All Climbing

Late last year my wife and I bought a house in Colorado and we went through all the normal stressful steps accompanying it. At one point during the process, I received a return phone call from my real estate agent from an unusual place – he was climbing the Third Flatiron!Now my first jealous thought was “dammit, get back to work.

UKClimbing.com offers up a comprehensive guide to bouldering at Fontainebleau, France complete with how to train, the local rating system, when to go, and where to stay.It has been used as a bouldering area since the 1870s and has almost continuously remained at the centre of the world bouldering scene since the 1930s.

As climbers, we’re always getting injures – that’s just part of the game. Hopefully your injuries are minor; but when an injury makes you stop climbing for an extended period of time, another outlet is needed for all that obsession.ClimbingNarc has an injury and recently asked on Twitter for some suggestions on non-climbing activities for climbers. I then re-tweeted this and collected the following interesting responses (after removing the jokes!

Chuck Fryberger offers up some insight on climbing great Fred Nicole.Should I even write about Fred? I’ve been bouldering avidly for 14 years and I still feel under-qualified to try to write any sort of authoritative article about him. I’ve slept on his floor on trips to Switzerland, I’ve shot footage and pictures of him, I’ve hosted him on a visit to Colorado, and I’ve flogged myself trying to repeat problems he opened in Hueco, Fontainebleau, Australia, Switzerland, and South Africa.

Sean McColl writes about warming up for competitions. He has some good advice that can be adapted to any climbing warm-up routine.My 75 minute warm up starts with 5 minutes of cardio. You can do anything, jump up and down, go for a run, jump rope, anything to get your heart going. For the first 10-15 minutes, if your feet are cold just wear your street shoes, if not put on your climbing shoes, do easy moves on big holds.

In the first part of this series, I questioned whether traditional climbing magazines can still thrive or will we see a faster migration to online only publications? 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.

Following up on the recent link to the Fontainebleau bouldering guide, VideoClimb.

Dougald MacDonald reports that Michael Kennedy is going to edit the new Alpinist.Kennedy edited and published Climbing magazine for more than two decades before selling the magazine in 1997. Along with being one of America’s top alpine climbers of the 1970s and â??80s, he created a magazine with authoritative articles and elegant design, and he was rewarded with the largest circulation climbing magazine in the world.

Gabor Szekely discusses something we all run into at some point: an unexplained slump in climbing performance.Every year, as my climbing schedule is pretty demanding, I go through an annual slump. For those of you that don’t know, a slump is a period of time (for me usually lasting a month or two), when my climbing is just not going the way it should.

Jon Glassberg recently posted quite a nice rant regarding climbing videos and the state of that aspect of the climbing industry.If you are going to make any money in the industry I would expect some personal progression. I want to see a desire to be better at that defining skill and a recycling of the money earned from making these movies to buy better equipment and software and to spend the time learning the techniques needed to become a better film maker.