At 46, Christophe Dumarest is still putting up new routes and guiding clients on some of the hardest faces in the Alps. But after more than 20 years of chasing intensity in the mountains, he now looks clear-eyed at what that pursuit has given him—and what it has cost. A portrait of a mountaineer who is still learning how to come back down. © Antoine Mesnage Christophe Dumarest has barely started telling us about his life when he starts asking about ours. How does Vertige Media finance investigations that may upset brands in the outdoor industry? How far can a publication push before alienating the companies that might help keep it alive? Dumarest knows the publication well. As he encourages us to keep doing work he considers necessary, he almost immediately starts probing the fault lines in our business model. It is the kind of balancing act he has known since he was young, up on ridgelines with empty space on either side—places that have given him as much to think about as they have adrenaline. Talking with Dumarest is a kind of intellectual ping-pong. A question about Patrick Gabarrou, the renowned French mountain guide, can lead to Walter Bonatti, the Italian mountaineering legend; guiding can lead to capitalism; the Grandes Jorasses to Spinoza. Dumarest talks fast, ideas spilling into one another, and sometimes you have to wait for him to take a breath before jumping back in. At 46, more than anything, he seems to have spent a great deal of time thinking about what the mountains have made of him—and about the contradictions they still force him to confront. One wedding and a few funerals At first, though, nobody really asks for his opinion. Dumarest grows up in Annecy with a father who loves the mountains and who, his son says, “really dreamed of becoming a guide and a mountaineer.” Weekends and vacations are therefore spent at altitude. “There was a pretty strong expectation,” Dumarest says today. “You don’t have to be some great Freudian psychoanalyst to see that there was a dream being lived out there, an ambition—especially my father’s.” He remembers cold fingers, bonking from hunger, breakfast at 6 a.m. before hours of skiing, and Swiss mountain huts filled with “bearded guys in overalls” watching two little kids walk through the door. Sometimes his parents would even leave Dumarest and his brother with the hut keeper while they went off to climb a peak. They are memories he now describes, smiling, as “colorful and a little borderline.” “We were in the post-’68 generation,” he says. “Those are things I wouldn’t have done with my own kids.” For the mountains to become his, Dumarest first has to get away from the version he inherited. As a teenager, he turns toward snowboarding, partying, and “a few detours,” before joining a regional mountaineering team that reawakens something that had been “lying fallow.” He later tries out for the FFME’s elite mountaineering development program, run by the French Mountaineering and Climbing Federation. Out of roughly 20 candidates, Dumarest finishes second. “I remember thinking, What the hell? I’m getting into something. I was so proud.” He had never found much recognition at school. Now he had found a place where he was good—and where other people could see it. “This was where I was recognized,” he says, looking back on how he felt at the time. Christophe Dumarest, well ahead of today's Parisian lifestyle trend © Family archives Dumarest insists he does not have “a competitive soul.” He says he goes into the mountains to escape “the constraints of meters and seconds.” And yet, among these handpicked groups of young mountaineers, he also wants to stand out. The mountains become both the place where he believes he is escaping competition and the place where he begins defining himself in relation to other people. “There’s probably a little pride in being able to guide routes that amateur mountaineers dream about.” On July 14, 2003, he learns just how high the price can be. Dumarest is then part of the ENJA, an elite French mountaineering group, alongside Arnaud Drouet, François Dupety, and Marshal Mussemessi. The three men, ages 22 and 23, die in the same accident in the Mont Blanc massif. Dumarest is almost exactly their age. He is at ENSA, France’s national school for skiing and mountaineering, when the news arrives. It hits him like “a physical blow to the body.” Then come the funerals. “Burying a 20-year-old, honestly, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Burying three of them in a row is really hard.” Dumarest begins asking himself whether “the game is really worth the candle”—whether any of it is worth the cost. But he cannot stay away for long from what has already become both his passion and the main place where he feels recognized. Around the same time, French mountain guide Patrick Gabarrou becomes one of his main climbing partners. Nearly 30 years separate them. Gabarrou brings “the project, the strategy, the determination.” Dumarest brings more technical ability and physical strength. Dumarest also becomes a mountain guide himself and, as he puts it, “gets a toe into the professionalization and media side of mountaineering.” More than 20 years later, he still pushes that logic surprisingly far in his guiding. Some of his clients become skilled enough to follow him onto objectives that professional alpinists themselves dream about. “There’s probably a little pride in being able to guide routes that amateur mountaineers dream about,” he admits. In spring 2026, Dumarest climbed the Gousseault-Desmaison with Didier Laurent and Charly Richer, potentially the first guide-client team to complete the route. Soon after, he opened Kairos on Mont Blanc du Tacul with Symon Welfringer. And yet, on his website, Dumarest invites clients to pursue their dreams “safely.” “That’s the contradiction at the heart of being a mountain guide,” he says with a smile. Staying in tune That intensity comes at a cost when it is time to go home. Asked what a life like his does to the people closest to him, Dumarest makes no attempt to protect the image of the heroic alpinist. “I don’t think it’s easy.” He compares his profession to being the concertmaster of the Orchestre de Paris: you have to maintain your instrument every day. The difference is that in his line of work, failing to prepare can have consequences far more serious than playing a wrong note. “Before a climb, you’re not completely there. Then there’s the climb itself, when you’re not there. Then afterward, you’re processing it, and you’re still inside the climb.” The new villain in the final season of Dexter? © Antoine Mesnage Dumarest has two children. And children, he says, require “attention, care, time, and presence,” including in the harder sense of the word: “When you’re there, are you really there?” Again, he does not try to defend his record. “I don’t think I necessarily got everything right.” He even describes becoming accustomed to experiences so intense that ordinary life can feel dull afterward. “It can make you somewhat antisocial,” he says. In 2009, after the death of someone close to him, another practice enters his life. His then-wife leaves for an intensive yoga training course in Bali, and Dumarest drops plans for an expedition to go with her. There, his résumé in the mountains counts for nothing. “You’re no longer a mountain guide, or a speaker, or a mountaineer. You’re nobody.” Since then, yoga has given him another way to look for the quality of attention that comes so easily when a wall forces him to be fully present. “In the end, I need that intensity, that verticality, to feel alive,” he says. It is his way of saying that when he climbs, the mental chatter stops. “We all still have to make a living. I get invited into companies. I’m not going there because I love the look of their eyes. I’m going there to earn money.” As he gets older, though, Dumarest is trying not to reserve that intensity for major alpine objectives. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, he and Arnaud Petit founded ACTS, short for Action collective de transition pour nos sommets, a collective focused on reducing the environmental footprint of mountain sports. The goal was to travel less, use less energy, favor adventures closer to home, and push the outdoor industry to change. Six years later, Dumarest does not tell the story as a success. The organization lost momentum, and criticism quickly turned toward the people delivering the message: “What about you?” Dumarest says that since ACTS was founded, he has never again flown somewhere for an expedition. A week spent walking, climbing, and bivouacking between Mont Aiguille and the Granier felt almost like a pilgrimage. “I came back completely blown away.” These days, he talks about “doing more with less.” Fewer miles and less logistics, yes, but also less dependence on performance to determine which experiences are worth having—or worth telling people about. Two days in the rain with wildlife photographer Jérémy Villet, just a few hundred yards from a car, were enough to reveal a mountain world Dumarest thought he already knew: waiting in a blind, watching migrations, reading tracks, spending time observing instead of climbing. That is also how he describes a recent encounter with Andy Parkin. At 72, the British climber and artist can no longer climb the way he once did after a serious accident. But Dumarest finds a man who still paints, sculpts, dreams up projects, and keeps creating even as physical performance has become less central to his life. Dumarest leaves with a conviction. “I thought: Andy Parkin at 72—that’s really the future of the mountains.” Letting go of grand claims Still, Dumarest has not left the world he sometimes criticizes. He bristles at the obsession with speed records and the pressure to perform, yet part of his income comes from corporate speaking engagements, where the rope team becomes a way to talk about management or collective performance. “We all still have to make a living,” he says. “I get invited into companies. I’m not going there because I love the look of their eyes. I’m going there to earn money.” Dumarest says he tries to use that access to steer the conversation toward other subjects: taking care of yourself, rebuilding a sense of collective purpose, or reminding people that a life perhaps should not be nothing more than one summit after another. Christophe's Morning Routine © M Daviet He also turns down some offers. “You’re still walking a fine line,” he says. Ocean Peak has also taught him to be wary of stories about life-changing experiences that wrap up a little too neatly. When he co-founded the organization in 2018, using the sea and mountains to work with young people facing serious difficulties, Dumarest briefly imagined taking corporate executives on immersive trips designed to shake them out of their usual environment, “give them a little slap,” then send them back to their companies ready to behave differently. Today, he smiles at the ambition. “I think that was a little pretentious.” That does not mean some experiences cannot leave much deeper marks. Dumarest tells the story of a former client who recently told him that their ascent of the Matterhorn had helped him get through cancer. For Dumarest, that day had almost disappeared among countless others. For the man tied into the rope behind him, it had become something he could draw on while facing the hardest ordeal of his life. By now, Dumarest understands that this may be why we ask questions in the first place. Because so often, we find answers in other people.

In 1996, Pierre Serin opened a bouldering gym in Toulouse, in southwestern France, that looked more like a cave than one of today’s polished climbing facilities. Thirty years later, the founder and manager of Solo Escalade has kept pace with a sport that has changed dramatically around him. We spoke with him about climbing’s move into the mainstream, the economics of running a gym, and the choices that have kept his independent business alive. The Solo Escalade climbing gym in Toulouse © Solo Escalade Vertige Media: How did you get into climbing? Pierre Serin: I’m a PE teacher, so I was already interested in climbing. I had spent time at a mountain-training center in the Pyrenees and done mountaineering in the military. In Toulouse, I used to climb on the brick walls along the Garonne River. In 1996, I met a group in Ariège, in the Pyrenees south of Toulouse, and they asked me to join their project: opening a climbing gym. At first, it looked more like a cave. It was basically a big house we had converted, with a bar and a workshop. It smelled like glue, there was dust everywhere, and almost no ventilation. At the time, there were only three or four climbing gyms in all of France. Vertige Media: Who came to the gym? Pierre Serin: We had mountaineers, beginners, and people training to become climbing instructors, but it was still very niche. We repaired gear, made climbing holds, and sold them to local clubs. We had learned how to resole climbing shoes in Avignon, and we also repaired shoes and bags for Decathlon, the big French sporting-goods retailer. Their products broke all the time, so there was plenty of work. That volume kept us going for a while. We worked day and night. We managed to pay ourselves a small salary each month, but the lifestyle was pretty unusual. We slept at the gym. I can tell you, a lot of relationships didn’t survive it. Vertige Media: How was climbing viewed back then? Pierre Serin: As dangerous. Even in my own family, people thought it was a little crazy to take those kinds of risks. When we climbed outside, relatives didn’t always understand all the stuff with ropes and belaying, the system climbers use to protect each other from a fall. But parents could see that their kids wanted to climb everything. It comes naturally to them. And a bouldering gym—short walls climbed without ropes, with thick pads underneath—felt reassuring. At least they knew their kid probably wasn’t going to get hurt. That’s really where our first customer base came from: families. And families are still a huge part of our business today. We eventually moved the gym to L’Union, a suburb of Toulouse. We did everything ourselves: the walls, plumbing, masonry, framing. I was pretty handy, and doing the work ourselves saved us a lot of money. Once we opened, we handed out flyers outside schools, and before long we had 300 students a week. It became the largest climbing school in southwestern France. It changed PE classes © courtesy of Pierre Serin Vertige Media: When did the gym become a destination in its own right, rather than just a place to train for outdoor climbing? Pierre Serin: The first generation of kids grew up and kept climbing indoors. Going outside takes time, costs money, and usually means driving somewhere. At the gym, you can meet up with your friends easily. These days, outdoor climbing tends to be something people save for longer trips. Kids started treating climbing the way they would soccer or rugby. It became an urban recreational sport. “The business works because of classes, families, weekends, and birthday parties, with memberships on top of that.” By the early 2000s, I could see that climbing was becoming much less niche. Outdoor climbing was no longer the center of everything, and bouldering had become an urban playground. The real boom, to me, started about 15 years ago, before climbing made it into the Olympics. At that point, we were growing 15 to 20 percent a year. Kids and birthday parties were a huge part of it. We were hosting four to six birthday parties every weekend. Kids would come back with their friends, then bring their parents. They were the ones telling them, “Try it. You’ll see, it’s fun.” Vertige Media: What actually drives your gym financially today? Pierre Serin: Families and kids. Dedicated climbers alone aren’t enough. The business works because of classes, families, weekends, and birthday parties, with memberships on top of that. Our instructors were versatile from the beginning. They worked the front desk, set problems—designing the climbs on the walls—cleaned the gym, and taught classes. We quickly had 10 or 12 employees at L’Union, unlike some gyms that operated with just a handful of volunteer climbers. Some operators in Toulouse initially focused on high-level climbers before realizing they needed to offer classes. But every gym has to find its own audience. Vertige Media: What was it like watching the big gym chains arrive and the number of climbing gyms multiply? Pierre Serin: I was worried. I had built my gym myself, so parts of it could look dated. The new gyms were more polished, and people often told us ours was dirty. Of course I wondered whether they were going to take our customers. I’m not obsessed with being the best, but I’ve always had a competitive side. I did track and field, and in that sport you’re competing against yourself. You may not finish first, but you still want to stay in the race. When the big chains arrived, we pushed ourselves even harder. And we kept growing by more than 20 percent. “Solo has always been profitable until this year, when we expect to finish about 7 percent in the red.” Vertige Media: What allowed Solo to stay competitive? Pierre Serin: We kept investing. I regularly replace the volumes, the large geometric features attached to the walls, refurbish the holds, and redo the mats. I still build and fix things myself. I’m constantly thinking about how to improve the place, and when we make a decision as a team, we try to do the work ourselves first. It hasn’t made us incredibly rich, but it has allowed us to keep going. Solo has always been profitable until this year, when we expect to finish about 7 percent in the red. We have 18 permanent employees, including quite a few younger people working part time. Before Covid, I thought we were going to break €1 million in annual revenue. Today we’re at around €900,000. Things have become much less predictable. With purchasing power falling, people are watching their spending and coming more often during off-peak hours to save money. The economic situation is genuinely difficult. People are going to have to think carefully about how they vote in France’s 2027 presidential election. Children and a manager © courtesy of Pierre Serin Vertige Media: Today, two models seem to be competing: the chain model, built around growth, and your more hands-on approach. What separates them? Pierre Serin: I’ve seen the chain model from the inside. I was a business partner of François Petit (Editor's note: former world climbing champion and founder of the Climb Up network of climbing gyms) before getting out of that arrangement pretty quickly. My feeling is that behind the message of “we’re doing this for climbing,” the main goal is to make money and open locations everywhere. Under that model, some flagship gyms make a lot of money, but you also have to keep expanding. And with rents, construction costs, rising energy prices, and economic uncertainty, that model is extremely risky. It’s the startup model: you put in a lot of money, accept that you won’t be profitable right away, and hope for a payoff later. I chose a more hands-on model. We work with what we have, but we also remain in control of our own decisions. “Maybe the ideal gym will mix climbing and parkour, with movement that’s very approachable. We need to keep making the sport accessible and always pay attention to the person who is walking into a climbing gym for the first time.” Vertige Media: Is that also why you reject franchising? Pierre Serin: Do not franchise. Seriously. That may be the best advice I can give anyone who wants to open a gym. With a franchise, someone else dictates your communications, your sales strategy, the way you welcome customers, and the way you sell punch passes or memberships. You’re no longer in control of what happens inside your own gym. I don’t want to pressure people to spend money. If they come climbing, the first reason should be because they enjoy it. I also think you need to be physically present. If you open a gym far from where you live and put someone else in charge, you stop seeing what’s actually happening. You can’t keep pushing your own ideas forward. You stop noticing the problems too, and then suddenly there’s a crisis or a strike you didn’t see coming. When you’re there every day, you can respond immediately. Vertige Media: You’ve sold shares in the company to some of your employees. Is that team making you think about a different kind of growth? Pierre Serin: Yes. Instead of building another huge gym in Toulouse, we look at rental prices and think maybe we need a different approach. We’re considering small neighborhood gyms with very little staff, low rent, and affordable prices. That model already exists in Japan. You could imagine a place that operates partly on its own, with events or social nights from time to time to keep the community aspect alive. “When you’re constantly exposed to people cutting corners and looking out only for themselves, eventually you start wondering why you shouldn’t do the same. That isn’t the spirit of climbing.” Vertige Media: If smaller gyms are part of the future, what do you think needs to be preserved in the way gyms introduce people to climbing? Pierre Serin: I don’t think a climbing gym should be reduced to competition climbing or designed around strong climbers. Route setters need to understand that families and kids are what keep our business alive. And the best setters understand that. If you give beginners boulders they can’t even figure out how to start, you lose them. You need movement that looks good, feels playful, and is accessible enough to make people want to come back. Maybe the ideal gym will mix climbing and parkour, with movement that’s very approachable. We need to keep making the sport accessible and always pay attention to the person who is walking into a climbing gym for the first time. The Solo Escalade terrace © Solo Escalade Vertige Media: You said, “People are going to have to think carefully about how they vote in 2027.” What does politics have to do with running your business? Pierre Serin: I don’t want to campaign for anyone, but running a business has taught me a few things that are pretty easy to calculate. If wages went up tomorrow, people would have more purchasing power and would start coming back to climbing gyms more often. A small company like mine can’t raise wages by 10 or 15 percent on its own. Large companies, their shareholders, and the government would need to contribute more. If people have more purchasing power, we can also pay employees better, and the community as a whole can become more supportive of one another. When you’re constantly exposed to people cutting corners and looking out only for themselves, eventually you start wondering why you shouldn’t do the same. That isn’t the spirit of climbing. If the far right comes to power, we’ll start watching one another. At the front desk, I won’t know who I can talk to or whether I can speak freely. People could also be attacked because they belong to the LGBT community. To me, that would be a terrible world.

Hiking, mountaineering, camping: natural spaces are often presented as open to everyone. But racism still runs through them, from mocking comments to suspicion. A generation of hikers of color is speaking out. And slowly, they are starting to change things—culminating this summer in a viral countertrend asserting their right to be there. © Gaspard Njock for Reporterre This article was originally published in french by Reporterre. It looks like one of the dozens of videos posted every day. A young man films himself walking along a river beneath towering mountains. His name is Omar, and he has a message for the people watching: “Get out of your neighborhoods and go hiking. It opened my eyes.” What he gets in return is a flood of vile racist comments, all boiling down to the same idea: “They better not start coming to our mountains.” Mountain trails are often portrayed as universal places to recharge. But as Omar’s story shows, the reality is harsher. For some people in France, heading into the mountains means crossing an invisible line—and sometimes being brutally reminded that they have crossed it. Warning shots Thousands of young people of color have decided to tear down that invisible barrier—and make sure people know it. In mid-August 2026, a TikTok video showing a mountain landscape appeared with a caption along the lines of: “One of the few places left in France without ‘wallah, wesh, mashallah,’ where you can still feel safe.” The post spread quickly and crystallized a familiar idea: the mountains as a last “sanctuary,” protected from certain groups of people. In response, dozens of young people of color launched the “We’re Coming” trend. They flipped the original message on its head, filming themselves hiking, camping, and summiting peaks with a single refrain: “We’re coming.” Driven by accounts including @sors2cheztoi and @iwas.here38, the trend racked up millions of views, turning a racist attack into a collective assertion that they belong in the outdoors too. “We didn’t even know the name of the mountain range that was 500 yards from our homes.” Foued, a 48-year-old Franco-Algerian Foued has spent most of his life brushing up against that invisible line. He grew up in Voreppe, near Grenoble, surrounded by the cliffs of the Vercors and Chartreuse ranges. Now 48 and French Algerian, he spent years knowing almost nothing about the mountains, just like his friends in the neighborhood. “We didn’t even know the name of the mountain range that was 500 yards from our homes.” When he was a child, his mother became ill and he was placed in a residential care home in the Vercors. For two years, he skied, hiked, and camped outdoors. “The mountains helped me get through that really hard time.” On weekends, he went back to his father’s home in the neighborhood. None of his friends there knew how to ski. Years passed before Foued found his way back to the mountains. A coworker pointed out that people from Paris were taking the train to hike practically in his backyard. He started going again, eventually working his way up to the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, or UTMB, and the GR20 long-distance trail in Corsica. He was hooked. But his presence never felt entirely unremarkable. “When there were two North Africans among 500 racers at a mountain-bike race, you thought, statistically, we stand out.” That absence has a history. “High-mountain sports were long dominated by men, shaped by a culture of performance, and largely reserved for more affluent social classes,” says geographer Léa Sallenave. Her research with young people from working-class neighborhoods in Grenoble found that the adults seen as authorities in these spaces—elected officials, mountain guides, recreational mountaineers—still largely come from more privileged backgrounds. “If you’re from a neighborhood in Paris and you have the chance to get away, you’re more likely to go rest by the ocean,” says Kovana, 28, who grew up in Essonne, outside Paris, and works delivering fruits and vegetables. “All year long, we’re stressed and physically exhausted from work. In the summer, we need a break. The mountains feel like more work.” “The Alps or the Fontainebleau forest aren’t inherently white spaces, but they become white because they’re occupied by people who experience themselves as dominant” Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, professor at Paris-VIII University Class is only part of the picture. Race matters too. “The Alps or the Fontainebleau forest aren’t inherently white spaces, but they become white because they’re occupied by people who experience themselves as dominant,” says sociologist and anthropologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, a professor at Paris 8 University. The landscape itself is not doing the excluding, she argues. The exclusion comes from people who see themselves as its rightful gatekeepers. Sallenave has documented that dynamic. In the journal Géographie et cultures, she analyzed more than 1,240 images published by 14 Alpine resorts between 2018 and 2020. The bodies pictured were overwhelmingly white, young, thin, and heterosexual. She calls this mechanism an “order of places”: the idea that the mountains have been claimed by certain groups, while others are treated as if they are crossing a line simply by showing up. The framework draws on sociologist Razmig Keucheyan, whose 2014 book summed up the argument in its title: Nature Is a Battlefield. Stares, mockery, and the racial burden Once they get onto the trails, the people Reporterre interviewed describe experiences with unsettling similarities: the feeling of being watched, the sense that they have to prove themselves, and sometimes outright ridicule and insults. Foued experienced it directly on the GR20. He and his friends asked for a cheese plate with bread, but the bread was only being served with charcuterie plates. The refuge manager became angry, and the group ended up leaving in the middle of the night. “It was just plain, stupid racism,” Foued says. Nadir Dendoune knows the feeling too. In 2008, he became the first North African to reach the summit of Mount Everest, where he held up a flag marked “93,” the number for Seine-Saint-Denis, the working-class department northeast of Paris where he grew up. “It was a political gesture. It meant: we belong everywhere.” He told the story in Un tocard sur le toit du monde (A Loser on Top of the World, Pocket, 2010), which was adapted into the 2017 French movie The Climb. Since 2019, Dendoune has spent every summer taking young people involved with France’s juvenile justice system into the Alps. He is also a patron of Apart, an organization that has used outdoor sports as a path toward employment and social inclusion for the past 20 years, including through trips to the mountains. Nadir Dendoune at the summit of Mount Everest. On one of those outings, a group of well-equipped hikers began quietly making fun of one of the teenagers because of the way he was dressed. “If people laugh at me, I don’t care. I’m old enough to take it. But these are kids, and getting them into the mountains takes months of work.” A nearly identical kind of contempt surfaced again this summer at Lac de la Muzelle in the Écrins, where Le Monde described experienced hikers making fun of newcomers’ “two-second” pop-up tents. Foued has experienced the same thing. “I could feel that some people were surprised to see us taking part in mountain-bike races or ski mountaineering. And sometimes that surprise came with little digs,” he recalls. People would comment on clothing they considered inappropriate for the sport—a soccer or basketball pair of shorts at a mountain-bike race, for example. “To me, part of it is about the codes of the sport. But sometimes it’s also a way of keeping certain people at a distance.” “I grew up in the Paris region, always surrounded by concrete. Everyone needs to touch some grass once in a while and breathe fresh air. Being able to enjoy nature and recharge shouldn’t be a privilege.” Imen, a member of the Hijabeuses. Imen, an outdoor-sports enthusiast and member of Les Hijabeuses—a collective founded in 2020 that campaigns for women who wear the hijab to be allowed to compete in official soccer and other sports competitions—describes a state of constant alertness. “On the trails, you know people are going to look at you, sometimes for a long time. Just leaving the house requires real mental preparation, and it can get to the point where it stops you from doing certain things.” For her, white privilege in the outdoors can be summed up simply: not having to worry about how other people are looking at you. Imen during an Instagram post © @sabury__ Sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas connects that vigilance to a broader mechanism. “That’s the whole problem with what people sometimes call ‘everyday racism.’ It happens in ordinary situations, but racism itself is never ordinary. People who experience racism know that these interactions are never harmless. They can have a lasting effect on the people subjected to them. And at altitude, when you’re especially vulnerable, the behavior of a refuge manager, for instance, can have serious immediate consequences.” Kovana found his own unlikely way into the mountains: playing video games with friends he had met online, until the group eventually decided to meet in person at Lac du Léat, near Grenoble. He loved it enough to start the Instagram account Sors2chez toi, where he shares his outings with infectious enthusiasm and tries to convince people from working-class neighborhoods like the one he grew up in that hiking is for them too. The racist responses online came quickly. “Stay home, we don’t want to see you here.” More recently: “Thugs in nature now. There’s nowhere left where you can have some peace.” But the comments that affect him most come from other hikers in person. When he camps, they often focus on cleanliness. “People ask me all the time whether I have something to put my trash in, as if respecting the place wouldn’t come naturally to me,” Kovana says. Most of the people he meets in the mountains are open and curious, he says. They ask questions. But every so often, something feels off. “You can tell the guy watches too much BFMTV. He’s nice, but he already has an idea in his head. And there you are, having to prove you’re not dangerous, not what he expects a Black man to be.” To help his community avoid bad experiences, Kovana regularly shares practical advice about gear, trail behavior, and respecting lakes and wildlife. Screenshot from the Instagram account @sors2cheztoi. Nadir Dendoune gives the young people he takes into the mountains an even harsher warning. “You don’t get to make a mistake. If you screw up, every French banlieue gets blamed for it. We know people are watching us.” It is the burden of having to represent an entire group—to reassure people, to be exemplary—in a way white people generally do not have to. Sociologist Maboula Soumahoro has described this as the “racial burden.” “It always falls on the person experiencing the racism,” Guénif-Souilamas says. “That’s exactly how something recreational can turn into a nightmare.” The future is theirs Over the past few years, things have started to change, in part because of social media. In June, Kovana announced a group outing to Étretat on his account. A teenage girl and her brother, who had been following him for weeks but had never dared to message him, showed up on the trail with their mother. “I loved that,” he says. Dendoune sees how different things are now. “My Everest climb in 2008 had a limited impact. If social media had existed back then, it would have been crazy. A kid sees someone who looks like him in the mountains—like the YouTuber Inoxtag—and thinks, ‘I can do that too.’” In Grenoble, Foued also follows local hikers of color, including @iwas.here38, who post videos of alpine lakes and summits accessible by bus. “Since they started posting those videos, I feel like it’s easier for people to take that first step.” “I think things are going to change, even if the political rhetoric targeting Black and Arab people doesn’t help. They need to get used to seeing us in the mountains. Not against them. With them.” Nadir Dendoune, journalist Many of those creators are women. Dounia, known online as @the_routarde_voilée, documents her hitchhiking trips. Aché founded the organization Our Summit, which runs free outdoor outings for young people from the banlieues. “Visibility is a political act because, for us as women who wear the hijab, visibility can also put us at risk,” says Imen. In 2023, she helped organize an ascent of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, with eight French women of color from the banlieues, guided entirely by women. “You get Islamophobic comments that are even worse than what men get.” Other groups want to take things further. Rando fragile organizes fully planned hikes from Paris that are meant to be accessible “to everyone.” In southern France, PSartrek Club operates in the same spirit and emphasizes what it calls “real connections.” “With these groups, we’re no longer trying to fit ourselves into a space that wasn’t designed with us in mind,” says anthropologist Jasmijn Rana, who has led a European research project on ethnoracial inequality in outdoor recreation since 2025. “We’re creating a space that was.” One question remains. Reporterre asked Nacira Guénif-Souilamas: Why so much hatred, and why now? Her answer flips the question around. If racist comments are multiplying under videos like Omar’s, she says, that does not necessarily mean things are moving backward. It may be a sign that more and more people of color are going into the mountains, filming themselves there, and feeling that they belong. “They’re saying to themselves, ‘If I want to do this, why should I deny myself?’” For Guénif-Souilamas, the hostility says a great deal about the people who see the mountains becoming more shared—and feel their sense of exclusivity slipping away. “I grew up in the Paris region, always surrounded by concrete,” Imen says. “Everyone needs to touch some grass once in a while and breathe fresh air. Being able to enjoy nature and recharge shouldn’t be a privilege.” “I think things are going to change, even if the political rhetoric targeting Black and Arab people doesn’t help,” Dendoune says. “They need to get used to seeing us in the mountains. Not against them. With them.”

After discovering bouldering in Paris, Sami and Mamoun returned to the city where they grew up with an idea: open a climbing gym. With Tla3, they hope to do more than build walls. They want to help create a climbing scene that feels more local, more accessible, and more connected to Moroccan climbers. First climbing sessions organized by Tla3. Courtesy of Sami. Over six months, they looked at 15, maybe 20 different spaces. Every time, they ran into the same impossible equation: enough ceiling height for bouldering walls, a central location in a sprawling city, parking, and, above all, rent that made sense for a sport still in its infancy in Casablanca. Then Sami and Mamoun found it: 4,300 square feet, 18-foot ceilings, offices nearby, residential neighborhoods just minutes away, and enough room to finally build what they had imagined. About 3,200 square feet will be devoted to climbing, with roughly 215 linear feet of wall, plus a café and a small yoga room. Tla3 is now aiming to open by the end of 2026. “Honestly, we couldn’t have asked for anything better,” Sami tells us. To understand why two guys from Casablanca have spent years pursuing this project, you have to start in Paris. Back to Casablanca Sami grew up in Casablanca. His mother is Moroccan, his father French. At 18, after attending Lycée Lyautey, he moved to Paris for college and eventually went into tech as a product manager. Sports weren’t a major part of his life at the time. He had climbed a little in high school, but it hadn’t made much of an impression. That changed almost by accident when a friend took him to Arkose Nation, a bouldering gym in Paris. “It was like this whole new world opened up in front of me,” he remembers. What hooked him quickly went beyond the climbing itself. He loved bouldering, the puzzle-solving side of figuring out a move, but also everything that happened between attempts and at the base of the walls. “I spent all my time at the gym. I loved meeting people, talking, and just having fun.” The gym became an “escape” for Sami, and almost immediately, it made him think about Casablanca. “When you’re young, there really isn’t a place like that,” he says. Even then, he wasn’t just imagining climbing walls. He pictured somewhere you could meet friends, get to know new people, grab a drink, hang out after climbing, and host local cultural events. “We’re still two men, and we don’t necessarily have the perspective or experience a woman would” The idea could have stayed a daydream. Instead, Sami decided to learn the business. He left tech and took jobs at Climbing District and later Climb Up, both major French climbing-gym operators in the Paris region. He spent two years learning how gyms work and how their economics fit together before returning to Morocco. Paris is also where he met Mamoun, another Casablanca native. Over time, the two climbers realized they wanted the same thing: “to grow climbing where we grew up.” Getting Casa Climbing Bouldering was partly a personal choice: it was the discipline Sami had fallen in love with. But it also made practical sense. Roped climbing requires more height, more equipment, and more safety infrastructure. Bouldering has a much lower barrier to entry. “You show up, put on climbing shoes, and climb,” Sami says. For two founders trying to introduce the sport to a new audience, that simplicity matters. Casablanca already has the historic wall run by the Club Alpin Français, which is mostly focused on roped climbing, along with a small bouldering area. But the city still doesn’t have a modern gym dedicated entirely to bouldering. Marrakech got there first a few years ago with Atlas Elevation, which offers both bouldering and roped climbing. For Sami, though, Casablanca was always the obvious choice. It’s his city, the place he knows best, and Morocco’s main economic hub. Before they even had a building, the partners wanted to find out whether there was actually an audience. So they built a spray wall—a training wall packed densely with holds—and started organizing sessions. About 230 people have climbed on it so far, according to Sami. The founders found more Moroccan climbers than they expected, but they also saw plenty of people coming in simply to try climbing without really knowing what they were getting into. Left: Sami and Mamoun at the future Tla3 space. Right: the spray wall used for the first sessions. Courtesy of Samy. Part of the challenge is changing some deeply rooted assumptions about the sport. “People tend to think, ‘Oh, that’s for kids.’” And that is exactly the audience Tla3 wants to reach: people who are still outside climbing culture. Existing climbers, Sami figures, will find their way to the gym on their own, especially with so few alternatives. “Our core audience is really young adults looking for that kind of third place, somewhere to hang out and have a good time,” he says. The grading and setting will reflect that goal: fewer extremely difficult problems, more beginner and intermediate climbing. Broadening the audience will also mean thinking carefully about what kind of space Tla3 becomes. At one of their sessions, the founders counted 18 women and four men, something they want to take seriously as they build the gym. They hope to reach gender parity on staff, post a code of conduct, and are considering women-only sessions. “We’re still two men, and we don’t necessarily have the perspective or experience a woman would,” Sami says. “I’d like Moroccans to reclaim some connection to that nature for themselves” Then there is the question of price, which inevitably complicates any goal of making climbing widely accessible. For now, the gym is considering a full-price day pass of around 140 Moroccan dirhams, or about $14, with discounts for students and others. For comparison, the median monthly wage for jobs registered with Morocco’s social-security system was 3,173 dirhams, about $320, in 2024. A single session would already represent more than 4 percent of that monthly income. For regular climbers, Sami says he wants monthly access to stay somewhere around $45 to $55, or roughly 430 to 540 dirhams. That amounts to about 14 to 17 percent of the same median wage. Despite Tla3’s stated goal of making climbing accessible, that kind of expense will still be out of reach for a significant share of the population. “The idea isn’t to set a price that makes this an elitist sport,” Sami says. Tla3 also plans to hold free climbing days and wants to keep taking its portable wall to schools, nonprofits, and other organizations where people who might never otherwise encounter climbing can give it a try. Moving Mountains The gym’s walls will be manufactured abroad, and much of the founders’ professional experience comes from French climbing gyms. Tla3 is also borrowing from a model that has become common in many Western cities: the bouldering gym as a social hub, not just a place to work out. Sami and Mamoun aren’t trying to hide those influences. Their challenge is making sure Tla3 doesn’t feel like a piece of Paris dropped into Casablanca. The name is one sign of that effort. Tla3 is written in phonetic Darija, with the “3” standing in for the Arabic letter ع. Depending on the context, it can mean “go up” or “climb.” It is the kind of word you might hear in a taxi or tossed into an everyday conversation. “It’s a really common expression. We use it all the time,” Sami says. The logo combines the phonetic spelling with Arabic script, while the café, events, and collaborations are intended to involve local businesses and organizations whenever possible. Casablanca itself is part of the idea. Sami describes it as a “melting pot,” a city where a single sentence might move between Darija, French, and English. “We wanted to make the model we discovered in France our own, locally,” he says. That idea of taking ownership goes beyond the gym. Morocco is one of the major climbing destinations in the Mediterranean region. Taghia, Todgha, Tafraoute, and the High Atlas have drawn climbers from Europe and North America for years. Local guides have worked in these mountains for decades. Yet a significant part of the modern climbing history of these cliffs has been written by outsiders: the people who explored new areas, established routes and boulder problems, bolted climbs, and produced guidebooks. Sami began thinking about that more seriously once he started climbing outdoors himself. Flipping through guidebooks, one thing eventually jumped out at him. “There isn’t a single boulder problem with a name a Moroccan could identify with. The names are in English or French.” His observation closely echoes the work of anthropologist Thomas Fouquet, whose research Vertige Media recently covered on Morocco’s “sporting mountain”: a national landscape whose recreational uses, codes, and stories have long been shaped from abroad. The future Tla3 space, still under construction. Courtesy of Sami. Sami is not dismissive of the climbers who came to Morocco to establish routes, bolt cliffs, or introduce these areas to the broader climbing world. On the contrary, he points to efforts aimed at passing on climbing skills and knowledge to people who live in villages near the crags. But he would like to see the balance shift. “I’d like Moroccans to reclaim some connection to that nature for themselves,” he says. Not to close the cliffs to anyone else—“everyone is welcome”—but so that people who live just a few miles from the rock are not left watching from the sidelines while visitors come looking for sun, stone, and adventure. Tla3 hopes to play a small part in that shift. Sami and Mamoun have already met with several guides and organized a few outdoor experiences. For them, climbing on plastic is not the end goal. “I know climbing can be a gateway to the outdoors,” Sami says. But before they can think too far ahead to the rock, they still have to finish construction, work through administrative delays, and pull off an opening that has already been pushed back several times. For now, their first bet is much simpler: get people in Casablanca who have never climbed before to walk through the door. What comes next might eventually lead all the way to the cliffs—and, maybe, to the next generation of boulder problems with names written in Darija.

Fresh off a Piolet d’Or with Benjamin Védrines for their ascent of Jannu East, Nicolas Jean now belongs to the upper echelon of world alpinism. His new status also says something about a discipline still finding its way toward professionalization, even as performance advances faster than the profession itself. Nicolas Jean © Simond The question seems simple enough: How do you describe yourself when you now spend much of your time pursuing the highest levels of alpinism? On September 3, the day before the 2026 Piolets d’Or winners were announced, Nicolas Jean was still unsure how to answer. Mountain guide, definitely. Professional athlete? That was harder. “It still feels a little strange,” he told us. The status is new, and he is still getting used to it. “Sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that you can get paid just to do mountain sports. It seems strange that you could make a living doing that.” Then he finally settled on an answer: “I often have a hard time saying I’m an athlete, so I usually say I’m a mountain guide.” Twenty-four hours later, the word became a little harder to avoid. Jean and Benjamin Védrines were named among the 2026 Piolets d’Or recipients for their first ascent of Jannu East, completed in October 2025. At 27, Jean had received one of the highest honors in world alpinism. That leaves a much more practical question: What does it actually mean to be a professional alpinist? Under the Radar On paper, Jean now checks plenty of boxes. Born in 1998, trained as a carpenter, and also a ski instructor and mountain guide, he joined Simond’s athlete team in 2025. But that shift is recent. In September 2025, Alpine Mag published a profile of his “new status as an (almost) professional alpinist.” In January, Le Dauphiné Libéré described him as part of a generation “quietly moving toward professionalization.” “For now, professional alpinists are still in a pretty precarious position” A year after the first of those profiles, Jean remains more cautious. Ask him about strength and conditioning, nutrition, or recovery, and he eventually sums up the situation this way: “For now, professional alpinists are still in a pretty precarious position.” As far as he knows, none of them has a full team of dietitians, physical therapists, and other specialists around them like athletes do in some sports. “We’re not at cycling’s level yet,” he said. When we pointed out how makeshift the whole setup still sounded, he agreed: “It’s still very amateur, even if we’re trying to do things as well as we can.” Nicolas Jean © Simond So “professional” means something particular in alpinism. There is no championship circuit where the best athletes can make a living directly from their results, and no professional teams modeled on team sports or cycling. The Piolets d’Or explicitly embrace a different philosophy. Their charter values style, exploration, commitment, self-reliance, technical difficulty, and “economy of means” rather than a simple ranking of results. Elite performance is very real. The profession meant to support it is far less standardized. Making Do Jean’s preparation for the first attempt on Jannu East in 2024 gives a concrete sense of that gap. Benjamin Védrines and Léo Billon each had a strength and conditioning coach. Jean did not. “They’d tell me a little about what they were doing, and then I’d kind of put together my own thing,” he said. “At the time, I was still working as a carpenter.” Skiing steep terrain all winter with Védrines became part of his training for the expedition. “We’re still in the very early stages when it comes to training,” he said. “Right now, we’re more like the Tour de France in the 1950s” That does not mean French alpinism has no structure behind it. The FFCAM’s Groupe Excellence Alpinisme National, or GEAN, has existed since the early 1990s. Every three years, it selects a group of young alpinists and supports them through a training cycle that includes several camps and a final expedition. Védrines and Billon are among those who have gone through the program. But while GEAN develops high-level alpinists, it is not a permanent professional environment with an employer, medical staff, and day-to-day support. Jean knows the difference well. Asked whether ENSA, the French school where mountain guides are trained, also helps athletes pursue high-level performance, he answered immediately: “They train you to become a guide. That’s it. After that, you figure it out yourself.” In practice, figuring it out means looking for information online, in books, and from other climbers and alpinists. Nicolas Jean © Simond A few minutes later, Jean offered a comparison. “We’re still in the very early stages when it comes to training,” he said. “Right now, we’re more like the Tour de France in the 1950s.” He immediately explained what he meant. Cyclists back then were already posting “really impressive average speeds,” he noted, even though training methods and everything else that now surrounds athletic performance would go on to evolve dramatically. The comparison fits. On July 8, Jean completed the Meije traverse from La Grave in 4 hours, 11 minutes, taking nearly 27 minutes off Benjamin Védrines’s previous benchmark. The performances are already extraordinarily advanced. The systems supporting them still have plenty of room to develop. Jean is convinced that matters. “I think that’s one of the reasons alpinism is going to keep evolving so much,” he said. Getting the Word Out Then there is the other side of becoming a professional: finding a way to pay for it. An interview Jean gave Outside in December 2025 echoed what he told us on September 3. In the mountains, he explained, an extraordinary performance is not always enough to attract sponsors. You also have to know how to tell the story. Jean used Rafael Nadal as an example. In his view, Nadal’s results alone would have been enough to establish his economic value even if the tennis star had barely communicated publicly. In alpinism, Jean said, “you have to.” That is not a minor part of the job. Photos, films, social media, and interviews can help build the partnerships that then free up time to train and go on expeditions. That side of the profession does not seem to hold much appeal for Jean. In the same interview, the guide said he cared more about “recognition from [his] peers” than recognition from the general public, and expressed wariness about social media. He also said he admired alpinists who could do major things without necessarily telling everyone about them. The logic is straightforward. To spend more time in the mountains, you need time. To free up that time, you need to be able to make a living. And to make a living, a performance sometimes has to become visible beyond the small circle of people who fully understand what it means. That is exactly the line Jean still seems to be learning how to navigate. Asked why he has trouble introducing himself as a professional athlete, he said the people around him every day have now gotten used to his new status. The awkwardness comes mostly with people he knows less well. “It doesn’t feel like a very natural way to introduce myself,” he said. “But I’ll get there.” The next day, a Piolet d’Or arrived. The word “athlete” will probably catch up soon enough.

At the base of a boulder problem, some climbers spend long seconds tracing the holds with their eyes, while others seem to understand the sequence almost immediately. Research in climbing, golf, and baseball raises a surprisingly profound question: As we learn how to act in an environment, do we also start to perceive it differently? © Louis Lepron for Vertige Media There’s a moment at the base of a boulder problem when you haven’t started climbing yet, but in a sense you already have. You find the start, trace the holds up to the finish, then backtrack because something doesn’t add up. You mime a cross move, hesitate over a foothold, stare at a hold without knowing what you could possibly do with it. Then someone else walks up, looks at the exact same wall for much less time, and starts climbing with a sequence that, in hindsight, seems almost obvious. It’s easy to chalk that up to experience. But what exactly does experience change? Do experienced climbers think faster? Do they remember more? Or does the wall itself, in some sense, look different to them? 51 Seconds In 2024, a team of sports science and cognition researchers fitted 60 climbers with eye-tracking glasses while they previewed two boulder problems. All of the participants were men, divided into three groups of 20: intermediate, advanced, and elite. The first problem was designed for advanced climbers, the second for elite climbers. Each participant had five minutes to inspect and attempt the problem, but there was no required preview time. Climbers decided for themselves when they had seen enough to start. That allowed the researchers to measure not only where they looked, but also how long each climber felt they needed to come up with a workable sequence. They seem to need fewer passes through the problem before deciding they have a sequence they trust enough to try On the first problem, intermediate climbers spent an average of 108 seconds figuring out their solution. Advanced climbers took 74 seconds. Elite climbers took 51. The intermediates also scanned through the problem about 2.5 times on average, compared with 1.5 times for the advanced climbers and 1.1 times for the elites. Among the elite climbers, 85 percent followed a relatively linear visual path from the starting holds toward the finish. Intermediate climbers were much more likely to backtrack, jump from one section of the wall to another, and then start over. So the difference isn’t simply that stronger climbers save a few seconds before pulling on. They seem to need fewer passes through the problem before deciding they have a sequence they trust enough to try. Once expertise is established, part of the problem appears to get solved faster. The question is why. In the Eye of the Beholder For a moment, leave the climbing gym and head to a golf course. In 2008, psychologist Jessica Witt and her colleagues asked 46 golfers to estimate the size of the hole after playing a round. The golfers who had played better that day perceived the hole as larger than those who had played worse. More surprisingly, their handicap—a better measure of their usual skill level—was not significantly associated with how large they thought the hole was. In other words, it wasn’t simply a case of “better golfers see a bigger hole.” Perception appeared to vary with what someone had just been able to do. Findings like these became part of a body of research later discussed by researcher Rob Gray under the term “embodied perception.” The basic idea is straightforward: We may not always perceive the world as an external scene that exists independently of us. What we see may also be calibrated, at least in part, by what we are capable of doing within it. Psychologists sometimes describe this process as ‘chunking.’ With experience, several pieces of information stop being processed individually and become a single familiar pattern Other experiments have produced similar results. A target can appear closer when someone has a tool that allows them to reach it. Baseball players who were hitting better on a particular day judged the ball to be larger. In Witt’s golf experiments, participants putting from an easier position later judged the hole to be larger than participants who had attempted the putt from farther away. It’s an appealing idea—perhaps a little too appealing for some psychologists, who dispute whether these experiments actually demonstrate a change in perception itself. The differences might instead come from judgment, memory, or the way participants interpret and respond to the task. The debate remains unresolved. But applied to climbing, the question is still fascinating. Is a hold simply a shape with a given size and orientation? Or does it also appear to us in terms of what our body believes it can do with it? A Sixth Sense Research conducted specifically on climbers offers one possible answer. In 2002, movement scientists Mark Boschker, Frank Bakker, and Claire Michaels, then at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, asked seven expert climbers, four novices, and nine non-climbers to memorize a wall containing 23 holds and then reconstruct its layout. The experts remembered more information. More importantly, they remembered a different kind of information. The inexperienced participants focused more on the shape, orientation, and location of individual holds. The expert climbers paid more attention to their functional properties: what the holds could be used for and how they related to one another. That is a fundamental difference. A beginner might see a small edge here, a foothold there, and a big hold farther up. With experience, that same arrangement may immediately suggest opposition between the hands and feet, a cross move, or a foot switch. The number of holds hasn’t changed. What changes is the unit in which the climber reads them. Psychologists sometimes describe this process as “chunking.” With experience, several pieces of information stop being processed individually and become a single familiar pattern. The same thing happens in chess: An experienced player does not necessarily memorize every piece one by one, but recognizes entire configurations. Climbing adds another layer because the body is part of the equation. A hold matters because you can reach it, push against it, pull on it, hook a heel on it, or use it to shift your center of gravity. As a climber’s movement repertoire grows, certain possibilities become easier to spot. That may be where the eye-tracking study becomes most interesting. Elite climbers don’t have faster eyes. They simply have more patterns available to recognize. And when the second problem in the experiment gets harder, their advantage shrinks. The elite climbers spend more time looking and scan more of the wall. When they encounter something that doesn’t fit what they already know, their eyes start searching again too. None of this means expertise literally makes a hold look bigger, as if someone had zoomed in on an image. The golf research doesn’t prove that, and neither does the climbing study. Taken together, though, these studies suggest something subtler: Seeing is not simply a matter of receiving an image. It is also knowing what you can do with it.

Climbing Business Journal has published the second edition of its survey on pay in U.S. climbing gyms. Job satisfaction is up almost across the board, but the data points to an industry that is becoming more professional without fixing some of its biggest blind spots. An analysis. (cc) Megan O'Hanlon / Unsplash 3.47 out of 5. That’s the average job-satisfaction score reported by assistant routesetters—the people who design and set the boulder problems climbers come in to try every night. No other non-management position scored lower. Assistant coaches came in just behind them, at 3.56. In other words, the two jobs most directly responsible for creating what a climbing gym sells are also held by some of its least satisfied employees. The figure comes from a dashboard published August 27, 2026, by Climbing Business Journal, the U.S. trade publication that has covered the climbing-gym business for more than a decade. This is the second edition of a survey launched in 2024, and it arrives at a pivotal moment. A year earlier, gym operators surveyed by the same publication were already describing a tougher business environment, squeezed between rising costs and declining customer spending. At the same time, workers have been finding new ways to increase their leverage by unionizing gym after gym. One caveat: this is not a global snapshot. The 1,590 responses collected across two survey rounds—the latest ran from April 1 through May 31, 2026—came from 38 countries but were overwhelmingly North American. The publication makes no attempt to hide that limitation: its averages reflect “the survey, not the industry.” Still, the survey does something the climbing business has long lacked. Jobs that were once understood mostly through personal experience and conversations between coworkers can now be compared across 34 positions with actual numbers attached. Happier, Really? The first finding is almost counterintuitive: job satisfaction is rising. Of the 30 positions included in both editions of the survey, satisfaction increased in 26, regardless of gym size or employee tenure. Pay explains some of that change. Average compensation, adjusted for local cost of living, rose 27 percent in the U.S. South and 21 percent in the West. Benefits moved in the same direction—but not for everyone. Among full-time employees, the share receiving health insurance or retirement benefits increased for nearly every position. Among part-time workers, it fell for every single one. Workers stretched too thin, expected to juggle several roles, underpaid for the responsibilities they carry, and unable to keep up with the rising cost of living in their cities Climbing Business Journal offers another, less flattering explanation. Research has shown that reported job satisfaction can rise during periods of economic uncertainty, as opportunities to leave become harder to find and the stability of having a job becomes more valuable—“especially in a passion-driven industry,” the publication notes. In other words, a worker who no longer feels free to quit may report being more satisfied without actually being treated any better. One of the survey’s most important additions this year is that respondents reported the number of hours they actually work. Nearly one in four U.S. full-time employees works more than 40 hours a week at their primary gym alone. By broader U.S. standards, that figure may not sound especially high. Gallup estimates that roughly half of full-time American workers put in more than 40 hours a week. But the climbing-gym figure leaves out shifts at other gyms, coaching or teaching on the side, and second jobs outside the industry. The real workload is therefore likely higher in a business where holding multiple jobs is common. The survey’s open-ended responses fill in the rest of the picture, and the same complaints show up again and again: workers stretched too thin, expected to juggle several roles, underpaid for the responsibilities they carry, and unable to keep up with the rising cost of living in their cities. More than the raw number of hours, those day-to-day conditions fuel burnout. And they hit hardest in jobs that cannot simply be put on hold: the routesetter responsible for keeping the climbing fresh and the coach responsible for keeping members engaged. A Gap That Won’t Close The obvious antidote is paid time off. In the United States, that usually falls under the acronym PTO, for “paid time off,” a bucket that can include vacation, holidays, and sick leave in a country where federal law guarantees none of them. The survey average is 116 hours a year, or just under three weeks. But the distribution tells a more revealing story: 74 percent of part-time employees and 9 percent of full-time employees receive no PTO at all. Among people working more than 40 hours a week, nearly half receive less than the survey average. Administrative and management positions continue to receive the most paid time off. In practice, paid rest is tied more closely to seniority and responsibility than to how physically or mentally demanding a job is. After adjusting for cost of living, women’s average annual salaries remain 11 percent lower than men’s, while nonbinary workers earn 23 percent less Another finding from 2024 remains firmly in place two years later: pay varies by gender. After adjusting for cost of living, women’s average annual salaries remain 11 percent lower than men’s, while nonbinary workers earn 23 percent less. The gap actually widens with experience. Among respondents with at least 11 years in the industry and the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, it reaches 29 percent. Across both survey rounds, men earned more in 64 percent of the positions measured. The climbing industry still performs better than the United States as a whole. According to data compiled by USAFacts, women nationally earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, compared with 89 cents in climbing gyms. A smaller gap is still a gap. When Pay Becomes Leverage These numbers are not appearing in a quiet industry. For months, employees at U.S. climbing gyms have been organizing, with pay and working conditions at the center of a labor fight that Vertige Media has followed from the beginning—from the wave of gym unionization to campaigns organized under the Climbing Workers United banner, which has connected efforts from one facility to another. In some places, the dispute has become openly confrontational, including a boycott campaign against Movement Gyms, one of the country’s largest climbing-gym chains. Aaron Vanek, a prominent figure in the organizing effort, previously explained the forces behind that campaign in our pages. Seen in that context, the raises documented by Climbing Business Journal stop looking like a simple statistical trend. They become part of an ongoing negotiation in which both sides need data. There is an important warning, however, before trying to apply these numbers to France. The U.S. data cannot simply be read through a French lens. Five weeks of legally guaranteed paid vacation, health insurance that is not tied to your employer, and a collective bargaining framework fundamentally change the equation. But the survey does expose a gap by comparison. France’s climbing-gym market has grown dramatically, yet to our knowledge, no public survey tracks what the thousands of people working in those gyms earn or how long they stay in their jobs. By 2026, though, that story is getting harder to sustain. The climbing industry increasingly looks like any other business sector: one shaped by growth, professionalization, bankruptcies, consolidation, and finance Climbing has always been full of people willing to earn less in exchange for staying close to something they love. That model helped build the industry, and it remains one of its biggest blind spots. When working in climbing is presented as a perk in itself, asking for more can quickly be treated as a sign of ingratitude. By 2026, though, that story is getting harder to sustain. The climbing industry increasingly looks like any other business sector: one shaped by growth, professionalization, bankruptcies, consolidation, and finance. It is a world where some gym owners can build real wealth. It is also a world where it is becoming harder to convince a younger generation that working 40 hours a week should be its own reward because the job happens to involve climbing. And it is becoming harder to pretend labor law somehow matters less here. That is exactly where numbers become useful. The assistant routesetter who rated their job satisfaction at 3.47 out of 5 did not need this report to tell them they were tired. But the report gives that fatigue context: a salary range for the job, a benchmark for hours worked, and a way to compare their situation with everyone else’s. No statistic has ever signed a union contract, and none of these numbers will close a pay gap on their own. But once an industry starts measuring itself, workers and employers have something concrete to negotiate over. Climbing gyms have long known how to count visits, memberships, and revenue. Now they are beginning to measure the people who keep the whole operation running. For better or worse? Read the full Climbing Business Journal report here.

In the French Basque Country, Mondarrain tops out at 2,457 feet. It’s neither the highest peak nor the hardest. But on a clear day, you can see all the way to the beaches of the Atlantic from the summit. I hiked up in August with 29 pounds on my back, good gear, and the thought that mountains don’t have to be inaccessible to be worth the trip. The summit of Mondarrain © Vertige Media I’ve always preferred the planning side of hiking: reading maps, choosing routes. It took me a long time to start thinking seriously about gear. At first, I didn’t have the money. I wasn’t particularly interested, either. These days, equipment is part of the routine because, as with so many things in life, the right tools can help you do more of what you love. The mountains, long seen as the domain of the well-equipped and the bold, are also there for people who head uphill simply because it’s beautiful. Peaks like Mondarrain are perfect for that. That morning, sometime before noon, we leave the parking lot in one of Itxassou’s oldest neighborhoods, where, two centuries ago, many of the houses were still sheep barns. The village, less than half an hour from Biarritz, has the Basque charm you see on seaside posters: red sandstone walls, exposed timber framing. And closed shutters, because the heat has already taken over the day. It’s close to 77 degrees when we start climbing a trail that begins just beyond the last red-and-white facades. Walking on Clouds Underfoot, my Hoka Speedgoat 7s roll over the gravel, their 37-millimeter heel stack making each step feel surprisingly soft. They’re the latest model in a long-running line, and the ride is comfortable. The foam cushions the weight coming down through my heels and gives a little bounce back. With 29 pounds on my back, I’ll take it. My daughter is asleep. For her, this mountain is a hammock. Meanwhile, bouncing along in my shoes, I feel like a cartoon character. The first part of the climb crosses a long, exposed meadow under an August sun that is absolutely not messing around. My answer is a black, short-sleeve Patagonia Capilene Cool Sun shirt. The fabric moves sweat away before it has time to soak in and provides UV protection on the skin it covers. When you’re carrying a kid on your back, the last thing you want to do is dig around for sunscreen at the bottom of your pack. Twenty minutes in, my shoulders aren’t burning. The shirt is even drying as I walk. It’s pretty remarkable, and I find myself smiling at the thought that outdoor brands really do keep finding new ways to make this stuff work better. The Hoka SpeedGoat 7 © Maxime de Courchelle Halfway up, three stone blocks rise from the meadow. This is where the first wide view opens up: the hills of Labourd, the historic region of the French Basque Country; the ridges of Artzamendi behind them, the highest peak in Labourd at 3,038 feet; and Itxassou below, suddenly looking like a miniature version of the Tour de France’s red-and-white polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey. We stop for a drink. The stones look like menhirs. Maybe they are. The massif is home to stone circles dating from roughly 1300 to 600 BCE, high-elevation burial sites from the Bronze Age. With dry feet and what feel like two little cushions of cloud under my heels, hiking suddenly seems like a perfectly good time for an archaeological detour. The forest comes next. We pass beneath a short, dense stand of beech trees that finally gives us some relief from the heat. Not from the grade, though. The trail steepens. Tight switchbacks pile up one after another, the kind of section where you end up putting your hands on your knees to keep driving upward. This is where the Odlo shorts earn their keep. They have a baggy cut, with polyamide and elastane fabric, so there’s plenty of room for big steps without anything pulling or catching. Four zippered pockets. Car keys on the right, turrón on the left. I can move freely, even on the steeper terrain. Climb and Feel At about 2,300 feet, just below the summit, we hear voices. A group of young climbers is working a short wall. I stop to watch. I have a partial pulley tear in my right ring finger, so yes, I’m a little bummed. Climbing short routes with a view across the entire Basque Country looks like a pretty good way to spend the day. I console myself with the idea that standing there and taking it all in fits neatly with the philosophy of Pyreneism. “Climb, write, and feel,” Henri Beraldi wrote in Cent ans aux Pyrénées. Pyreneism developed in part as an alternative to the Alpine obsession with performance. Writers and scientists argued that the Pyrenees were something to experience and understand before they were something to conquer. That said, I am still wearing trail-running shoes. The Speedgoats were designed for ultralong races—we’re talking 112 miles, give or take—and they grip well. But what matters here is what that actually means on a hike. With weight on my shoulders, the thick cushioning takes some of the sting out of rocks underfoot, makes the descent easier, and leaves my knees in better shape for the next day. The Odlo shorts and the Patagonia T-shirt Then the summit plateau suddenly opens in front of us, along with a cross and a flagpole where the ikurriña, the Basque flag, snaps in the warm wind. We sit down in the grass. The Pyrenees spread out across the horizon, from Pic d’Anie to Pic d’Orhy, from the Spanish ridgeline to the first plains of Béarn. To the left, the Nive River winds toward Cambo-les-Bains. Look farther still, beyond the terrain as it gradually flattens out, and the horizon changes color. It becomes paler, almost translucent. Those are the pine forests of the Landes. Beyond them, too far away to really make out but hinted at by that distinctive brightness, are the beaches. Labenne, maybe. The Atlantic, definitely. Around us, scattered through the short grass, are ruins: old collapsed walls that nearly disappear into the landscape. In November 1813, as Wellington’s armies advanced out of Spain and back onto French soil, Marshal Soult established defenses along these heights. Mondarrain formed the far left end of his entire line, a natural strongpoint. In military terms, it was a redoubt: a small fortified position built to hold the line. We make it back down in an hour. The shoes absorb the impacts, and my knees barely notice the terrain. The benefit of all that cushioning is most obvious on the descent. There’s nothing heroic about it. Just comfort, and a little help for joints that have started to creak. Plus the slightly ridiculous feeling that I’m bounding downhill like a mountain goat. Translate “Speedgoat” and you’ll get the idea. Mondarrain is nowhere near the highest summit in the Pyrenees. But that morning, with good gear and no need to rush, it was a pleasure. Practical Information for Hiking Mondarrain: Starting from the Ateka/Sanoki neighborhood in Itxassou, allow about two hours for roughly 2,130 feet of elevation gain. There are a few rocky sections near the summit, but nothing technically difficult. Gear We Used: Shoes: Hoka Speedgoat 7 — €165 Shirt: Patagonia Capilene Cool Sun — €75 Shorts: Odlo Essential Cargo Baggy — €99.95 Les chaussures : Hoka SpeedGoat 7 à 164,90 euros Le haut : Patagonia Capilene Cool Sun, 75 euros Le short : Odlo Essential Cargo Baggy à 99,95 euros

In India, two organizations are fighting over who gets to represent sport climbing. One is recognized by World Climbing. The other claims the country needs a dedicated national federation. Caught in the middle are athletes short on money, visibility, and, at times, answers. Vertige Media examined years of documents and spoke with the key players behind a governance dispute that is slowing Indian climbing’s rise. Climbing walls at the Indian Mountaineering Foundation center in New Delhi (cc) Pulakit Singh / Wikimedia Commons Behind the alphabet soup of organizations and legitimacy claims, the consequences are immediate: visas that are hard to plan for, flights booked at the last minute, competitions prepared in uncertainty, and public funding caught in the middle. Official letters, court orders, federation exchanges: Vertige Media reviewed several years of documents and collected responses from World Climbing, the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, and the Sport Climbing Federation of India. On the ground, several athletes and people close to the sport describe an opaque, underfunded system where fear of losing opportunities shapes what people are willing to say. Two Ropes The first organization in this tangle is the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, or IMF. Created in the wake of an Indian expedition to Cho Oyu, an 8,000-meter peak in the Himalaya, the organization officially became the IMF in 1961. It later joined the IFSC on January 27, 2007, as one of the 57 founding federations of the international governing body now known as World Climbing. “Indian climbers are suffering and are being deprived of their dues” Indian Olympic Association (IOA) Facing it is the Sport Climbing Federation of India, or SCFI, which says India needs a dedicated national federation for the sport. In an exchange with Vertige Media, its secretary general, Colonel SP Malik, said the organization was created in March 2022 after the Indian Olympic Association, or IOA, concluded that the IMF could not, in his view, be recognized as the sport federation for climbing. The SCFI says its mission is to “organize, conduct, regulate, promote and develop” sport climbing in India. Its argument is straightforward: since climbing became an Olympic sport, India needs a dedicated body structured across its states and Union Territories. In a letter dated April 5, 2022, the IOA asked the IMF to notify World Climbing that it would end its international membership “in the national interest.” The Olympic committee wrote that the IMF “is not a federation,” but a foundation organized by geographic zones. More importantly, it said support from the IOA, the Sports Authority of India, and India’s Ministry of Sports “cannot be provided to climbers” without a recognized national federation for climbing. Later, the IOA followed up in even stronger terms, saying “Indian climbers are suffering and are being deprived of their dues.” It asked the IMF to “surrender its membership of the IFSC” so that the SCFI could become a member of the international body. The SCFI submitted its application in March 2022. World Climbing responded with one condition: it needed a termination letter from the IMF, because its statutes do not allow two members from the same country. That remains the central blockage. Contacted by Vertige Media, the IMF said the 2022 matter had been “filed and closed” after an “appropriate response” to the IOA. The SCFI disputes that version. SP Malik called it “false” and said the IMF should provide evidence of such an agreement. The IOA did not respond to multiple requests from Vertige Media before publication. The institutional dispute does not appear to be over. Three orders from the Delhi High Court reviewed by Vertige Media show that the SCFI has taken the matter to court, in a case registered as W.P.(C) 19546/2025. As of April 16, 2026, the case was still pending, with the next hearing scheduled for September 21, 2026. Internationally, however, World Climbing continues to recognize the IMF. The organization confirmed to Vertige Media that it is “aware of another Indian organization seeking to be recognized,” but said the IMF, “as one of the founding members of World Climbing, is the current member representing climbing in India.” As for any emergency measures, World Climbing said, “At this stage, no provisional measures have been discussed.” On Their Own Dime For athletes, the fight shows up in very practical ways: limited resources, tight deadlines, constant uncertainty, and heavy dependence on administrators. In response to criticism, the IMF says “all participation in international events is based on the national ranking system published on the website.” The SCFI rejects that view and points instead to the absence of a dedicated national federation for the discipline. The case of Anil*, an Indian paraclimber, illustrates how the system can stall in real time. Hoping to compete in the World Climbing Para Series in Laval, France, scheduled for late August 2026, he contacted officials on May 22: “I just checked, registrations for the Para Series in Laval, France, are open. Can you recommend my registration?” What followed was a string of follow-ups as the deadline approached. On May 28, he wrote: “I am following up regarding the registration process [...]. Do you have any updates?” The reply from administration: “We will get back to you as soon as possible.” On June 4, Anil* pressed again: “Please keep me informed as soon as possible. I also need to apply for a visa.” On June 6, he pointed out the rule: “The registration deadline is 42 days before the first day of competition, July 17 at 23:59 UTC+0.” On June 19, the answer was still vague: “We will inform you shortly.” By June 23, the wait had become a financial and logistical problem: “I need to book tickets, get a visa, and manage finances once it is confirmed. There will not be enough time if it is confirmed too late.” The exchange shows how vulnerable an athlete can be when major expenses depend on administrative approval. “Nila* became terribly sick because of the heat, as did all the other athletes with her. She had a severe wheezing attack and had to be taken to the hospital” Mother of a climber Other documents sent to Vertige Media point to recurring problems. One mother complained that a finals schedule had been changed “one day before the competition,” even though “most parents had booked flights for the evening.” Her question went unanswered: “Given the cost of the tickets, who is going to reimburse them for this last-minute change?” In the same exchange, she described an event held in extreme heat: “Nila* became terribly sick because of the heat, as did all the other athletes with her. She had a severe wheezing attack and had to be taken to the hospital.” Another message criticized the cost of mandatory gear: “The athletes represent the nation and are charged exorbitant amounts for poor-quality uniforms at Asian and international competitions. And they have the mandatory IMF logo. The least that could be done is to provide the uniforms.” The financial side remains sensitive as well. One email reviewed by Vertige Media describes unpaid prize money after the 29th National Sport Climbing Championship, held in Bangalore on December 26, 2025. On July 2, 2026, nearly six months after the podiums, Kian* wrote to IMF officials asking for his prize money and that of his sister Tiya*: “Several winners from the same competition have already received their prize money,” he wrote. Asked about these cases, the IMF pointed to the rigor of its national ranking system. Its honorary secretary, Keerthi Pais, said athletes have access to zonal secretaries, a dedicated commission, and “a dedicated Sport Climbing manager in IMF who responds to emails.” “No access is denied to any genuine deserving and justified application,” he said, without directly addressing the individual cases raised by Vertige Media. Low Voices In a letter to World Climbing’s executive board reviewed by Vertige Media, former international climber Sandeep Maity urged the governing body to suspend the IMF’s exclusive representation or, failing that, grant fair transitional recognition to both organizations. World Climbing rejected that opening. “World Climbing does not intervene in national matters, and its authority is limited to what is provided in the statutes,” the organization said. It added that athlete protection is a priority, but drew a firm line: it intervenes only in cases of direct danger to athletes, “not to resolve the underlying governance dispute itself.” “When an athlete depends completely on that support, speaking up becomes difficult. Many fear that raising issues will affect the opportunities or facilities they receive in the future” Deepu Mallesh, Indian speed climber On the ground, however, the collateral damage is already clear. In his letter, Maity sounded the alarm: “A healthy sports ecosystem cannot thrive when athletes are afraid to speak up.” He added: “Many athletes, coaches and parents are hesitant to raise their concerns publicly, for fear of retaliation, loss of opportunities, exclusion from competitions, or negative consequences for their sporting careers.” The IMF rejects those claims entirely. “India is the world’s largest democracy. There is sufficient freedom for individuals and organizations to express their concerns,” Keerthi Pais said, adding that “the IMF has never restricted anyone’s efforts or voice.” Still, multiple exchanges with Vertige Media point to a fear of speaking openly. “Many athletes stay silent because speaking up often leads to being treated differently in training camps,” Isha*, an Indian climber, told us. Speed specialist Deepu Mallesh highlighted the financial dependence that makes speaking out costly: “Once you are part of the national team, not every athlete is in the same position. Some have individual sponsors and financial support, while many others depend entirely on the federation or the national team for training camps, competitions, equipment, and travel.” That dependence, he said, changes the calculus: “When an athlete depends completely on that support, speaking up becomes difficult. Many fear that raising issues will affect the opportunities or facilities they receive in the future.” Indian climbing remains trapped in a fight over competing narratives. World Climbing still recognizes the IMF. The SCFI says India needs a dedicated national federation. The IMF says the matter is closed. The Indian courts have yet to rule on the dispute. In the meantime, for several athletes, the conflict is measured less in statutes than in money spent, answers delayed, and the care with which everyone chooses their words. *Names marked with an asterisk have been changed.

An unprecedented protest movement is shaking World Climbing. Led by Portugal and Latvia, national federations have filed formal complaints with the international governing body after a July 23 vote on suspending the Russian, Belarusian, and Israeli federations was canceled. Marco Scolaris with Vice President Naomi Cleary in Turin in December 2025 © Giorgio Perottino/IFSC Political controversy continues to dominate the summer at World Climbing, the sport’s international governing body. In late July 2026, the Latvian and Portuguese climbing federations filed formal protests challenging how the organization handled its July 23 Extraordinary General Assembly. That day, the planned votes on suspending the Belarusian, Russian, and Israeli federations did not take place as expected. Three new motions, submitted in the final days before the meeting by Cyprus, the United States, and Australia, had been combined into a single text and circulated to member federations less than 24 hours before the assembly. Once that unified motion passed, the three suspension votes effectively disappeared from the agenda. A First In the world of sports governance, filing a formal complaint against the international organization that controls your funding and regulates your activities is unusual. For Normunds Reinbergs, president of the Latvian federation, Latvijas Alpīnistu savienība, it was a first. “I’ve been president of the federation since February 2024,” he said by phone. “This is the first time I’ve made an official complaint.” Latvia’s protest focuses on the procedural mechanics of the July 23 meeting. At the center of its complaint is what Reinbergs calls the “Voting Flow,” a kind of decision tree sent to the federations less than 24 hours before the assembly. It imposed a specific order: first, a vote on the unified motion; only if necessary would the assembly move on to the three suspension votes. Once the unified motion passed, those votes were dropped. As the group Climbers for Palestine argued in an op-ed, the motion did not function as a competing proposal. It functioned as a procedural roadblock. The Latvian federation president appears to agree. “The worst thing for us is that it blocked the three votes, which was the main reason we came together,” he said. “The General Assembly in April voted that we needed to vote on these motions. And we didn’t get the chance.” Latvia’s protest also raises questions about where the unified motion came from. According to Reinbergs, the motions submitted on July 8 by the American and Australian federations were identical, word for word. Together, those two countries hold four of the 12 seats on World Climbing’s Executive Board: Anne-Worley Moelter, a vice president, and athlete representative Kyra Condie for the United States; and Naomi Cleary, vice president for finance, and Campbell Harrison for Australia. The Latvian complaint suggests there may have been coordination between those member federations and the Executive Board, though it offers no formal proof. “The U.S. and Australian motions are copy-and-paste motions,” Reinbergs said. “If they were different, it would make sense to submit both. But if they’re the same, why was there a need to submit the same thing twice?” For Latvia, the issue also has immediate practical consequences. Latvian law prohibits public funds from being used for competitions that include Russian or Belarusian athletes. World Climbing’s February 2026 decision to reinstate those federations has therefore put the Latvian federation in an impossible position. “Athletes will have to pay for themselves, because we don’t have any sponsors,” Reinbergs said. “The only solution is for the athletes to pay their own way.” Latvia’s protest is therefore also driven by its own direct interests. Whatever the motivation, the official letter was co-signed by seven other World Climbing members: Poland, Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine, Portugal, Lithuania, and Jordan. Friends in High Places Alberto Cruz, president of the Portuguese competition climbing federation, the Federação Portuguesa de Escalada de Competição, takes a broader view. The day after the July 23 meeting, he also decided to formally register his disagreement. But his complaint goes beyond the assembly itself. It also challenges how a legal opinion commissioned by World Climbing on June 22, 2026, was used to justify the procedure. “Our complaint is about politics and a lack of transparency and democracy” Alberto Cruz, president of the Portuguese Climbing Federation. The opinion was intended to answer four questions about the division of power between World Climbing’s General Assembly and its Executive Board: the exact authority of the General Assembly, the legality of lifting the Russian and Belarusian suspensions, the Executive Board’s power to reject motions, and the limits of holding meetings virtually. Its author was Sarah Umbricht, a Swiss attorney and legal adviser to the Swiss Alpine Club. At the same time she was preparing the opinion, she was also chairing World Climbing’s Governance Commission, an advisory body that works directly with the Executive Board. At the July 23 assembly, the opinion was presented to the federations as a legal matter that had already been definitively settled. Speaking with Vertige Media, Cruz returned to what he sees as the core issue. “It’s about governance,” he said. “The process that the IFSC and World Climbing followed was not correct. The statutes were not followed.” At the center of the Portuguese federation’s argument is the division of authority between the General Assembly and the Executive Board. In March 2022, the General Assembly voted to suspend Russia and Belarus and gave the Executive Board a specific, conditional mandate: the suspensions could be lifted only once “the grounds that had justified them had ceased to exist.” In February 2026, the Executive Board lifted those suspensions. According to Cruz, no one verified that the conditions set by the General Assembly had actually been met. “The Executive Board has no power to go against a decision of the General Assembly,” he said. Cruz also notes that the legal opinion was based on documents selected by the Executive Board itself. The minutes from the 2022 General Assembly were not provided to the attorney, even though they contained the conditional mandate underlying one of the four legal questions she had been asked to address. At the July 23 Extraordinary General Assembly, only five federations were allowed to speak. Each was limited to three minutes, with no debate and no right of reply. “So we voted on something that was not on the original agenda,” Cruz said. His conclusion was equally blunt: “Our complaint is about politics and a lack of transparency and democracy.” Looking Like FIFA What explains the World Climbing Executive Board’s conduct? Neither federation president claims to speak for the organization, but both have their own theories. For Reinbergs, the answer lies in Olympic money. Since the Tokyo Games in 2021, World Climbing has become increasingly financially dependent on the International Olympic Committee: broadcast revenue, Olympic sponsors, and the sport’s place on the Brisbane 2032 program. World Climbing President Marco Scolaris acknowledged as much in an interview with Vertige Media in early July. “We went through a difficult period, with the risk of being downgraded to an additional sport,” he said. “That changes the financial picture considerably.” “World Climbing will do anything to escape these votes” Normunds Reinbergs, president of the Latvian Climbing Federation. “World Climbing will do anything to escape these votes,” Reinbergs said. “For money, for being on that stage, [it will] sacrifice ethical and other values and start using lawyers.” He continued: “This has never happened before. For an extraordinary assembly or an assembly, World Climbing invites lawyers to support its opinion, and then interprets that opinion in favor of its actions.” As someone put it in a WhatsApp discussion, Reinbergs added, “we are more like FIFA now.” A legal opinion commissioned from an attorney who was simultaneously chairing World Climbing’s Governance Commission, less than a month before a crucial vote. A change to the voting procedure announced less than 24 hours before the July 23 assembly. And, just minutes before the vote, an appearance by the International Olympic Committee’s new sports director to remind members of the Olympic Charter’s new neutrality principles. That is a lot for a federation that had promised a fully transparent vote. Cruz said he did not want to speculate about the Executive Board’s intentions, but added: “They want to make a decision against a lot of federations, but they are not following the proper process. They are trying to hide something.” The Latvian and Portuguese federations, along with the other signatories, are calling for an investigation into the July 23 process and the release of all relevant documents. The Portuguese federation is also demanding another Extraordinary General Assembly so that members can vote on the three suspensions originally scheduled for July 23. It gave World Climbing seven calendar days to respond. At a time when sports federations and their leaders are facing intense scrutiny, as the cases currently involving FIFA demonstrate, Scolaris has insisted that his organization would be different. Now World Climbing will have to prove it.

At Stanage, the busiest bouldering area in the United Kingdom, years of heavy traffic have slowly worn away the ground beneath the boulders. In June 2026, 40 volunteers set out to repair the damage—with eight tons of gravel and plenty of questions about what comes next. Volunteers for the operation © Rab Rob Greenwood opens Strava and selects “Trail run in Derbyshire.” He hits start. He’s ready. But what follows looks nothing like a trail run. Instead of trekking poles, Rob is carrying a 55-pound bag of gravel. On this June morning in 2026, the UK Climbing brand manager is standing below Stanage Edge in the Peak District, in north-central England. Around him, roughly 40 volunteers are finishing their coffee. Their goal for the day is simple, at least on paper: haul 300 bags containing nearly eight tons of crushed sandstone up to the boulders at Stanage Plantation, the country’s most popular bouldering area. They have come to repair damage caused by years of heavy climbing traffic. As soon as his watch starts recording, Rob sets off with his wheelbarrow up a trail with an 8 percent grade. “Zone two! Let’s go!” He is only half joking. Above him, the problem is real—and it has been building for years. Beneath Stanage Plantation’s most iconic boulders, repeated foot traffic first compressed the vegetation, then destroyed the roots holding the soil in place. Once those roots disappeared, rain began washing away the topsoil and then the layers beneath it. Gradually, it carved out scars that can be hard to notice unless you know what to look for. In some places, the ground has lost as much as two feet of depth over 30 years, or roughly three-quarters of an inch annually. For boulderers, the landings—the areas where climbers fall—have become worse. But the larger problem is environmental: every inch of lost soil represents years of natural development that cannot be restored in a single season. That day, three organizations came together at Stanage: British outdoor brand Rab, the British Mountaineering Council, or BMC, the national body for climbing and mountaineering, and the Peak District National Park Foundation. Together, they had organized the largest restoration project ever attempted at Stanage Plantation. They had one day to move 300 55-pound bags, containing nearly eight tons of gravel in all. Loved to Death Jade Harrison, Rab’s communications coordinator, spent the first five months of the year putting the project together. For the past five years, Rab—whose roots are in nearby Sheffield—has quietly supported the Peak District National Park Foundation. The company typically contributes £5,000 a year to general restoration projects. This year was different. Rab doubled its contribution to £10,000, and its employees did more than follow the project through Excel spreadsheets. They put on gloves and joined the work. “I remember we had the first meeting here at our head office, probably around January, where all three organizations came together and we sort of divvied up the jobs of who needed to do what,” Harrison says from Sheffield. “Ours was very much from a funding and communications perspective. The Peak District National Park Foundation organized it from a logistical perspective, and the British Mountaineering Council was heavily involved from a conservation point of view.” “I would say that we have definitely added to the erosion of Stanage Plantation over the years, that is for sure, so it’s pretty nice just to try and give something back” Tim Fish, Product Manager at Rab The preparation took five months, in part because the organizers needed approval from Natural England, the government agency responsible for protecting the country’s natural environment. The agency imposed a strict limit: no more than 40 participants, all drawn from the three partner organizations, to avoid putting even more pressure on the site. Tim Fish, Rab’s product director, has climbed at Stanage for more than 30 years. That morning, he was among the first to pick up a bag. “I would say that we have definitely added to the erosion of Stanage Plantation over the years, that is for sure,” he tells Vertige Media. “So it’s pretty nice just to try and give something back.” Jon Fullwood was there too. The BMC’s access and conservation officer has been climbing at Stanage for 35 years. A few days after the project, during a video call with Vertige Media, he holds an old guidebook photo from the 1990s up to his computer screen. Beneath one of the Plantation’s best-known boulders, the ground is covered in vegetation. It almost looks like a meadow. “When you’re there all the time, the process is so incremental that you don’t see it on a day-to-day level,” he says. “But when you look back at old videos or look back in a book that you bought a while ago, you can really see the difference.” Today, the same spot has lost nearly a foot of soil. The meadow is gone. Stanage has suffered so much because it is, quite simply, one of the most popular climbing areas in the country. Stanage Edge is a three-mile stretch of sculpted sandstone in the Peak District, between Sheffield, Manchester, and Leeds. It has more than 2,400 climbs, some of which have been logged nearly 12,000 times by the climbing community. Roughly half a million people visit every year. They come for the distinctive rock, the evening light, and the sandstone cracks that helped shape British climbing. Stanage’s climbing history began in the 1890s, when the first climbers started venturing onto the rock—often in secret, and sometimes by bribing gamekeepers. The land was privately owned and reserved for hunting by the local aristocracy. For decades, access was a constant battle. In 1932, the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, a protest for public access held about nine miles away at the highest point in the Peak District, became a defining moment in England’s campaign for the right to enter the countryside. Today, Stanage is freely accessible. Anyone can walk or climb there. That is a political victory. It is also part of the reason the area is now under so much pressure. The “Green Traverse” at Stanage, before and after © Jon Fullwood Collection “I think Stanage is the most popular crag in the country,” Fullwood says. “That means it gets the most people, the most use, and the most erosion. Over the years, these fantastic bouldering locations have just become victims of their own success. It’s a real target. People come from far and wide.” And 2,389 Calories Later The day began with coffee. Roisin Joyce, director of the Peak District National Park Foundation, gave a welcome speech, followed by Tim Fish and BMC CEO Paul Ratcliffe. Then it was time to get to work. The group looked at the 300 bags of crushed Peak District sandstone—the same material that erosion had carried away. The goal was to make the repairs blend into the landscape. “This material is sourced in the Peak District, so it’s essentially exactly the same as the material that eroded away,” Fullwood says. “It’s sand, small rocks, and grit dust. We’re filling in some of the lost ground with crushed grit—basically replacing it with what’s been lost.” A week earlier, Fullwood and Tom, a national park ranger, had prepared the site by digging a few discreet drainage channels. These would allow water to flow beneath the new fill rather than washing it away again. On the day itself, all the volunteers had to do was carry and compact the gravel. Adam remembers that “all.” Rab’s content coordinator also remembers the laughter that broke out during the lunch break. “By lunchtime, everyone stopped for coffee and cake,” he says. “It was like, ‘How much more?’ To be fair, we’d only done about a pallet and a half by then. And I think there were 22 delivered in total.” One optimistic volunteer had planned to go for a bike ride afterward. Another had planned a hike. By the end of the day, everyone went straight home, exhausted. Rob Greenwood checked his watch. When he stopped recording, the numbers came in: 6.1 miles, 2,457 feet of elevation gain, and 2,389 calories burned. “I do see a lot of people—especially among the younger generation—who are very conscientious and mindful of the environment in a way that I’m not entirely sure my generation was, I think the main difference is there are just a hell of a lot more of them.” Jon Fullwood, Access and Preservation Officer at the BMC A Fresh Start From his office, Fullwood points out that this was not the first restoration project at Stanage. A similar effort was organized about 20 years ago through local climbing forums. “It was certainly, in terms of scale and publicity, the biggest we’d done,” he says. “But it was also part of a sort of continuum, if you like. Some similar work was done about 20 years ago. It was as much as anything to test how it would work, whether it would work, what the results would look like, and how it would stand up to the weather.” Other projects are already being discussed, including some in Wales. The bigger question—the one Fullwood has been asking for years—is how climbers behave. Don’t drag crash pads across vegetation. Don’t trample the fragile boundary between bare soil and plant life, where erosion continues to spread. Climb on less crowded boulders. Stay off wet rock, when sandstone holds are more likely to break. “I do see a lot of people—especially among the younger generation—who are very conscientious and mindful of the environment in a way that I’m not entirely sure my generation was,” Fullwood says. “I think the main difference is there are just a hell of a lot more of them.” © Rab Climbing has drawn in entire generations, fueled by the growth of gyms, the Olympic Games, and social media. Most of these new climbers never learned outdoor practices through the informal, person-to-person traditions of the crag. Passing that knowledge along is also the community’s responsibility. Ten years from now, Fullwood hopes to return to the boulders at Stanage Plantation and see that the soil is holding. He hopes the grass will be growing back. “Well, I genuinely think—I hope, and I think—that they will look a lot better than they did in January this year,” he says. “Had we not done anything, they would look ten years worse as well. It would be ten years more erosion. So I think we genuinely set the clock back.”

Movement Gyms employees and their supporters are set to rally outside 10 The North Face stores across the United States on Monday, July 13. Their goal is to pressure the brand to suspend its partnership with the nation’s largest climbing-gym chain, which the union accuses of anti-union practices and stalling contract negotiations. © Courtesy of Climbing Workers United The labor dispute between Movement Gyms and some of its employees is expanding once again. After holding pickets outside Movement gyms and asking members to prepare to pause their memberships, Climbing Workers United is now taking its campaign to one of the company’s biggest business partners: The North Face. At noon local time, Movement employees, Workers United members, and customers are expected to gather outside 10 The North Face stores in Chicago, New York City, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. Organizers plan to ask passersby to sign letters addressed to store managers and send messages to the brand’s leadership. “A partnership with a corporation that violates the rights of its workers contradicts the values of The North Face and VF Corp.—and it must end,” Workers United said in a statement. More specifically, the union is calling on The North Face to suspend the partnership until Movement stops what the union describes as union-busting and begins bargaining in good faith with unionized employees. The demonstrations come five days before Global Climbing Day, which The North Face and Movement are hosting together on July 18. All Movement gyms will offer free climbing that day, including complimentary gear rentals and classes. The North Face also sponsors other events and competitions held at Movement facilities. By targeting the brand directly, the unions hope to highlight what they see as a conflict between the partnership and the public commitments of The North Face’s parent company, VF Corporation. VF, which also owns Vans, Timberland, and Smartwool, says it supports “workers’ right to freely choose union representation and to exercise that right without retaliation from their employer.” “If The North Face and VF believe in workers’ rights and human rights, they need to end this partnership with Movement Gyms until Movement stops union-busting and begins bargaining in good faith with its unionized employees,” Workers United said. Workers United President Lynne Fox wrote to the CEO of VF Corporation and the Global Brand President of The North Face to request a meeting. According to the union, corporate leadership had taken no action by the day before the rallies, and no meeting had been scheduled. This latest action is part of a labor dispute that has been building for several years. In November 2021, employees at Movement Crystal City in Virginia became the first workers at a privately operated U.S. climbing gym to vote to unionize. Since late 2024, employees at 10 additional Movement locations have joined Climbing Workers United. As of late June, however, none of those locations had secured a collective bargaining agreement. Unfair labor practice charges have also been filed with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency responsible for enforcing U.S. labor law. The allegations include unilateral changes to working conditions and bad-faith bargaining. Climbing Workers United says more than 500 Movement employees are now union members. Across the broader climbing-gym industry, the organization says it represents more than 1,300 workers at 32 gyms nationwide. The July 13 action is not a strike. But it marks another shift in the union’s strategy: After putting pressure on Movement’s leadership and asking customers to get involved, organizers are now calling on the company’s business partners to take a position.