I’ve spent many years curating articles like this — both on the @climbing Twitter account (over 32,000 followers) as well as curating an email newsletter for the Boulder/Denver area called the Startup Digest (which was eventually acquired by Techstars). Here, I spent about three years releasing a popular weekly newsletter highlighting the top events and activities for startups in the region before I handed over the reins to a new volunteer. So I have considerable experience (and enjoyment) building a newsletter and curating content.

So why now after having the initial idea years ago? There are two main reasons. First, my life situation has finally allowed me the opportunity and time to start and continue working on this project in earnest. Second, I feel there’s a large void to be filled concerning climbing news, articles, and overall information.

Many climbing blogs and sites have come and gone, while the total number of climbers has grown significantly. The popularity and growth of email newsletters have also expanded, but there’s not much catering to climbers that are independent of single source media companies like Climbing or Rock and Ice magazines. These newsletters are exclusively a collection of everything they published.

The value of an independent email newsletter (at least in my opinion) is curation without any obligation to a single source.

After only three issues, I’m pleased with the statistics. Both the open rate and click through on the links are way above industry standards (any way you categorize them). So that’s very encouraging, and I’ll be making significant efforts to ensure the content is there to maintain and even improve these stats.

As far as the future, I have no plans other than curating great articles each week. There may or may not be some form of advertising at some point, but for now, the goal is to continue improving the newsletter.

As always, if you have any feedback regarding this project, please leave a comment. And if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here: http://www.climbingdigest.com

The post Introducing the Climbing Digest email newsletter first appeared on All Climbing.

From Black Diamond:

It all started in the gym for BD Athlete Carlo Traversi. Now, 15 years later, he’s come full circle, tracing his roots back to where it began, only this time, as the owner of Sacramento’s new premier bouldering gym. But Carlo’s motivation is not only to provide quality plastic pulling, but also to create what he experienced growing up—a communal place for climbers to train and hang out, but also be mentored and taught the valuable ethics needed for the crag. Check out this film documenting Carlo’s journey from the gym to the crag and back again.

The post Video: Carlo Traversi – Gym. Crag. Repeat. first appeared on All Climbing.

From Black Diamond:

BD Athlete Will Gadd has been putting Black Diamond gear to the test for over 20 years. He was an early proponent of our revolutionary carbon fiber ice tools—now known as the Cobra—and has been questing to the top of ice formations around the world with prototype ice gear ever since. From climbing Niagara Falls with prototype ice pitons, to going big in Greenland with extra-long special-made ice screws, Gadd is always willing to put it all on the line for the sake of adventure … and invaluable feedback to the designers and engineers here at BD. Recently, his latest hare-brained idea involved multiple innovations—as well as his own Canadian ingenuity—and was captured in this film. Check out Gadd’s latest gear testing exploits as he takes the formidable spray ice of Helmcken Falls … with natural gear.

The post Video: Will Gadd Takes On Helmcken Falls with Natural Gear first appeared on All Climbing.

Whether learning how to jam cracks or cruising 5.13 testpieces, tape gloves will prevent the back of your hands from turning into hamburger. Not only will this help you avoid needless suffering, it will allow you to climb exponentially more than the haughty non-taper who is sidelined by shredded skin.

The post How to Make a Tape Glove first appeared on All Climbing.

As your main points of weighted contact, your feet matter. Placing them silently forces you to be deliberate and aware with your choice, placement, and movement onto and off each foothold.

The awesome power of Silent Feet

The post Silent Feet, How to Have Better Climbing Footwork first appeared on All Climbing.

I’ve been complaining about this for a while, but unfortunately they’re not quite there yet. You can’t just click on a link for the PDF download. Instead, you have to load up the entire online magazine seeing page-by-page thumbnails and once the process is complete, you can then save the mag as PDF.

Part of the way there is better than nothing I guess…

If the goal of a free magazine is wide distribution, then why are they making hard for as many people as possible to read it?

My advice: publish straight to PDF. Put it on Amazon S3 or a CDN and allow us to link straight to it. Immediately more distribution that costs less than printing a paper magazine that will increase revenue from advertisers.

The post Dead Point Magazine Now Offers PDF Download, Kinda first appeared on All Climbing.

The Path from Matt Wilder on Vimeo.

via Matt Wilder and @jmccartie

The post Climbing Video: Matt Wilder on The Path (5.14a/b R) first appeared on All Climbing.

Trad climbing has lost some of its appeal, or is a smaller blip on the radar. I still know plenty of folks that prefer trad, but there was a day when there was only trad. Trad climbing may be analogous to a lost culture. In fact, it is a culture within a culture, and as with the loss of any culture, itâ??s inevitable that knowledge specific to that culture is also lost. My goal here is to create and catalog the (lost) techniques, tricks, and tips particular to, or useful for trad climbing.

(via @rockgrrl)

The post Trad Climbing Techniques, Tricks, and Tips first appeared on All Climbing.

Duct Tape: For some reason that I will never understand, trad climbers have an affinity for duct tape that is almost as creepy as a mustachioed man winking at five year olds. What they do with this stuff, Iâ??ll never know but what I do know is that to look like a seasoned trad climber, you need to have truck loads of this shit. But hereâ??s the trick: you canâ??t keep on the roll. Youâ??ve got to stick it to your parka, wrap it around nalgenes and toothbrushes for no apparent reason and use it to patch your carharts. Maybe someday youâ??ll meet MacGyver and figure some practical uses for this stuff.

The post The Accessorized Trad Climber from Pimpin and Crimpin first appeared on All Climbing.

Peter Beal and Dougald MacDonald both have some interested perspectives on this issue and I’d like to expand further on the topic.

Personally, I still enjoy reading climbing magazines. I subscribe to Climbing, Urban Climber, and Rock & Ice even though I’ve been considering letting my subscriptions lapse at times. I don’t get climbing news from magazines as they’re usually about a month behind. I love the photography, but that can be found abundantly on the web as well. Climbing video is important to me and you can’t watch a video clip of a sick new project in a magazine either.

So why have I continued to subscribe and read them then? It’s likely the combination of (mostly) good articles, reviews, accident reports (I think these are important learning lessons), and technique/gear tips they provide. Unfortunately, all of these could be ported to an online format.

What I would love to see is some sort of hybrid model from the climbing magazines. They could take a lesson from a main stream publication like the Wall Street Journal. I initially subscribed to the WSJ while in business school and at about $300 per year for a subscription to the delivered daily paper, it got to be too much (both in cost as well as paper volume).

After business school, I found the Journal offered the entire paper online for $99 per year. A fraction of the cost, though still a bit pricey, but well worth it in my opinion to still be able to read all the content I wanted while not having to pay for paper I was never having the time to read. Their site even provides the ability to have links to every article in each day’s paper sent in an email. The subscriber controls what and how much they want to read.

I was never going to continue to pay regular price for the paper subscription especially after my student rates ended. By offering the online version at a substantially discounted price, they were able to capture what economists would call the consumer surplus.

Climbing magazines have the opportunity to embrace this as well. How many climbers who are not willing to pay $30 per year on a magazine subscription may be willing to pay $5 or $10 for this same content online? A small percentage I am sure, but realize this is still $5 more than these publishers would have received otherwise.

True, publishers risk that some of their paying subscribers will migrate to the online only version, but with such relatively low subscription numbers as a percentage of the climbing industry’s participants, I would think it would be a welcome portion of additional revenue.

I’m not sure there is anything the magazines can do content-wise at this point. What else can really be added to print magazines? The future is online and it will be interesting to see how the they handle these critical decisions over the next few years.

The post The Future of Climbing and Technology – Part 2 first appeared on All Climbing.