The Mountain and the River: Why Climbing Is Better When It Holds Together
- Ethan Lavoillotte
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
Climbing is always threatening to split itself in two: purists on one side, newer-school climbers on the other. Tradition versus spectacle. But an old Buddhist parable—the one about the mountain and the river—helps explain why that fight goes nowhere.
A Saturday night on planet Earth, inside a climbing gym. Three generations are climbing side by side on the same wall. A teenager links a paddle move—a fast, dynamic slap from one hold to the next. Next to him, a woman in her fifties works through a steep compression sequence, squeezing opposing holds to stay on. Between them, a guy in his thirties films an attempt on a coordination boulder, the kind of problem built around timing and movement. Nobody is really talking. Everyone is climbing inside their own bubble, with their own codes, references, and language. In 2026, that scene feels normal, almost ordinary. But that quiet coexistence tells you almost everything about climbing today.
Boredom Belongs to Us
Sometimes the best way to read the present is through an old parable. In this case, the Buddhist one fits our problem pretty well. On one side, there is the mountain: fixed, solid, grounded in force. In climbing terms, that means thin sandstone edges, the endurance of the classic Fontainebleau circuits, and a foundation built over decades, going back to the 1940s. On the other side, there is the river: fluid, fast, always changing. That is where you find flashy coordination moves, slick comp holds, modern gyms, and their futuristic look. Between the two runs a low-grade tension that has shaped climbing for the last twenty years.
So who is right? Nobody. And that may be the best part.
Let’s be honest about it. Early climbing was not much of a spectator sport. It was hard to watch and even harder to package. Around the time of the first big competitions—especially after the Bercy comp in 1988—one newspaper headline summed it up brutally: climbing was “about as exciting as watching paint dry.” For a sport that wanted visibility, and already had one eye on the Olympics, something had to change. The show had to be rebuilt.
Competition climbing took time to find its place. In the 1980s and 1990s, plenty of elite climbers wanted nothing to do with it. Some eventually came around out of love for competition. Others did it because it became hard to avoid. But even then, comp climbing still looked a lot like outdoor climbing: static movement, varied grip types, endurance, body tension.
Then, in 1998, route setters at the Top Rock Challenge in Val-d’Isère introduced the first real coordination sequences, with linked ramps and jumps. At the time, nobody knew that detail would help reshape the sport. Over the next few years, those moves spread slowly, then openly, until the whole thing tipped.
Paddles, Smartphones, and Parables
Switzerland, September 2018. Tomoa Narasaki steps into the final at the Boulder World Cup in Meiringen. In front of him are holds that look like smartphone shells. Narasaki explodes off the start and paddles from one hold to the next—one, two, three, four. His feet never touch the wall. He is hanging there on contact strength alone, sticking each slap onto the volumes as he goes. The crowd holds its breath, then loses it. Something has changed.
Three years later, the 2023 World Championships in Bern drove the point home with fully smooth holds from Flathold and Pierre Broyer. The idea was simple: you could not hold them statically. You needed speed, perfect timing, and near-perfect precision. More traditional climbers watched that footage with equal parts fascination and disbelief. The question came fast: is this even still climbing?
The forums lit up. Modern climbing is betraying the spirit of bouldering. Coordination is for people who have never climbed outside. This stuff asks for too many different skills.
That is where the old Buddhist parable comes back in, setting the mountain against the river. But the story never really answers which one is superior.
Classic climbing—the Fontainebleau style of historic circuits, crimp lines, and pinchy old-school movement—builds a climber’s physical foundation. It teaches basic gripping, finger strength, core tension, and precise footwork. That is the mountain: stable, durable, built on millions of repetitions.
Modern climbing highlights a different kind of body logic. Speed replaces endurance. Fluidity replaces constant full-body tension. The moves demand more contact strength: the ability to generate maximum force in a split second, right when the hand hits the hold. Precision has to be exact, because at high speed even a small mistake costs you. The hips become central. By anticipating where the body will land, the climber creates the swing they need. That is the river: fast, adaptable, always moving.
You can set those two styles against each other, of course. You can say one is “real” and the other is artificial. You can cast Fontainebleau as authenticity and modern bouldering gyms as pure spectacle. But that misses the point. These two approaches complete each other. When a problem makes the static method impossible, a dynamic solution can save the send. And when the coordination falls apart, going back to finer climbing—tight body tension, exact positioning, cleaner movement—often gets it done.
The best climbers in the world already understand that.
On November 11, 2025, Elias Iagnemma made the first ascent of Exodia, which he proposed at V18 (Font 9A+), putting it in the conversation for one of the hardest boulders on Earth. But the ascent that really turned heads came a year earlier, when he climbed Burden of Dreams. That boulder, the first confirmed V17 (Font 9A) in the world, is famous for its brutal precision on tiny crimps and microscopic feet. Iagnemma found a different answer: a dynamic paddle that bypassed the worst part of the sequence. The mountain met the river.
Will Bosi has embodied that range for years. In early 2026, he made the first ascent of Pôr do Sol in Sintra, Portugal, and proposed V16 (Font 8C+). The key move was a “sheriff”—a dynamic uncrossing of the arms that forces a cut loose, when both feet come off. It is a flashy move, but one demanded by the rock itself, the same way Rainbow Rocket in Fontainebleau demands it. Bosi called it “probably the best boulder I’ve ever tried.” Not because it was static or dynamic, but because it brought both logics together.
Still Not Parkour
There is one objection that never seems to die: coordination is parkour, not climbing. You hear it in YouTube comments, on forums, and at the base of boulders.
In 2025, French climber Cyprien Bossut set up a simple experiment. He invited Raphaël Bourgeat-Lami, a high-level parkour athlete, to try eleven competition boulders. The video pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, and it settled the argument pretty quickly.
Bourgeat-Lami, who is used to jumps, landings, and explosive movement, struggled. A lot.
“No, this has nothing to do with parkour,” he finally said, out of breath. “The movement is completely different.”
There are similarities, sure: speed, timing, and coordinated use of the upper and lower body. But the underlying logic is not the same. In parkour, everything revolves around landing, impact absorption, and managing force on contact with the ground or obstacle. In modern climbing, everything happens through contact strength, exact hand placement, and control of the swing. It is just not the same sport.
And really, this kind of technical shift is nothing unusual in sports history. Tennis changed dramatically when graphite rackets took over in the 1980s, making the game faster and more powerful. Soccer changed when German-style gegenpressing spread in the 2010s, pushing the sport toward a more physical, more intense model that everyone else had to answer. Climbing is moving through the same kind of transition.
So where does it go next?
Some setters already think coordination may be starting to burn out. Maybe it got too spectacular, too repetitive, maybe not as demanding as people first thought. The sport may regulate itself. Formats change. Styles blend. Trends cycle back around. Because today’s modern climbing is inevitably tomorrow’s classic climbing.
In twenty years, kids in gyms will watch Tomoa Narasaki in Meiringen the way climbers now watch Pierre Allain in the 1940s: with respect, curiosity, and maybe just a trace of amused condescension.
And maybe the next revolution is already taking shape somewhere quietly, in the back corner of a gym. An anonymous setter testing a new kind of hold. A climber finding an unexpected method on an old boulder in the forest. The story keeps moving. It always does.
