnold on Freerider, El Capitan

More on YouTube

Watch · Behind the Scenes of The Dawn Wall Film (Caldwell & Jorgeson)
Watch · Breathtaking: K2 — The World's Most Dangerous Mountain

If you read three books

Krakauer's Into Thin Air remains the best-written single account of any mountaineering disaster. Joe Simpson's Touching the Void is the existentially deepest survival narrative the discipline has produced. Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind is the cultural-historical context for everything else. Then move to Bonatti for the high-alpine ethic; Boukreev for the contrarian view of 1996; Tommy Caldwell for the Yosemite continuity.

Chapter XXVIThe numbers.

The fatality rates of high-altitude mountaineering are unusual among sports. Annapurna's all-time summit-to-death ratio is approximately 32% — roughly one death for every three summits. K2 sits at around 25%. Nanga Parbat at 20%. Everest, with its commercial route-fixing and high summit traffic, is around 1.5%. The high-altitude eight-thousanders considered together return roughly one death per fifteen summits.

The contemporary comparison: Formula 1 grand prix racing, in its most dangerous historical decade (the 1970s), killed approximately one driver every two seasons of full participation — a per-event fatality rate roughly an order of magnitude lower than 1970s Annapurna climbing.

The mountaineering community's relationship to those numbers has been ambivalent for a century. The romantic justification — that the danger is part of the meaning, that an objective without consequence is no objective — coexists with a practical professional ethic that argues for risk reduction wherever possible. The two positions are not reconcilable; the discipline has continued to hold them simultaneously.

Chapter XXVII2026.

The contemporary climbing landscape is fragmented in a way it has not been before. Olympic sport climbing — gym-based, telegenic, increasingly distinct from outdoor climbing — operates under IFSC rules with a stable international circuit. Commercial Himalayan mountaineering operates as a high-end adventure tourism category with its own ethics and its own labour force. Hard alpinism continues at the Piolet d'Or frontier in small, lightweight teams. Hard sport climbing pushes the grade frontier through Ondra and a handful of others. Bouldering develops on its own track, mostly indoors. Free soloing remains a minority pursuit dominated by Honnold and a small number of others.

The discipline's centre of gravity has shifted toward the gym. Most people who currently identify as climbers have not climbed outside, or have done so only infrequently. Whether this is a problem — whether the discipline's outdoor tradition can survive being a niche within a larger gym sport — is the live argument of the next decade.

The mountains are unchanged. They will be there.

Chapter XXVIIIWhy people do it.

The honest answer is that climbing is one of the few activities in which the consequences of a mistake are simple, immediate, and undeniable. A free solo of Freerider rewards careful preparation with continued life and punishes a single missed foothold with death. The grades and the scoring of competition climbing introduce a different reward structure — points, finishing places — but the underlying motion still selects for attentiveness and rejects sloppiness with unusual clarity.

This is not a justification for risk-seeking. It is a description of why a great many people who would never free solo find the disciplined-attention quality of even gym climbing valuable. The work is concrete; the feedback is honest; the failure mode is not socially negotiable.

From Mont Blanc in 1786 to a teenager on a 5.10b at a suburban gym in 2026, that quality has been continuous. Everything else — the equipment, the grades, the competitive structure, the commercial layer — has changed.

Chapter XXIXWhat comes.

The grade frontiers continue to push. The first 9c+ seems probable within five years; the candidates are mostly Ondra and a small number of younger climbers. The first V18 boulder is similarly imminent. The first Olympic gold by a climber under the new Paris-format separation has been won by Garnbret in lead-and-bouldering and by Mirosław in speed; the LA 2028 cycle will probably extend that pattern.

The Himalayan landscape is changing for two reasons. The retreat of glaciers is making some classic routes objectively more dangerous (the Khumbu Icefall in particular has destabilised significantly through the 2010s and 2020s). The Sherpa-led commercial expeditions are reshaping the economics of high-altitude climbing toward Nepali ownership of the industry that operates on Nepali ground.

The unanswered question, as always, is who climbs the unclimbed lines that remain. The southwest face of Cho Oyu, the unclimbed ridge of Gasherbrum IV, the long traverses still attempted but not completed. The frontier has moved but not closed.