Climbing and trekking have put some Moroccan valleys on the global adventure map. But what happens when mountains where people actually live become the backdrop for athletes coming in from somewhere else? Through his work on what he calls Morocco’s “sporting mountain,” anthropologist Thomas Fouquet examines the blind spots of an outdoor culture that often sees itself as neutral, even as it moves through a much longer history. Toubkal (cc) Othman Alghanmi / Unsplash People think they are coming for the rock. For sun while Europe shivers. For big red walls, high valleys, villages at the base of the routes, and the promise of an adventure that still feels available—less built-out, less crowded, less processed than the Alps. Taghia, Todgha, Chefchaouen, Imlil: for many climbers and trekkers, those names already sound obvious. But a cliff is never just a cliff. In an article published in the Revue internationale des études du développement, titled “La montagne-sportive au Maroc : entre confiscation, préservation et marchandisation,” Thomas Fouquet, an anthropologist and research fellow at France’s CNRS, asks us to look at what outdoor culture often prefers to leave outside the frame: colonial history, social inequality, tourist narratives, money flows, gear flows, and the power dynamics hidden behind the call of wide-open spaces. Imported Mountains The paradox is simple. Morocco’s mountains are there. Visible, inhabited, massive. And yet the sports now practiced in them have long been shaped by models imported from elsewhere. The story begins under the French protectorate. France established its protectorate over Morocco in 1912. Ten years later, the Club Alpin Français opened its High Atlas section. In 1923, the club held its annual congress in Marrakech, with Marshal Lyautey as honorary president. Moroccan mountain sport was born, then, into a strange rope team: European actors bolting routes, building the first refuges, training guides, and projecting onto the Atlas an Alpine imagination imported from Europe. The wall was Moroccan, but for a long time the story wrapped around it spoke French: alpinism, exploration, soft conquest, and the vertical postcard. In an interview with Vertige Media, Fouquet sums up that history plainly: “In the eyes of Moroccans, mountain sports are a kind of foreign space at home.” The mountains are national by geography, but partly foreign in their codes, institutions, stories, and uses. Here, the word “postcolonial” is not a slogan. It describes what is visible on the ground. “Mountain sports were introduced and developed in Morocco through colonization,” the researcher says. That legacy still leaves marks. Many routes are still equipped by Europeans, either living in Morocco or passing through. Some clubs remain shaped by codes inherited from that history, while Moroccan practitioners often come from privileged urban backgrounds. Things are shifting, though. Fouquet now sees a real surge of interest in climbing among young Moroccan city-dwellers. In Rabat and Casablanca, climbing sections are full. Some have even had to turn people away. It would be tempting to call that democratization. Fouquet is more cautious: “There is mass participation, but there is no democratization of climbing.” The profile remains fairly narrow: young people from urban middle- and upper-class backgrounds, often with international experience, studies abroad, or time spent in Europe. Many discover climbing elsewhere before realizing it exists at home. As if the detour through another country suddenly made their own visible. “The Moroccan population is not targeted by the outdoor market. But Moroccan territories are targeted by outdoor practices” Thomas Fouquet, anthropologist and research fellow at the CNRS In his article, Fouquet quotes a 33-year-old Moroccan climber who began climbing during secondary school at a French lycée in Casablanca. For him, climbing first meant plastic holds on a concrete wall, inside a French school setting. Then came the discovery of local rock. His reaction: “Oh yeah, we Moroccans can climb too, we actually have this here [laughs].” Sometimes it takes a social or geographic detour to realize your country is not just a destination for other people. The divide is material, too. In Morocco, the climbing market remains tiny. “Today, there is no equivalent of a Vieux Campeur,” Fouquet says, referring to the French outdoor retail chain. Climbing shoes, chalk, tape, resoling: everything quickly becomes a matter of suitcases and shared workarounds. “I share my chalk and tape all the time,” the researcher says. Then he adds: “The Moroccan population is not targeted by the outdoor market. But Moroccan territories are targeted by outdoor practices.” Fake Authenticity Moroccan valleys attract visitors because they seem to offer what many Europeans believe they have lost at home: mountains that feel rawer, less developed, less crowded, less transformed. But authenticity often has a trapdoor. What a traveler sees as charm—remoteness, the absence of heavy infrastructure, the feeling of being outside time—can be lived locally as a very concrete constraint: inadequate roads, limited access to health care, school, work, or electricity. In his article, Fouquet quotes geographer David Goeury: “Isolation, a constraint at the national scale, could then be considered a resource at the global scale.” In plain terms, what holds a place back can become its best selling point. Fouquet describes a deep disconnect, where “the aspirations and desires of some are strongly disconnected from those of others.” The trekker wants an untouched village, without too many power lines in the picture. The person who lives there just wants light. A line from work on the Aït Bouguemez valley, quoted in the article, captures the bind: “For tourists to come, heritage must remain, but for inhabitants to remain, heritage must evolve.” In Imlil, the last village before Toubkal—Morocco’s highest peak, at 13,671 feet—this misunderstanding takes shape. Fouquet calls it an “outdoor bazaar”: guides, lodging, secondhand gear, old ice axes, beat-up skis, the commerce of adventure and the economy of making do. A Chamonix of the Atlas, but without the polished finish of an Alpine resort. “It is a kind of hypertrophy of consumerist and capitalist logic taking hold of the mountains in Morocco, but in successive layers,” he says. Climbing adds an even more sensitive layer. Hiking passes through. Climbing changes things. It drills into the rock, installs bolts—the fixed metal protection climbers clip into—establishes routes, names them, maps the walls. It does not simply move through a landscape. It leaves its own signs behind. Fouquet is not trying to turn foreign route developers into easy villains. Many, he notes, are deeply attached to Morocco, know the places well, and build sincere relationships with local residents. Still, the act carries weight. “Appropriating that portion of territory and naming it has something symbolically significant about it, given the country’s history and the foreign presence within it,” he says. “You come, you practice, you consume, you leave” Thomas Fouquet, anthropologist and research fellow at the CNRS The question quickly becomes concrete: Who decides that a cliff becomes a climbing area? Who bolts it, names it, maintains it? And who remains a spectator when a place where people live gets reclassified as a “spot”? In recent months, young Moroccan climbers from the CAF in Casablanca have spoken out against what they see as the persistence of a colonial mindset in certain practices. What they are criticizing is less the existence of climbing itself than the way places are consumed. Fouquet sums up that logic sharply: “You come, you practice, you consume, you leave.” Against that, another way of inhabiting the sport is beginning to take shape—one more attentive to places and to the people who live there. The anthropologist calls it “politics from below”: paying attention to how you arrive in a village, to the name you give a route, to what the activity leaves behind, not only to what it lets you tick off in your send log—a climber’s personal list of completed routes. The Kaizen Effect Layered onto that long history is the accelerator of social media. YouTube, Instagram, and stories of personal transformation are making the mountains more visible to young urban Moroccans. That can be a valuable new entry point. But sometimes it opens first onto the image, before it opens onto the culture of the place. Fouquet tells the story of a mountain guide who came across young people from Marrakech trying to climb Toubkal in winter, wearing jeans and sneakers, after seeing videos online. “Young Moroccans are interested in the mountains. But there is this huge gap between the images being produced and the concrete knowledge people actually have,” he says. The summit becomes a story backdrop before it is understood as an environment. People come looking for an image of themselves before they have learned the cold, altitude, snow, slowness, and risk. But the story does not end with dispossession by image. In Taghia, young local residents have become excellent climbers. Fouquet describes them as “a kind of bridge between this inhabited mountain and this sporting mountain.” Maybe that is where part of the future lies: in the ability of Moroccan practitioners to produce their own stories, their own images, their own ways of living with the cliffs. Morocco is not some exotic exception. That is part of what makes the research useful: it looks at a specific case that speaks to a question running through all of contemporary outdoor culture. “This is not about saying there is something highly specific to Morocco. These are Moroccan forms of a very global question,” Fouquet says. How do you move through a natural space without consuming it like a disposable product? And how do you think about wild places without forgetting that they are already inhabited, named, worked, and contested? Fouquet is not calling for a boycott of the Atlas. He rejects the comfortable posture of the judge. “My question is not to criticize the fact that foreigners come climb in Morocco, but rather how they do it, with what ethics, what mindset.” Maybe it all comes down to one sentence, offered at the end of our conversation: “It is more a problem of pace than distance.” The modern trap is not going far. It is arriving too fast. Seeing the cliff before the village, the line before the place, the wild adventure before the history. Thomas Fouquet’s study reminds us of something outdoor culture sometimes prefers to forget: wide-open spaces are never empty. Even in silence, cliffs are always saying something. To read Thomas Fouquet’s full work: “La montagne-sportive au Maroc : entre confiscation, préservation et marchandisation,” published in the Revue internationale des études du développement.

President of the Palestine Climbing Association, recognized by World Climbing as a national federation in 2024, Hiba Shaheen lives and climbs in Palestine. Between crags she says have been taken over under Israeli occupation, daily checkpoints, and a federation motion that never made it to a vote, she speaks for the first time about the reality facing Palestinian climbers under occupation — and the institutional fight she is leading to put them on the international stage. A long interview from Ramallah. Members and supporters of the Palestine Climbing Association © Asia Zughaiar Vertige Media: Just before this interview, we heard that a Palestinian climber had just been attacked by an Israeli settler. Can you tell us what happened? Hiba Shaheen: It happened yesterday, June 9, in a village north of Ramallah. One of our climbers was there with friends. They weren’t at a climbing crag — an outdoor climbing area — they were setting up a hammock, which is why they had climbing gear with them. A settler came and started attacking them. They managed to run away and weren’t seriously hurt because they escaped quickly. But when they came back, all their belongings were gone: phones, passports, climbing gear, everything. Vertige Media: What are the current living conditions like for Palestinian climbers? Hiba Shaheen: What I just described is pretty typical. It is not the first time a Palestinian climber has been attacked. About a month ago, another member of ours was at home in Hizma, a village near Ramallah, when the Israeli military invaded the neighborhood. They were going into houses at random, searching them, detaining people, handcuffing them, blindfolding them. People from the village could be held for an entire day with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes covered. These are not isolated stories. This is our reality. Today, no Palestinian climber is safe, anywhere, at any time. “Even when you go climbing outside: if the military shows up and finds a knife in your bag, you can be arrested or shot” Hiba Shaheen, climber and president of the Palestinian Climbing Federation Vertige Media: How would you explain the situation? Hiba Shaheen: It is not that complicated: someone wants to come to your land and colonize it, and your mere presence becomes a problem. Settlers say it openly: “A good Arab is a dead Arab.” They want all Palestinians to leave. And right now, they have a green light, with full support from the Israeli government, the police, the military. A settler can attack, hurt, even kill someone, and never be held accountable. Even when you go climbing outside: if the military shows up and finds a knife in your bag, you can be arrested or shot. They can simply say, “They posed a threat. They had a knife.” There is no real accountability. No one protects us. Vertige Media: In that context, where do you find the motivation to keep climbing? Hiba Shaheen: When you have been climbing for years, it becomes part of who you are. You cannot really fight the urge to put your hands on rock. For me, the wall is still the only place where I feel truly free. On the wall, you feel connected to the rock, to the land. You move freely. No one tells you what your next move should be. And at the same time, you know it could all stop at any moment. You know that the crag you are climbing today may be a place you never get to climb again. In a strange way, that is one of the things that pushes me to climb even more: to enjoy what we still have, for as long as we can. Vertige Media: In practical terms, how do movement restrictions affect your climbing? Hiba Shaheen: Imagine every village has two entrances. Multiply that by a thousand villages, and you have 2,000 gates to get through. My hometown has three gates. Two are completely closed. The third has a color system: if it is yellow, it opens sometimes. If it is orange, it never opens. After a certain hour, you cannot drive back into your own town. Because of these movement restrictions, our climbing community has never really been able to grow beyond Ramallah. To go to Nablus, where we have a relatively safe crag, you have to cross at least three checkpoints. And depending on your luck that day, one of them will be closed, or they will be searching every car. You can spend one or two hours waiting in line. It is a constant logistics problem built around uncertainty. Vertige Media: Out of roughly a dozen crags identified in Palestine, you now have access to only one. How has the occupation gradually taken those sites away? Hiba Shaheen: There are several categories. First, there are crags in areas under Israeli control where the main access route goes through a settlement. Israelis can drive through the settlement and be at the crag in five minutes. Palestinians have to come from another village, walk around the settlement for nearly 40 minutes, and then go through a military and security check at the entrance. If you pass, you climb. If you don’t, you are sent back. It can be for any reason — even something your brother did, not you. “For me, the wall is still the only place where I feel truly free. On the wall, you feel connected to the rock, to the land. You move freely. No one tells you what your next move should be. And at the same time, you know it could all stop at any moment. You know that the crag you are climbing today may be a place you never get to climb again. In a strange way, that is one of the things that pushes me to climb even more: to enjoy what we still have, for as long as we can” Hiba Shaheen, climber and president of the Palestinian Climbing Federation Then there are crags near settlements. Settlement security can show up within minutes and tell you that you are not allowed to be there. Sometimes you barely have time to park before you are told to leave. And then there is the most serious category: stolen crags. These are crags that were bolted — equipped with fixed protection — by Palestinian climbers, sometimes with help from international partners, on Palestinian land, for Palestinians. Then another federation came in, listed those crags in its own guidebook, renamed the routes, and reclassified the land as a military zone. Now they are off-limits to Palestinians, but Israelis can climb there. I do not think this has ever happened anywhere else in the world: a national federation taking routes equipped by another climbing community, changing their names, putting them in its own guidebook — without having bolted them in the first place. Our most beautiful crag, Yabrud — the one you see in Andrew Bisharat’s documentary Resistance Climbing — is now completely inaccessible. A settler established an outpost there. Since then, every time our climbers have gone, military jeeps have shown up. The last time, they were told: “Leave, or you will be in the crossfire.” Vertige Media: You say crags have been “stolen.” What exactly is the role of the Israeli federation, the ILCA, in this? Hiba Shaheen: First, we have to go back to a basic point. Under the Oslo Accords, all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal. The West Bank belongs to Palestinians. And yet the ILCA is bolting crags and organizing climbing activities in those settlements, even though it should not be operating in the West Bank. And it does not hide this. The federation openly runs military training for Israeli soldiers — rappelling, knots, climbing techniques. So it is directly linked to, and complicit in, military operations. Vertige Media: Activist sources say the logos of the IFSC — the former name of World Climbing — and the UIAA appear on Israeli guidebooks for crags in the occupied West Bank. Can you confirm that? Hiba Shaheen: Yes, I can confirm it. I saw it on the Israeli Climbing Association website. Their guidebook carries the IFSC logo. I do not know whether that means formal approval or whether it was simply overlooked. I cannot say with certainty that the IFSC approved it. But if we are telling them about this, they have to open an investigation. Vertige Media: What did you formally ask World Climbing to do, and how did the organization respond? Hiba Shaheen: We submitted a formal letter requesting the suspension of the Israeli federation, with evidence of violations of IOC and World Climbing statutes — including the unequal access to training facilities imposed on Palestinians. For us, crags are training facilities. We do not have a proper climbing gym. We documented the fact that our athletes were stuck at the border for three days while trying to travel to a competition, and that a two-week bridge closure prevented us from attending another event. All of that was documented and sent. Our letter did not even make it into the folder of motions submitted for a vote. The response we received was that our letter did not establish the complicity of the Israel Climbing Association, only the actions of the Israeli state. And the state, they said, did not fit the criteria. Vertige Media: What do you make of that? Hiba Shaheen: When they suspended Russia, no one had to prove that the Russian federation was complicit. They simply suspended it. With Israel, we are being asked to meet an impossible standard of proof. It is a double standard. Our motion was co-signed by Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. Spain also submitted one, under pressure from Climbers for Palestine, but it was more cautious: it called for discussion and investigation rather than a direct suspension. Only the Spanish motion was put to a vote. “A full suspension of Israel from all World Climbing activities — competitions and meetings included” Hiba Shaheen, climber and president of the Palestinian Climbing Federation Vertige Media: An extraordinary General Assembly is scheduled for July 2026 to discuss “geopolitical issues.” What do you know about it? Hiba Shaheen: Honestly, not much more than what has been made public. I do not know exactly what will be put to a vote, or in what form. What I know is that the idea came up as a way to deal with all the pending motions — ours, the ones about Russia and Belarus, and others. We were prepared to bring our motion directly to the World Climbing General Assembly last February, which was supposed to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But then Israel and the United States struck Iran. In the chaos that followed, World Climbing announced that the in-person General Assembly was canceled and said that only statutory items would be handled. The session where votes could happen was postponed. Hiba Shaheen during a visit to France © Pascal Étienne Vertige Media: What exactly are you asking World Climbing to do? Hiba Shaheen: A full suspension of Israel from all World Climbing activities — competitions and meetings included. Competing under a neutral flag, as was done with Russia, does not work in Israel’s case. Every athlete would have to prove neutrality. But for Israeli athletes, that is impossible. All of their athletes of service age are listed in the reserves. That is a legal obligation. An athlete who was on active duty in Gaza six months before an international competition cannot be neutral. We also stated the criteria for lifting the suspension: Palestinians must have free access to our crags, we must be able to travel between our cities, and we must be able to travel to competitions. Right now, none of those conditions is met. Vertige Media: Can World Climbing actually do anything? Hiba Shaheen: Yes. The power of World Climbing is its General Assembly. If member federations submit motions, World Climbing has to review them and act. The federations have the power. If World Climbing does not act on its own, its General Assembly can force it to. There is also a shared interest. World Climbing wants to grow the sport worldwide and increase international participation. That is necessary if climbing wants to stay in the Olympic program. We asked World Climbing to help us build a climbing gym. The response we received was that they do not have a direct budget for that. They pointed us toward Olympic Solidarity funding, which has to go through our National Olympic Committee. When we went there, we were told: “Climbing is just you. How many climbers are you — 60, 100? It is not interesting for us. We will give the money to football, basketball, volleyball.” Vertige Media: Do you currently have athletes capable of representing Palestine internationally? Hiba Shaheen: Yes. And in all of this, there are still some positive signs. Tawfiq Najada, from the village of Ein Qiniya, just sent his second 5.13b — the American equivalent of 8a — at Iraq al-Dub in Jordan. That matters because other climbers have climbed it too, so the grade is confirmed. He had climbed one in Palestine before, but because no one else had graded it, we were not fully certain it was 8a. We founded the PCA in 2019, with nine other climbers. Climbing had just become an Olympic sport, and the sport was starting to grow in Palestine on a small scale. We had a small community, a small gym, and a dream of one day seeing Palestinian climbers at the Olympics. To get there, we had to build the sport locally and gain official representation so we could enter international institutions. That has been done since 2024. Today, we have around 60 members, including six active competitors. “Even insurance companies have refused to cover female climbers because they assessed the risk as too high. That is one of the things that weighs on me the most. Because I know what climbing feels like, and I want other women in my community and my country to experience it too” Hiba Shaheen, climber and president of the Palestinian Climbing Federation But to reach the next level, we do not have enough infrastructure. Our only gym, Wadi Climbing in Ramallah, is a bouldering gym — a gym for shorter climbs above padded floors. It does not have the hold styles used in modern competitions. The walls are only three meters high; competition walls are four and a half meters. We do not have a speed wall at all. And on the only outdoor crag we still have access to, we cannot guarantee safety. That makes everything much harder, especially for women. Vertige Media: Why are women even more exposed? Hiba Shaheen: Because we are a conservative culture, and families are very protective of their daughters. If a man is arrested, people feel he may be able to manage. If it is a woman, the fear is very different — the risk of sexual assault, arbitrary detention, everything that can happen. Even insurance companies have refused to cover female climbers because they assessed the risk as too high. That is one of the things that weighs on me the most. Because I know what climbing feels like, and I want other women in my community and my country to experience it too. The Ein Qinya site, located near a Palestinian village in the West Bank © Hiba Shaheen Vertige Media: A coach from the Lebanese climbing federation reportedly told you that armed security teams were accompanying the Israeli delegation at international competitions. What do you know about that? Hiba Shaheen: I can confirm it. It happened in Madrid, and then in Prague. At those competitions, the Israeli climbers had armed security teams in areas reserved for athletes and coaches. They were the only ones with armed security there. As a Palestinian, I am not surprised. I see how they militarize every part of their presence. But at a sports competition on European soil, there is no reason to be surrounded by guns. Why are other federations not reacting? Why does Israel feel it needs that level of protection? Vertige Media: Israeli climbers were booed during the Climbing World Cup stop in Madrid. Are they personally responsible for the actions of their state? Hiba Shaheen: Take Ayala Kerem, a World Cup finalist and the 2024 European vice-champion. She is sponsored by Shikun & Binui, an Israeli construction company known for its role in building illegal settlements in the West Bank. This is documented. Through that sponsorship, she is directly endorsing the colonization of Palestine. That is not a coincidence. “As long as Palestinian climbers do not have access to the same rights, the same crags, the same ability to travel and compete, allowing Israeli athletes to climb freely on the international stage means validating an unjust system” Hiba Shaheen, climber and president of the Palestinian Climbing Federation Vertige Media: Is it fair to exclude them from competitions? Hiba Shaheen: Yes. As long as Palestinian climbers do not have access to the same rights, the same crags, the same ability to travel and compete, allowing Israeli athletes to climb freely on the international stage means validating an unjust system. Vertige Media: What is your relationship with the international collective Climbers for Palestine? Hiba Shaheen: I am very grateful to them. I am in regular contact with most of them — about once a month. I keep them updated on what is happening here. They are more courageous than many federations and governments. I hope the movement keeps growing.

On July 23, national climbing federations from around the world will meet for an unprecedented vote: whether to suspend Israel, Russia, and Belarus from World Climbing. Under pressure from a whistleblower and an international advocacy group, the Executive Board agreed to call a special General Assembly. For the first time, here is the story behind a vote that could lead to a historic decision. At the World Cup event in Madrid in May 2026 © Alberto Astudillo García Like the rest of Europe, Spain was sweltering in the summer of 2025. But in the heavy heat of her apartment in Tarragona, Jimena Villar-de-Onis finally had a little free time. A trained lawyer, the Swiss climber had always moved between a thousand projects at once. This time, the path was clear: she went down an internet rabbit hole. Jimena was looking for information on the subjects that fascinate her most: international law and sport. And that day, while clicking through sources about the situation at climbing cliffs in the West Bank, she was stunned. Jimena Villar-de-Onis first learned that Israel’s national climbing federation, ILCA, was promoting—and sometimes even renaming—climbing areas in occupied Palestinian territories. Link by link, she read that Israel’s relentless settlement expansion, pursued at a frantic pace since it began on 7 October 2023, also extended to the climbing cliffs of the West Bank. Two years later, while on a climbing trip in Switzerland, the young Oxford University researcher kept thinking about it between routes. Around that time, she was in frequent contact with Luisa Gieric, a young Spanish student. After the shock came the decision to act together. “We had spent hundreds of hours on this,” Jimena Villar-de-Onis says over the phone, looking back. “I tried to publish an article, but nobody wanted it, so we put everything on a website and an Instagram account.” Eighteen months later, the information gathered by the two climbers has become part of the foundation for what could become a historic decision in the climbing world. On July 23, 2026, dozens of national climbing federations will vote at a special General Assembly of World Climbing, the sport’s international federation. The meeting will include three separate votes: whether to suspend the Belarusian, Russian, and Israeli federations. The evidence gathered by Jimena Villar-de-Onis helped a broader movement build toward that moment. The Swiss climber has thrown herself into it completely through Climbers for Palestine, the group that has put the most pressure on World Climbing so far. The Battle of the Motions March 2022. Russia’s army invades Ukraine. Two weeks later, in Salt Lake City, the IFSC—the former name of the international climbing federation—holds its annual General Assembly. Emotions are running high, and representatives from dozens of federations are facing a question sport rarely wants to answer: what do you do when a member country starts a war? With the invasion dominating the news, a majority of federations vote to suspend Russia and Belarus, and to automatically exclude their athletes from international competition. “It is a mistake. Sport should not take a position on one conflict, because if you start with one, you have to do it for all of them” Marco Scolaris, president of World Climbing, on the suspension of the Russian and Belarusian federations following the war in Ukraine. Marco Scolaris, the president of World Climbing, said it plainly a few months ago on Climbing Radio: “It is a mistake. Sport should not take a position on one conflict, because if you start with one, you have to do it for all of them.” In his view, the Court of Arbitration for Sport proved him right. When the International Ski Federation voted in 2025 to fully exclude Russian athletes, CAS overturned the decision: athletes could not be barred outright, only required to compete as neutrals. But for Jimena Villar-de-Onis, that framing is not quite right. “In principle, Marco Scolaris is right. But on the substance, nobody has ever asked for Israeli, Russian, or Belarusian athletes to be fully excluded,” she explains. “We are arguing for suspension. That is different. And if athletes want to compete, they can do so under a neutral flag.” That is more or less what the federation would later do. In 2025, World Climbing adopted a “neutrality policy”: Russian and Belarusian athletes would compete without flags, national colors, or anthems. The measure held until February 2026, when World Climbing’s Executive Board suddenly lifted the suspension of the Russian and Belarusian federations. In practice, Russia and Belarus were full members again. Ukraine immediately protested and submitted a motion. That is where things got tangled. At the same time, Jimena Villar-de-Onis and Climbers for Palestine were moving on a different track. Their argument was not based on Israel’s war. Their case was narrower, and more technical. They argue that ILCA is violating its own statutory obligations as a member of World Climbing. In late 2025, Climbers for Palestine published an evidence report documenting ILCA’s activities: confiscated climbing areas in the West Bank, the reframing of Palestinian cliffs and first ascents, and financial and institutional ties with the Israeli military and companies operating in settlements. The report argues that these activities have helped effectively exclude Palestinian climbers from their own cliffs by obstructing their freedom of movement, as the president of the Palestine Climbing Association explained to us in an interview. Step by step, Climbers for Palestine organized internationally. The group now has pressure groups in several European countries. In Spain and Italy, its members succeeded in getting their national federations to adopt two motions. Along with Ukraine’s motion, World Climbing suddenly had three texts on its desk. Three texts that forced it to open a debate on Israel’s participation in climbing competitions. The issue was supposed to be addressed at its 2026 General Assembly in Riyadh. Then another war disrupted everything. Pressure, Secrecy, and the Fine Print In April 2026, the United States and Israel began bombing Iran. The Middle East had become a war zone. World Climbing canceled its trip to Saudi Arabia and moved the General Assembly online. At the same time, the federation announced that sensitive issues would not be discussed. Jimena Villar-de-Onis was furious. With little time left, the researcher decided to do everything she could to increase pressure on national federations and on World Climbing itself. Thanks to that mobilization, national climbing federations were asked to vote on whether to hold a special World Climbing General Assembly on “geopolitical questions.” On April 23, the proposal passed with 78.69 percent of the vote. It was unquestionably a win for Climbers for Palestine. Many people celebrated. Jimena stayed calm. Because once she dug into the details, she knew it would not be that simple. “Any decision taken under this agenda item will constitute a recommendation to the Executive Board regarding the suspension of a National Federation” A statement set forth in black and white in an official World Climbing document. The July 23 vote will not be binding. To find that out, you have to dig through World Climbing’s official website. Buried there, the document for the upcoming special General Assembly is clear. In the original English, it says: “Any decision taken under this agenda item will constitute a recommendation to the Executive Board regarding the suspension of a National Federation.” In other words, the national federations can vote yes on suspending Belarus, Russia, and Israel, and the Executive Board can still do nothing. Jimena Villar-de-Onis discovered this while combing through the statutes and pushed World Climbing to acknowledge it. The international federation eventually published the document, without announcing it. According to Climbers for Palestine, the group had to threaten to release the information itself in order to force that clarification. So there it is: what looks like a democratic process includes an escape clause. The Executive Board still holds the power. Copy of the official World Climbing document On July 23, federations will vote anonymously. The order of the vote is already known: alphabetical (by federation names), with Belarus first, Russia second, and Israel last. For Jimena Villar-de-Onis, that is not incidental. It could influence the result, as could the very simple wording of the vote: “Vote to recommend to the Executive Board the suspension of [National Federation Name].” As a trained lawyer, she knows the fine print matters. For Belarus and Russia, the situation has already been decided by the Executive Board, which lifted their suspensions in February. A vote recommending suspension would be a direct rebuke to the Executive Board. But according to Jimena Villar-de-Onis, many Eastern European federations support suspension. That creates a tension: can a federation vote no on Russia and yes on Israel without contradicting itself? And what about the reverse? Marco Scolaris himself acknowledged in the Climbing Radio podcast that differential treatment “has become a form of violence against the Palestinian people.” For Israel, the logic is different from 2022. World Climbing is not being asked to take a position on a conflict between states. It is being asked to apply its own statutes to a member federation whose documented activities, according to Climbers for Palestine, constitute violations of international law. “It can pass” Jimena Villar-de-Onis, a member of Climbers for Palestine. A Disrupted World Cup in Chamonix According to our information, around 60 to 70 federations are expected to take part. A suspension recommendation requires a simple majority. But the quality of that majority will matter as much as the raw result. If federations vote overwhelmingly for all three suspensions and the Executive Board follows their lead, it would set a historic precedent. For the first time in an Olympic sport, a federation would be suspended for documented violations of international law. Israeli athletes would then have to compete under a neutral flag during qualification for Los Angeles 2028, less than a year before the cycle begins. If the vote is clear but the Executive Board refuses to act, a legitimacy crisis begins, and Marco Scolaris will have to explain why a majority of member federations has no real power. If the margins are narrow and the results split, the Executive Board will have everything it needs to justify inaction. Summer will pass, and the show will move on. Jimena Villar-de-Onis and Luisa Gieric at a demonstration in Madrid © Courtesy of Jimena Villar-de-Onis For Jimena Villar-de-Onis, a historic precedent is still possible. “It can pass,” she says confidently over the phone. In the meantime, Climbers for Palestine has launched a major campaign urging members of national federations to write to their federations and convince them to vote for Israel’s suspension. Tomorrow, just before the Climbing World Cup stop in Chamonix, a demonstration in support of the Palestinian people is planned. The entire Executive Board will be there. It will be hard to look away.

Lately, our philosopher-columnist has noticed a little contempt among climbers for “gym bros.” As more and more bodybuilders wander into climbing gyms to try the sport, it seemed like a good time to think through the welcome they get. A muscular little social drama, somewhere between screaming, Planet Fitness, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. (CC) Sehoon Ye / Unsplash Bodies and Yells Fair enough. Plenty of us make noises on the wall that sound closer to animal than human. At the same time, yelling in climbing is widely frowned upon. We yell a lot, but we condemn yelling because it breaks the rule of “fair play.” According to a line often, and perhaps falsely, attributed to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, fair play is “the way of playing the game used by those who know it is only a game and do not get caught up in the game.” Yelling does exactly the opposite. It forgets that climbing is only a “game,” to use the word of Lito Tejada-Flores, the American climber, filmmaker, and writer. It shows a disproportionate investment in an “useless” activity, to borrow the famous phrase from French alpinist and writer Lionel Terray’s Conquistadors of the Useless. And because it is useless, the activity is supposed to be practiced with a certain detachment—or at least with a convincing performance of detachment. “Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little” A young climber The person who forgets that, the person who fails to remember that climbing must remain, at least outwardly, just a game, breaks a rule that pushes him outside the group. He is no longer one of us. He becomes the other. In this setting, yelling is always something the outsider does. “We” do not yell, because we know none of this is all that serious, and we do not let ourselves get carried away. Rental Shoes, Columbus, and Cannibals But if the yell does not come from us, if it always belongs to the other inside us, then where does it come from? A young climber recently explained it to me this way: “I think some people yell like people at a weight room. I think maybe they come from lifting. Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little. That definitely exists. But I don’t personally know anyone who does it for that reason.” There it is again: the yell belongs to the outsider. To the others. To “the lifting people.” Here, they no longer even “yell.” They just open an animal mouth. They “yell to say” something instead of articulating speech like real humans. And they do it “like people at a weight room”: like those others who are not us. The ones who put on a show. The ones who fake it. Unlike us, the real climbers There is no proof of any of this. But it costs nothing to think it. That is exactly how prejudice works. As Claude Lévi-Strauss shows in Race and History, the tendency to suspect the next tribe over of the most shameful behaviors, to see them as closer to animals than to humans, to describe them as “savages” and “barbarians” or as “earth monkeys” and “louse eggs,” is what we call ethnocentrism. It is, he writes, “the most ancient” and most widely shared attitude in the world. Every society believes it is superior to the others and sees surrounding peoples as degraded versions of humanity. But Lévi-Strauss also points out that, while this reflex certainly did not spare Westerners, it was above all characteristic of the societies they encountered. So when Western societies believed themselves superior to so-called “primitive” peoples, they were merely “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.” On this point, we are no different from the peoples we contacted—and conscientiously exterminated. That is how Lévi-Strauss can set all human societies side by side: those that believe they are “civilized” and those supposedly “primitive,” all ironically united by a shared rejection of otherness. “But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness” A manager at a major rock climbing chain The story goes, for instance, that when Christopher Columbus landed on one of the islands in the Antilles and met Taíno people, he asked whether they were alone there. The local people replied that another people lived nearby, but that they should be feared because they were fierce, cruel, and ate human flesh: the Kalinagos, whose name, through slow distortions, eventually gave us the word “cannibal.” But nothing proves that the Kalinagos actually ate people. After all, they were described that way only through the testimony of their enemies, so we can reasonably doubt the truth of that reputation. We see the same thing in our own world with lifting and yelling. “Planet Fitness,” like “Kalinago,” starts to function almost like an ethnic label. It gets used to name the whole opposing tribe, the one we want to separate ourselves from, the one we accuse of deviance—yelling, eating people, same basic mechanism—the one we define ourselves against. “I picture Jean-Baptiste, not especially athletic, 27 years old, dragged by his friends into a climbing session after work,” one manager at a major climbing-gym chain told me. “Maybe he’ll never be a great climber. But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness.” Basic Instinct So why the rejection of “Planet Fitness”? There are probably noble reasons. A critique of consumerism. A critique of modern individualism. All of it in the name of the supposedly communal and humanist values of climbing. But already, we can see a clash of values that is typical of ethnocentrism: on one side, the pure ones, us; on the other, the corrupted ones, them. There is also the idea that newcomers treat our “art” like any other fitness activity. And that they lack the one thing every community sees as essential: culture. What we accuse them of is not having “climbing culture.” Not knowing anything. Then, by a small slide, we move from the absence of this specific climbing culture to the absence of culture altogether, exactly as Westerners accused other peoples of having no culture simply because they did not share ours. The yell expresses this perfectly. It makes visible an ignorance of the rules and of fair play, an excessive investment in an activity that is supposed to involve self-control and some distance from one’s own performance, as Olivier Aubel shows in L’escalade libre en France. But none of this is unusual. Identity is built this way. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued with the concept of “schismogenesis,” every human group builds itself in opposition to another. Through small distinctions, through the rejection of otherness, group bonds grow stronger, and each member identifies more deeply with the whole they are supposed to form together. From that angle, saying “climbing” is a “tribe” is not merely a metaphor. It is almost literal. Quasi-ethnographic. Deep down, climbers treat bodybuilders the way the Taíno people Columbus encountered treated the Kalinagos: with suspicion, prejudice, and slander, all classic signs of primitive ethnocentrism. We, too, are a small people bound together by our rejection of the other, the ones across the way, the ones who are not like us. We are simply “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.” We can regret this tendency, and it is probably good to stay aware of it so we can resist it when it appears. But we can also observe it with the distance and irony of an anthropologist. That helps us get down off our boulder a little and realize that, despite appearances, we are not so far from the few survivors still wandering the great Amazon forest—or from “the lifting people.” Though I do have to admit: I’m not far from thinking they keep some unspeakable culinary secret hidden in their tubs of protein powder. That said, I would love to know what they say about us when they are among themselves.

With the Skwama Lite, La Sportiva takes one of its cult models and turns it into something more approachable: more precise than a beginner shoe, less punishing than a pure performance weapon. It is a technical compromise for climbers who want to level up, start using their feet better, and still finish the session breathing normally. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media Everyone knows the slightly masochistic ritual of breaking in new climbing shoes. Your foot goes in, but not willingly. Your toes make whatever space they can. The heel pulls. The downturn delivers its little sermon on suffering. And you tell yourself, once again, “They’ll stretch.” With the Skwama Lite, the pitch is different. Yes, it hugs the foot and clearly loads the front of the shoe. But above all, it lets you imagine an actual session: climbing, falling, trying again, working foot placements, without ripping your shoes off every two minutes with the fading dignity of a medieval monk. A Skwama, really? The name sets a trap. Skwama Lite. It is hard not to think about the original Skwama, the shoe that has become a staple in a lot of climbing bags, known for its springy softness, S-Heel, and almost cocky ease on modern climbs. By putting that badge on the Lite, La Sportiva immediately throws it into a slightly unfair comparison. Because the Lite is not a watered-down Skwama. It is not a Skwama that skipped leg day. It is a different tool for a different job. Less aggressive, less asymmetric, more human, it lands right in that very real gray zone of progression: the point where you have worn out your beginner shoes, but you are not ready to sacrifice your toes at the altar of pure performance. On paper, the brief is pretty clear: a vegan synthetic upper, moderate downturn, 4 mm FriXion Black rubber, a 1.1 mm full-length LaSpoFlex midsole, and the P3 system, which helps the shoe hold its shape and tension over time. Taken one by one, none of that is going to make anyone shout “genius” in the locker room. But together, it says exactly what this shoe is trying to do: give you precision without pretending you have mutant feet. The first fit backs that up. The forefoot feels wrapped, not crushed. The toe box is much more forgiving than the classic Skwama’s, though it is not wide by any means. Climbers with very high-volume feet should still try before they celebrate. And because the synthetic upper will not stretch like leather, sizing matters from the start: snug, precise, but livable. Going too small “for performance” would be the fastest way to ruin what this shoe is offering: progress without turning every session into a dispute with your toe joints. When your foot starts asking questions The Skwama Lite comes alive when your foot has to start thinking. Volumes, insecure smears, modern slabs: the feedback is clear, even a little instructional. You do not get the electric snap of an ultra-soft comp shoe, and you do not get the strict support of a shoe built only for edging, meaning standing on very small footholds. It sits in a readable middle ground: soft enough to smear on a volume, structured enough to stand on a small edge without folding in half. That is its main strength. It does not turn bad footwork into a miracle. There is no lie here, no cozy illusion where magic rubber covers up every sloppy move. When your foot slips, you can often tell why: you did not commit enough pressure, your hips lagged behind, the angle was wrong, the weight transfer was off. In those moments, the shoe works like a good technique coach. It does not forgive everything, but it explains a lot. That can sting. It is also useful. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media On small edges, it holds up better than the “Lite” label might suggest. The 4 mm sole, combined with the full-length midsole, gives enough support to stand cleanly on vertical terrain or in a slight overhang. You do not get the talon-like bite of a Miura VS or the aggressive pull of a tightly sized Solution, but the shoe is serious. It lets you push, shift weight, and work. For a progression shoe, that matters far more than shining for three moves before turning into a torture device. Its natural habitat is the modern climbing gym. The Skwama Lite likes volumes, uncertain feet, open boulders, and problems where the foot is not just holding a foothold but helping balance the whole body. The FriXion Black rubber offers steady grip and makes sense for climbers stacking indoor sessions. It does not quite have the mental security of Vibram XS Grip2 on the slickest surfaces, that extra bit of trust that lets you commit without second-guessing. But this is not bargain-bin rubber. It simply makes you place your feet well. Bad news for the ego, excellent news for technique. The toe patch handles basic toe hooks well enough. Toe hooks, where you pull with the top of the shoe, feel solid on simple compressions, standard gym moves, and everyday scumming. But once the movement gets very physical and competition-style, with a lot of pulling through the front of the foot, you start to find the shoe’s limit. The Skwama Lite can do the move, but it does not pretend to be a mutant sock built to live on a 45-degree spray wall. The heel tells a similar story. By dropping the original Skwama’s S-Heel, La Sportiva gains comfort, simplicity, and probably a better fit for more feet. But it also gives up some absolute lockdown. On a heel hook, where you use the heel to pull or hold tension, it works fine for balance, positioning, or moderate compression. On a hard heel hook locked on a tiny feature in steep terrain, with your body pulling the other way, the Lite lacks authority. It does not necessarily pop off, but it does not give you that locked-in feeling that lets you forget the heel and think about the next move. And in that situation, being able to think about the next move instead of your heel already feels like a small luxury. The technical age Outside, the Skwama Lite still has real credibility on single-pitch sport routes, especially on technical vertical terrain or slight overhangs with smears, small feet, and placements you need to read carefully. Rock does not scare it. Its sensitivity even helps you understand footholds, adjust pressure, and avoid climbing only with finger strength, that old temptation whenever a foot looks even slightly questionable. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media That said, it would not be our first choice for long multi-pitch days, cracks, or routes that demand a lot of sustained support. For that kind of terrain, a Katana, Miura, or TC Pro will offer more structure, more useful stiffness, and more overall coherence. The Skwama Lite can absolutely go to the crag. It just was not designed to spend its life at a belay while your partner sorts out the rope. That is where it finds its real place: in the very specific moment when you realize climbing better does not just mean pulling harder. When you start looking at your feet differently. When you learn that a tiny edge is not always too small; sometimes you just have not weighted it properly. That a volume is not a missing foothold, but an invitation to manage pressure. That a foot slip often says more about your position than about the shoe. For that phase, the Skwama Lite checks a lot of boxes without feeling like it was designed by committee. It is precise enough to help you improve, comfortable enough to keep on for a while, and sensitive enough to help you understand what is happening under your foot. It does not sell pain as proof of commitment. It also does not turn climbing into an easy walk. It offers something more useful: learn to place your feet before punishing them. Its limits are clear, and that clarity is part of what makes it easy to understand. Very advanced climbers may find it too tame. The heel lacks lockdown for demanding use. The rubber will not silence XS Grip2 purists. The more forgiving fit will not magically work for every foot. But criticizing it for those things would almost be criticizing it for being honest. The Skwama Lite is not a classic Skwama dressed up as an accessible shoe. It is a serious progression model, built for climbing often, training cleanly, and feeling a little more of what you are doing. It is not the shoe that will hand you two number grades just by touching your foot. No honest shoe does that. And any shoe that suggests otherwise should probably answer for its promises in front of a court of battered toes. But it can help you place your feet more accurately, load them more confidently, and keep your shoes on long enough to repeat, understand, and adjust. In a time when climbers still confuse technical performance with suffering, that is not so “lite” after all. The Skwama Lite is available through La Sportiva and specialty retailers in sizes 34 to 48, with half sizes across the full range. Suggested retail price: €130. Sponsored by La Sportiva.

In climbing, we learn to hold on because holding on is visible. We spend less time learning how to fall, because falling still looks a little too much like admitting defeat. And yet, at the end of a rope or in the middle of a padded floor, a fall says plenty about risk, fear, other people’s eyes, and the rules of a sport’s culture. (CC) Nicolas Meunier / Unsplash In climbing, falling should be ordinary. In bouldering, most attempts end on a pad. In lead climbing, a clean fall can even mean you are finally climbing at the edge of what you know how to do. And still, falling carries a strange embarrassment. It makes noise. It stops the attempt. It draws eyes. Sometimes it makes you smile too fast, say “I’m good” before you have even checked, or turn fear into a funny story before anyone sees too much of it. That is one of modern climbing’s quiet contradictions: we fall all the time, but mostly we learn how not to. The Fall, and Everyone Watching In a bouldering gym, a fall disappears quickly. A body lands on the pad, someone walks through, the music takes over again, and the next try begins. On a rope, a fall lingers. The rope comes tight, the belayer catches it, the climber may swing back into the wall, then lower into that very specific silence that follows a fall nobody quite expected. In a sport built around the send—a clean ascent without falling or hanging—falling means the sequence broke. The attempt did not hold together. Climbing also makes failure unusually visible. For a few seconds, everyone knows who fell, where, and how. We do not always fall because we failed to hold on hard enough. Sometimes we hold on too hard because we never learned how to fall Just listen at the base of the wall. “Come on, commit.” “That was nothing.” “You had it.” “Take!” “I didn’t go for it.” “My foot slipped.” None of that is a big deal on its own. But these small reactions create an atmosphere, and eventually a culture. They show what gets admired, minimized, encouraged, turned into a joke, or kept private. A fall also exposes your place in the group. One climber who refuses to let go may be seen as tough. Another who comes down before the end may be seen as cautious, clear-headed, or “not committed enough,” depending on the place, the grade, and the vibe. The same fall does not mean the same thing in a packed gym, at the base of a crag, among friends, or in front of a camera. Technically, though, a fall is not just a mistake. On lead, until the rope is clipped into the next quickdraw, the last piece that is truly protecting you is still below. If the climber has pulled out slack to clip, the fall gets longer. Add in very concrete errors—back-clipping, Z-clipping, the rope behind the leg—or the physics of fall factor, and a fall becomes much more than “someone let go.” A fall is a system: dynamic rope, belayer, friction, wall angle, body position, slack, fatigue, surprise. Climbers are happy to learn how to read a route, place their feet, refine beta—the specific sequence or method for a climb—and squeeze out one more move. The possible end of the attempt is more often left to experience, imitation, or whatever reflex shows up in the moment. In a 2026 paper, “The Climber’s Grip,” Matthias Boeker and his colleagues equipped 19 climbers with sensors. The authors found that muscular fatigue was significantly correlated with increased fear during lead climbing. Fear sometimes shows on the face. More often, it settles in the forearms. It makes you stay on a hold too long, clip too late, breathe too high, decide too fast. Many climbers know the loop: the more fear rises, the harder you grip; the harder you grip, the faster you get tired; the faster you get tired, the more likely you are to fall; the more likely you are to fall, the more the fear seems justified. So we do not always fall because we failed to hold on hard enough. Sometimes we hold on too hard because we never learned how to fall. Climbing’s Love of Risk To understand why falling carries so much weight, you have to look at what climbing rewards. Success matters, of course. But how you succeed matters almost as much: staying calm, clipping at the right moment, not showing too much fear, keeping precision when the climbing gets exposed, brushing off the fall once you are back on the ground. Courage becomes a technical skill, but also a kind of style. The sociology of risk sports has a term for this. Sociologist Stephen Lyng popularized the idea of “edgework” to describe activities in which people deliberately move close to a boundary—physical, psychological, social—in order to test their ability to stay in control. Climbing fits that story well: a body near empty space, movement that still has to stay precise, fear that has to be managed without being denied. The trouble starts when that story turns fear into a character flaw. In a study on risk and recognition in climbing, sociologists Trygve Langseth and Øyvind Salvesen show that risk-taking is part of climbing’s value system and can generate credibility among peers. Climbers move through a world where certain kinds of risk are recognized, narrated, and ranked. A fall, then, also happens inside a language. In the gym, at the crag, in a group, or on social media, certain attitudes start to define what “counts”: not letting go too early, being willing to whip—a big lead fall—laughing off a foot slip, turning a scare into a good story. On the other side, some fears become harder to say out loud. “I don’t trust this belay.” “I don’t want to fall here.” “I don’t know what will happen if I let go.” Sometimes saying that takes more energy than squeezing the hold for a few more seconds. This is especially clear in the way climbers talk about the “mental game.” The phrase can be useful. It can also flatten everything else. If someone freezes, do they “have a mental block”? Or have they never practiced falling? Is the belayer reliable? Is the fall clean from that spot? Is there a ledge, ground-fall potential, a bad rope position, a major weight difference between climber and belayer? Psychological language can make an individual problem out of something that also involves training, trust, equipment, terrain, and shared culture. A pad absorbs some of the energy. It does not teach you to bend your knees, avoid catching yourself with straight arms, check the landing zone, downclimb instead of jump, or skip the last try when fatigue makes the fall worse Accident data reminds us of what heroic stories tend to forget: not all falls are the same. A prospective study conducted in Glasgow in 1992–1993 recorded 19 climbing injuries treated in emergency care; 18 were directly related to falls. Those numbers are old and local, but they point to something simple: the seriousness of a fall depends on where it happens, what the body hits, and how the rope comes tight. The point is not to split climbers into the cautious and the brave. An ordinary fall on a steep overhang can become a terrible idea two bolts lower, on a slab, above a ledge. What we call courage is sometimes a very concrete skill: knowing how to read the fall before it happens. Letting Go? Bouldering shows this paradox at scale. It has made falling ordinary. You can start climbing without a harness, without knowing how to tie a knot, without a partner, without much technical vocabulary. You walk in, put on shoes, follow a color, and fall. The gym democratized climbing by shifting part of the risk onto the infrastructure: pads, calibrated setting, posted rules. But a pad does not teach you how to land. In 2024, the DAV recorded 261 accidents involving serious injuries or rescue response in German and Austrian climbing gyms; 75 percent involved bouldering. In 84 percent of bouldering accidents, the injury came from falling onto the pad. In 2023, the same tracking system noted that bouldering injuries mostly affected the extremities: arms and legs. The DAV is not describing a sport that is unusually dangerous. It is pointing to a familiar paradox: in bouldering, injuries often happen at the exact moment when people assume the safety system will do the work. A pad absorbs some of the energy. It does not teach you to bend your knees, avoid catching yourself with straight arms, check the landing zone, downclimb instead of jump, or skip the last try when fatigue makes the fall worse. The same logic applies on a rope. A fall involves two people, sometimes more. Too much slack can make the fall dangerously long. Too little slack can create a hard catch, send the climber back into the wall, and make the impact harsher. Petzl makes this point in its guidance on dynamic belaying: giving a soft catch does not mean leaving a lot of slack, because that can increase the risk of hitting the ground. Learning to fall, then, has to be shared. It involves the climber, the belayer, the group that comments or stays quiet, and the gym that teaches people instead of simply posting rules. Behavioral psychology gives us a useful frame here. Graduated exposure means ranking fear-provoking situations from least to most stressful, then working through them progressively. A 2023 study of women climbers with fear of falling found that psychological training based on emotional regulation can reduce anxiety and improve performance. In climbing, that rarely starts with a huge, spectacular fall. It can be much quieter: jumping from a low boulder problem, learning not to land on straight arms, taking a small fall just above the bolt on a steep and well-protected route, working with a trusted belayer, saying exactly what is scary, and repeating the process until the body has another option besides locking up. The goal is not to eliminate fear. Fear can be right. It can point to a real danger, uncertainty, bad conditions, lack of trust, or a past experience. The work is to give that fear words and reference points. Is it the eyes of other people? A previous fall? An objectively dangerous spot? A shaky belay? Not knowing what will happen when the rope comes tight? In a sport obsessed with sending, falling will probably always feel like a public kind of failure. But it can become something other than a verdict. A learned movement. Shared information. A moment you know how to move through without immediately dressing it up as a joke, proof of courage, or a small private shame. Learning to fall does not mean giving up on climbing hard. It means understanding that climbing is not only about what you can hold on to. It is also about how, sometimes, you learn to let go.

As the Olympic era pushes sports federations to pour more of their money and attention into elite performance, Sport Climbing Australia is trying to widen the frame. By creating an inclusive category at the highest level of its national competitions, the Australian federation wants to help its athletes chase the Games while also making room for climbers left out by the sport’s binary model. It is a delicate balance, still very much a work in progress. But Australia is choosing it. © ClimbingQTS Climbing’s arrival in the Olympics has shifted the sport’s center of gravity. In many federations, calendars, budgets, and priorities are being rebuilt around high performance. In Australia, though, the federation is testing a different answer: refusing to pit medal hopes against broader access to competition walls. Same Wall, Same Standard In many sports, gender categories arrive loaded with tension, suspicion, and hard lines. The conversation often starts at the top: international rules, eligibility criteria, Olympic policies, debates over fairness, and the protection of women’s categories. In Australia, Sport Climbing Australia has chosen a different entry point: the climbers who, until now, have not really had a place in the competitive pathway. “Our ambition is to have more Australians climbing more often, in whatever way makes them happy” Rebecca Hamilton, CEO of Sport Climbing Australia In a recent ABC News story, several young climbers described the gap between the welcome they found in LGBTQIA+ climbing spaces and the much harsher experience of competitions. Luce, a nonbinary climber, said they had felt forced to choose between being “a queer climber” and “a competition climber,” as if they could not be both. Phoebe, a trans woman, described being misgendered at competitions. That is the context in which ClimbingQTs, an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group within Australia’s climbing community, pushed Sport Climbing Australia to act. The organization, which brings climbers together every month in gyms across the country, had spent months calling for better recognition of trans, nonbinary, and queer climbers in competitive pathways. The Australian federation is now working on an inclusive category, open to climbers who do not want to, or cannot, enter the binary men’s and women’s categories. © ClimbingQTS Rebecca “Beck” Hamilton has led Sport Climbing Australia for the past year. She did not come out of climbing. In fact, she says she has only climbed once, and she sees that distance as an asset. “I do like to keep a bit of independence from it,” she says, “because that can be a real strength as a CEO..” Her job, she tells us, is not only to think about the athletes who might reach the Games. It is also to understand “the people who keep our sport going every day.” Sport Climbing Australia is trying to hold two goals at once: build international-level performance and create a broader, more accessible, more sustainable sport. “Our ambition is to have more Australians climbing more often, in whatever way makes them happy,” Hamilton says. For the federation, the challenge is to make sure the inclusive category does not become a side room, a symbolic add-on next to the “real” competition. Hamilton is clear on this point: the category has to be structured, easy to understand, and genuinely competitive. “I do think there still need to be rules,” she says. “Especially at an elite level, we had to define what category one looked like.” The model under discussion is built around levels: category one for athletes climbing at an elite standard, with lower levels potentially added later for regional, local, or gym-based competitions. At national championships, only category one would be offered. “In category one, you are essentially climbing at an elite level,” Hamilton says. “You are climbing on the same problems as our Olympians at our national championships.” That point matters. Boulder problems are the short, ropeless climbs used in bouldering competitions, and for Hamilton, using the same problems changes the nature of the project. The point is not to adjust the wall for a category seen as different. It is to open access to the same athletic standard. “The message I heard very clearly from talking with the team,” she says, “is that they actually don’t want anything to change on the wall at all. They want those elite competition opportunities.” Still, the question is practical. In a competition where boulder problems are usually split between men’s and women’s categories, which problems will athletes in the inclusive category climb? Hamilton does not pretend to have all the answers yet. “Will they climb on the male or the female boulder? … I’m actually not sure.” That choice, she says, will have to be built with the people most directly affected, as the federation gets a better understanding of participants’ profiles and levels. She even floats one possible solution: “Just draw it out of a hat,” she says. “Don’t make it a thing.” © ClimbingQTS That pragmatism runs through her thinking. The Australian federation has already launched an open category for disabled climbers who do not fit existing Paralympic classifications. At a recent National Cup, two athletes took part. “And two athletes is enough,” Hamilton says. “That’s two more athletes than we had before.” Not Choosing Between the Elite and the Grassroots Another distinctive part of the Australian model is how the country defines and funds the mission of its sports federations. “Most climbing federations today seem to have producing Olympians and Paralympians as their main mission,” Hamilton says. “We are no different in that respect. But in Australia, we have two very separate funding streams.” One side is dedicated to performance: Win Well. The other, Play Well, is focused on access to sport. “And that is where the inclusive category really makes sense,” she says. « La stratégie Play Well en Australie dit que chacun a une place dans le sport » Rebecca Hamilton, CEO of Sport Climbing Australia That structure allows Sport Climbing Australia to avoid setting elite climbing against the grassroots. The federation wants to support commercial climbing gyms, which play a central role in the growth of Australian climbing, while also working on coach education, adaptive climbing, equipment, safety, youth pathways, and masters categories. In that framework, the inclusive category is not meant to be a one-off gesture. It is one piece of a larger plan. “The Play Well strategy in Australia says everyone has a place in sport,” Hamilton says. “I love that idea. You may not be a competitor. You may come climbing once a week for the social connection. You may be an official, a volunteer, a coach. But everyone has a place in sport.” Local Bet, Global Rules There is one major limit: Sport Climbing Australia is not operating in a rule-free world. National competitions can also serve as selection events for Australian teams, which then compete on international, Olympic, and Paralympic circuits. In those pathways, the federation will have to apply international rules. « Nous voulons être un laboratoire » Rebecca Hamilton, CEO de Sport Climbing Australia Beck Hamilton le dit clairement : certaines compétitions permettront à des personnes trans de s’inscrire dans la catégorie correspondant à leur genre. Mais dès lors qu’un événement devient une porte d’entrée vers les équipes nationales et les Jeux, une ligne réglementaire s’impose. « Je ne fixe pas ces règles, je les applique », résume-t-elle. Hamilton says this plainly. Some competitions will allow trans people to enter the category that matches their gender. But once an event becomes a gateway to national teams and the Games, the international rulebook takes over. “I don’t make those rules,” she says. “I merely enforce them.” That is also why the inclusive category does not solve everything. For some trans women, it may leave the central question untouched: the ability to compete in the women’s category. ABC News cited one climber who welcomed the emergence of an inclusive category, but would still prefer to compete in a women’s event. Australia’s project, then, opens another route. It does not, by itself, reopen the door to the women’s Olympic pathway. The goal is not to replace the Olympic model with another one. It is to keep that model from taking up all the space. Alongside Olympic men’s and women’s categories, and alongside Paralympic categories based on classification, Sport Climbing Australia wants to add an inclusive pathway that is structured, competitive, and fully owned. Looking further ahead, Hamilton says Australia would like to host the World Championships before the Brisbane 2032 Olympics. In that scenario, she imagines the Olympic and Paralympic pathways having their World Championships first, followed by an inclusive World Championships “on the same walls.” She knows the experiment will be watched. “Absolutely, we want to be a laboratory,” she says. She has already heard from people in other Australian sports facing the same questions, but unsure how to approach them. For Hamilton, the method is simple: find the people affected, listen to them, build with them, then test. Sport Climbing Australia does not have all the answers yet. But its proposal comes down to a line Hamilton repeats like a guiding principle. “The walls don’t discriminate,” she says. “The walls are the walls. When you walk into a climbing gym and you go on the wall, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, or anything in between.”

Desire Lines grew out of a simple conviction: mountain literature has been built around one narrow voice—white, male, and heroic—while pushing many other stories to the margins. Katie Ives, the former editor-in-chief of Alpinist, and Holly Chen, the collective’s art director, explain how a 2024 writing workshop sparked an editorial project that feels both ambitious and urgently needed: making room for marginalized voices in climbing and mountaineering at a time when their rights in the United States are under growing attack. © Juliet Kennedy Vertige Media: Mountaineering and climbing are still very male and very white spaces. How do you explain that, structurally and culturally? Katie Ives : It really depends on how you define mountaineering. If you look at the earlier meaning of the word—in both French and English, montagnard and mountaineer—it meant someone who dwelled in the mountains. Then the Victorians came along and redefined it in a much narrower way: specialized gear, alpine clubs, and hiring local guides who had been climbing those mountains for generations, while relegating them to a lower status as guides and porters. We are still trapped inside that very narrow definition. When you look at mountaineering in a broader, more global sense, you realize that countries in Africa, Asia, and South America have their own mountain-climbing traditions that long predate the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Even within European alpine climbing, women were far more involved from the beginning than the history books suggest. Clara Roche has done important scholarship in Britain, looking at guides’ journals and private letters and compiling first ascents—not first female ascents—and first winter ascents that women did. When winter mountaineering was developing in the Alps in the 1870s and 1880s, many of the people doing groundbreaking work were women. In Lizzie Le Blond’s case, she was writing the first English-language guidebooks to winter mountaineering. You have to read between the lines of history books to see that people pushed to the margins were always there. “Creating that broader, more diverse spread of voices and stories is going to take much longer. Probably as long as it took for the problem to be created in the first place” Holly Chen, Creative Director at Desire Lines Holly Chen : My perspective is more lived and first-person. I grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There wasn’t a big mountaineering culture around me, not a big outdoor culture. So as a kid, I would go to the library, pull every adventure book off the shelves, and start reading. Walter Bonatti’s Mountain of My Life, Jon Krakauer—all the big hero narratives. I devoured every single book. And in my mid-teens, I suddenly thought: I can’t do this. I can’t mountaineer. I can’t rock climb. Everyone in these books is a man. I held on to that belief for most of my life. I moved to the U.S. when I was 18, started climbing in a gym, and still thought, “Oh, I’m just doing this for fun. I’m not a real climber.” It wasn’t until I started getting into mountain journalism, and reading some of the texts Katie talks about, that I understood this field was actually much deeper than it looked to me as a kid. Why aren’t these people more prominent? Because I spent ten years of my life believing I couldn’t do this. Vertige Media : Why has it taken so long to change? Holly Chen : A problem that took almost a century to create is not going to disappear in a couple of years. This is something we may be working toward for our entire lives. But the next person who lives in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or anywhere in the world, and picks up a book because they’re interested in mountaineering and climbing culture—they shouldn’t see only one dominant voice. Creating that broader, more diverse spread of voices and stories is going to take much longer. Probably as long as it took for the problem to be created in the first place. Katie Ives : When I was editor-in-chief of Alpinist, even as late as 2015, I still had trouble finding women to write for the magazine. I realized I had to break that cycle: women saw magazines, didn’t see themselves in them, and assumed they couldn’t write for them. So I started doing a lot of outreach directly to the community—seeking out women writers, nonbinary writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers—and inviting them in. After a while, you get momentum. People see themselves in the pages and think, “Oh, I can do this.” By the time I left Alpinist, about 50 to 60 percent of the writers we were publishing were women and nonbinary writers. I wasn’t trying to find them anymore. They were finding us. You have to create spaces where people feel welcome. Then people can take creative risks because they know they’re supported. Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, also known as Lizzie Le Blond, Irish author, photographer, and mountaineer (cc) Wikimedia Commons Vertige Media : Other cultures have a very different relationship with mountains—neither conquest nor performance. What does that teach us? Holly Chen : Taiwan is a very outdoor country. I would have to double-check the exact number, but it has around 52 mountains over 10,000 feet running down the center of the island. People there are immersed in nature all the time. It becomes part of us, rather than some faraway peak you have to go conquer. It’s a parallel existence with nature, not dominance over it. Hong Kong, where I spent most of my teenage life, is different: concrete, glass, high-rises. But for Taiwanese people, nature is so integrated into the culture. There’s this recreational mindset of existing with nature, in nature. “How we approach mountains is a microcosm of how we approach nature in general: do we consider ourselves separate from it, or part of it?” Katie Ives, Editorial Director of Desire Lines Katie Ives : In many cultures around the world, mountains are seen as bridges between earth and the heavens—sacred spaces. Approaching them becomes more like a pilgrimage than a conquest. Sometimes reaching the summit is part of that. Sometimes it isn’t. There is also the sense of living with and living in the mountains, as Holly described, rather than coming from the outside to dominate. Ashima Shiraishi wrote something in a recent anthology on women mountaineers that I found really powerful. She asked: “How can climbing circle back to being an activity rooted in ritual and meaning? What other traditions and cultures that have gone unwritten and unnoticed may emerge into the climbing culture?” That is exactly the question we are asking. How we approach mountains is a microcosm of how we approach nature in general: do we consider ourselves separate from it, or part of it? Vertige Media : What was the founding moment of Desire Lines? Holly Chen : It was in 2024, at the Women Up Climbing Festival in Los Angeles. I had known Katie for a while, and that’s where I met Rosie Bates. After the festival ended, the three of us—Katie, Rosie, and I—sat down to teach a writing clinic. It was just a small yoga room, a couple of tables pushed together, a little projector. And the energy in the room was so different. The energy of that entire weekend was: everyone feels safe being who they are. No one is performing for anyone else. The questions, the excitement that came out of it—when it was over, we looked at one another and said, “How do we keep this going?” That conviction kept growing, until we invited Natalie Berry and Juliet Kennedy to join the team. Vertige Media : Which literary and cultural references inspired the editorial direction of Desire Lines? Katie Ives : Around 2016, I started noticing real growth in writers coming into mountain literature from the margins—women, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers. They were bringing radically different, cutting-edge, experimental ways of looking at mountains, and they were shattering old paradigms. There have been a number of powerful books. Faye Latham’s erasure poetry took Frank Smythe’s British Mountaineers and used whiteout and stitches to remake it into something new: this idea of bursting through the seams of Western colonial mountain literature and finding buried voices by reinterpreting the past. And then there is Headstrap, by Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar, about the Sherpas of Darjeeling. It’s told in a nonlinear style, almost as a series of interwoven conversations. That inspired me a lot in terms of narrative form. We don’t have to follow a traditional arc that looks like a mountain: an inciting incident, rising conflict, summit, resolution. Life—and history—is much more full of gaps and missing spaces. Holly Chen : Something struck me when I first started writing about climbing. I had just led my first climb outside—lead climbing means clipping the rope as you go—and I was very excited. I started writing about the experience, but I would flip open those classic mountaineering books and try to imitate the language because I wanted to be part of that world. The tropes were all there: the storm closing in, pushing through, conquering the objective. So I wrote about this little 5.7 crag I had just led for the first time as if I were conquering some big mountain. I wrote like that for a long time. Until one day I looked at it and thought: that is not how I feel about rock climbing. I don’t feel like I’m conquering anything. Why am I writing this way? “We have to keep producing these stories faster than they are being silenced” Katie Ives, Editorial Director of Desire Lines Vertige Media : In the U.S., federal policies are directly attacking the rights of trans people and minorities, including in national parks. Has this changed the sense of urgency around Desire Lines? Katie Ives : Absolutely. Doing this work was always important, but now it feels like we’re racing against time. You look at the ways the U.S. government has been rapidly deleting and removing stories about the contributions of women, LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, and Indigenous people. We have to keep producing these stories faster than they are being silenced. We have to keep helping people continue to have a voice faster than they are silenced. And by “we,” I don’t mean specifically us. There is only so much our small group can do. But everyone in America should be doing what they can to push back. Vertige Media : You say Desire Lines isn’t a media outlet—it’s a movement. Where do you draw the line between journalism and advocacy? Katie Ives : When I first got into writing, the idea was that you weren’t supposed to write about ideas or politics. I came across a piece by a British editor, Dave Cook, who talked about how climbing writing had the same problem: it was keeping out discussions of race, gender, and politics. By doing that, he argued, it was becoming an incredibly narrow, escapist genre that was, as he put it, running on empty. Mountain literature needs to open its doors to these wider conversations if it wants to be relevant to our changing world. And there can be a false idea of neutrality—this notion that we have to give equal weight to both sides. When one side is saying that trans people shouldn’t exist, are you going to give equal weight to that? Women are people. Climbers of color are people. Trans people are people. Those should be basic human ideas, and nonpartisan. And yet, strangely, in our current world, they have been branded as somehow partisan. That is incomprehensible to me. On the left, Katie Ives; on the right, Holly Chen © Courtesy of Desire Lines Vertige Media : What are the most urgent stories to tell right now? And the most difficult ones? Katie Ives : My preference, generally, is that if we include a story about a marginalized culture, the writer should be from that culture. That removes a lot of the difficulty of outsiders misinterpreting things. What feels both urgent and difficult to publish is work on sexism and sexual harassment in the climbing community. Those topics make people very uncomfortable, and it can be hard for writers to get published because some editors see them as too political or too divisive. But that is exactly where you need to be bold. “These stories need a place to be told. I really hope we can be that place—where people feel safe” Holly Chen, Creative Director at Desire Lines Holly Chen : I feel very similarly. I host a routesetting podcast—routesetting is the craft of designing climbs in a gym—and sometimes, weeks after an episode comes out, someone reaches out to me anonymously to say that the person I just hosted has some dark backstory, or has left a trail of hurt people behind. And I feel absolutely frozen. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if it is even my place to help these people. And I have potentially platformed someone’s abuser online. These stories need a place to be told. I really hope we can be that place—where people feel safe. Vertige Media : In five years, what do you hope Desire Lines will have changed? Holly Chen : On a small scale, if I can provide a safe space for just one person to be themselves, that would sustain me. On a larger scale, I hope people in the climbing and mountaineering community will feel a little more confident being themselves, and more willing to speak up about these issues rather than staying silent out of fear of repercussions or losing work, like what happened to Shannon Joslin. Katie Ives : Every story that gets told is something saved from the void. I believe very strongly that every human being has infinite realms of wonder, possibility, and worth within them. Every fragment of that preserved in a publication is something saved from the abyss. That has always been a huge motivation for me. And beyond representation, I think about what Julie Rak wrote about cholita climbers in South America. For them, it wasn’t just about being able to climb. It was about being able to climb as themselves, wearing their traditional dress, and redefining what climbing means. That is the transformation: not just more representation, but revolutionizing the genre itself. Read more: the official website of the Desire Lines collective and media project

In Fontainebleau, even the things people leave behind have something to say. Especially when they smell like pine resin, sleep in the sand, and watch a whole generation of climbers come outside looking for what the gym can no longer quite promise. These are the thoughts of a pof bag left at the base of a boulder. (cc) Wolf Lieff / Unsplash I no longer know exactly how long I’ve been squatting in this patch of sand. Three weeks? Ten years? A full generation of Solutions and Dragos? In Fontainebleau, time doesn’t pass. It settles in. Into the grain of the sandstone, the repainted circuits, the old crash pads, and the springtime promises of gym regulars swearing that this year, finally, they’re going to “climb outside more.” I’m a pof bag. Or I was. These days, I’m mostly a small textile corpse. A sticky relic from a time when friction smelled like pine resin, not a chemistry lab. Every now and then, someone nudges me with a shoe. Someone takes a picture of me with an ironic emoji. Someone asks, “What is this old-school thing?” And somewhere, in a Bleau parking lot, a purist in canvas pants quietly cries inside his Renault Kangoo. Back then, people pulled me out with respect. They slipped a hand inside, tapped their palm, and launched toward the crimp with the modest confidence of people who did not need an algorithm to validate their attempt. I’m not saying things were better before. I’m just saying they were less white. I can already hear the comments. People will say I’m acting like a bitter old bag. That I’m confusing culture with mothballs. That Fontainebleau belongs to no one, and especially not to a little resin pouch abandoned back when people still said “Bleausard” without irony. You would not be entirely wrong. A forest guarded by three old guys in threadbare shorts who can recite the full first-ascent history of Bas-Cuvier without taking a breath is not exactly a democratic ideal. And the old-timers were not all quiet saints of good style. I’ve seen plenty of self-appointed gatekeepers hold forth on the purity of the rock while leaving behind a cigarette butt, three scraps of tape, and a 20-minute ethics lecture for a beginner whose only crime was putting a pad on a patch of heather. Age does not make you exemplary. It just gives you more memories to justify your own contradictions. Still, the problem is not change. It’s the speed of it. You came in large numbers: motivated, sincere, full of that wild energy people have when they discover the forest for the first time. It is beautiful to watch waves of climbers leave the fluorescent lights behind and come looking for something else among the pines and sandstone lines. A culture that is not shared becomes a private collection. And private collections always end up gathering dust. But going outside is not just a change of scenery. It is not a bouldering gym with a transparent roof. Sometimes you show up in Bleau as if you’ve arrived at a new sector inside a concept-store gym. You scroll. You find the line. You check the grade on the app. You watch the beta video — beta meaning the sequence, the how-to. You drop the pads. You film the go. You tick it. You leave. In the meantime, the boulder has turned white, the landing has been chewed up, three chalk ticks have survived your enthusiasm, and someone has delivered the classic line: “Don’t worry, the rain will wash it off.” The lazy gospel of invisible impact. From my low little lookout in the dirt, I’ve learned to identify the powder tribes. First, there are the plasterers. They don’t chalk a hold. They remodel it. A sloper resists them — a sloping hold, the kind you have to press and trust — and they coat it until they’ve created a cast of their own helplessness. They call it “optimizing conditions.” I call it turning a thousand-year-old sandstone masterpiece into a whiteboard for a crisis meeting. Next to them are the tick-mark people. Their relationship with rock is purely geometric. A hold does not exist unless it has been underlined in white highlighter. A foothold only counts if it’s marked like a fire-escape route. They don’t read the boulder. They annotate it. It’s touching, really, this way of coming into nature only to recreate the ergonomics of PowerPoint. Outside begins at the exact moment you start asking what you are leaving behind And then there are the cosmetic brushers, a very common species. They own a magnificent boar-bristle brush, clipped to their pack with an unnecessarily technical alpine carabiner. They pull it out, give the rock two vague little polite swipes, like dusting off a jacket before a job interview, then walk away convinced they have performed a major ecological act. Spoiler: owning a brush does not make you a guardian of the forest. No more than owning a Netflix subscription makes you a French New Wave director. I’m exaggerating, obviously. That’s the perk of being an old fossil: I get to be unfair without having to manage the Instagram comments. Thankfully, there are others. The ones who arrive gently. Who look where they place their feet and their pads. Who really brush, before and after their turn. The ones who understand that a boulder is not a product to consume, but a material thing to care for. They know that the beauty of Fontainebleau lies as much in what you send as in what you choose not to leave behind. You can spot those people quickly. They are not necessarily quieter, because restraint has never stopped anyone from having a strong opinion about heel-hook beta. But their presence weighs less. They do not act as if the forest has been privatized for their training session. They know the rock was there before their project, and that it will outlast them. Do not treat the rock like a gym wall that forgot to be reset Pof versus chalk, in the end, is not the point. The real fault line is somewhere else. It separates those who think climbing outside means getting something out of a place from those who understand that you also have to learn how to leave it. Outside begins at the exact moment you start asking what you are leaving behind. Not just the visible trash, the tape, the cans. The habits, too. The noise. The consumer confidence. The comfortable idea that a natural space is basically a free public service with trees around it. I know. I sound like a cranky old scold. And yet I love watching you climb. Even the rushed ones. Even the plasterers. Even the theorists of “Honestly, this style just doesn’t suit me” after four catastrophic burns. Because sometimes, the magic still happens. A beginner finally understands that you do not pull with your arms so much as push with your feet. A mutant pauses for two seconds from performing and looks at the light through the birches. A child invents a sequence that is absurd and beautiful. Someone lovingly brushes for the next person without turning it into a story. The sandstone gets its mystery back. And I think, maybe not everything is lost. Cultures do not die when new people arrive. They die when no one takes the time to pass on the tiny habits that hold them up. So keep your crash pads, your apps, your ultra-technical shoes, and your beta videos. Come. Climb. Fall. Discover. Keep this forest alive. It was never meant to be the private lounge of three nostalgic men. But please, learn how to leave. Brush. Erase. Look. Do not treat the rock like a gym wall that forgot to be reset. As for me, someone may eventually pick me up. Or I may disappear under the leaves for good, which is another way of vanishing. That’s fine. I’m only a pof bag. But when you head home, at least try to leave the rock less marked up than your ego.

On June 20, workers at Movement San Francisco launched a national campaign asking customers to pledge to freeze their memberships. Management has spent thousands of dollars on anti-union legal fees. Ten unionized gyms are still waiting for their first contract. At the largest climbing gym chain in North America, the standoff is entering a new phase. Movement Gym employees in San Francisco on June 20, 2026 © Courtesy of Climbing Workers United On Saturday, June 20, 2026, at 2 p.m., about 20 people gathered outside Movement San Francisco, a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Some held signs. Others handed flyers to members walking through the door. They were not asking them to turn around. They were asking them to scan a form and sign one promise: if the workers give the signal, they will freeze their memberships. By the next day, workers say more than 300 members had already pledged to do it. The practice picket — a trial run meant to test support before a larger action — officially launched a new national campaign led by Climbing Workers United. At the same time, Movement workers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Baltimore suburbs were handing out the same flyers outside their own gyms. This is not the first chapter in the fight. In January, Vertige Media reported on how Movement workers were organizing at a pace the climbing industry had never seen, while earning an average of $15 an hour in cities like San Francisco and New York, where a living wage — enough to cover basic costs — is above $25 an hour. Aaron Vanek, a full-time organizer with Climbing Workers United, told us then that Movement was the key domino: “Once we bring down this big domino, it will mean we can close negotiations anywhere in the country.” This summer, that bet is playing out in public — and workers have decided to turn up the pressure. Ten wins, zero contracts Since late 2024, workers at 10 Movement Gyms have voted to join Climbing Workers United, a union affiliated with Workers United. In San Francisco, the December vote was unanimous. “Our vote to unionize was unanimous back in December and there is strong solidarity among our team,” Merit Hagenkort, Front Desk Lead at Movement San Francisco, told Vertige Media. And yet, despite 10 election wins, none of those gyms has secured a collective bargaining agreement. That is the problem. In the American labor system, a union election does not change much on the ground until a contract is signed — and that is often where employers slow the process down. Movement workers’ demands are straightforward: raise wages that are too low, address what unions call pay compression — when new hires are paid nearly as much as experienced staff, effectively wiping out seniority — fix chronic understaffing, create more full-time jobs, provide holiday pay for routesetters, the workers who design indoor climbs, and address safety concerns tied to air quality. Workers point to “a lack of investment in our facilities.” “The implicit message to hesitant workers: joining a union will cost you” Merit Hagenkort, employee at Movement Gym San Francisco With bargaining stalled, Movement recently sent a message that workers at unionized gyms decoded quickly. The week before the San Francisco picket, the company announced new paid holidays — but only for non-union locations. Hagenkort called it “a move that feels designed to undermine our organizing.” Movement workers say the move fits a familiar anti-union playbook, known in the U.S. as union-busting. The implicit message to hesitant workers: “joining a union will cost you.” Unfair labor practice charges have also been filed against Movement with federal authorities. If successful, those charges can legally force an employer back to the bargaining table in good faith. Very expensive lawyers According to Aaron Vanek, Movement has hired Jackson Lewis, a law firm known for representing employers in union fights, and is paying steep fees in some cases. “Imagine how that money could be used to improve the gyms or pay their employees,” he told Vertige Media. “The fact that they are responding in such a way shows that they are afraid of the power of their workers. We are confident we will win a contract that will change conditions for Movement employees. It is a question of when, not if” Aaron Vanek, a member of Climbing Workers United For Movement workers, this is not just a bad line item. Their employer is backed by private equity — investment in companies that are not publicly traded. Spending that kind of money, they argue, is a business decision: stopping unionization across a 30-gym chain means protecting margins built in part on low wages and maximum workforce flexibility. Vertige Media asked Movement for comment on these points. The company did not respond. Vanek is not backing down. “The fact that they are responding in such a way shows that they are afraid of the power of their workers. We are confident we will win a contract that will change conditions for Movement employees. It is a question of when, not if.” The federation is asked to pick a side The union push is not limited to gym entrances. In May, Workers United International President Lynne Fox sent a letter to USA Climbing, the national governing body for competition climbing in the United States, asking it to stop holding competitions, qualifiers, or championships at facilities that do not respect workers’ rights. In practice, that would rule out Movement Gyms and Touchstone Climbing, California’s largest climbing gym chain, where several Bay Area and Los Angeles locations are also in conflict with Workers United. The argument is direct: climbing has been an Olympic sport since Tokyo 2020, and “When USA Climbing partners with facilities where management has committed labor law violations or where serious labor disputes remain unresolved, it risks placing the sport out of alignment with international standards and exposing athletes, events and the sport itself to reputational harm.” “When USA Climbing partners with facilities where management has committed labor law violations or where serious labor disputes remain unresolved, it risks placing the sport out of alignment with international standards and exposing athletes, events and the sport itself to reputational harm” Lynne Fox, International President of Workers United The letter followed new unfair labor practice charges filed against Movement with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees labor relations in the U.S. Workers’ attorneys describe “surface bargaining” — going through the motions of negotiation with no real intent to reach a deal — at several gyms: Wrigleyville and Lincoln Park in Chicago; Callowhill in Philadelphia; Gowanus, LIC, and Harlem in New York; and Crystal City in Virginia. “At my gym, Movement has been bargaining in bad faith with us for as long as we've been unionized. We're ready to do whatever it takes to win a contract,” said Aliya Hunter, a front desk worker at Movement Harlem. The customer has leverage Facing a wall from management, Climbing Workers United is scaling up. If management will not bargain with its employees, maybe it will listen to its customers. The campaign launched on June 20 asks members and visitors to sign a freeze pledge — a promise to temporarily freeze their memberships. This is not yet an active boycott. It is a collective pre-commitment from a critical mass of customers who, when the union chooses the moment, would suspend their payments at the same time. Workers are holding financial pressure in reserve, ready to use it if they have to. “We're grateful for the solidarity and support we've seen from members and guests during our practice picket and at the gyms every day, and it only strengthens our resolve,” Hagenkort said. © Courtesy of Climbing Workers United Already, nearly 500 Movement Gyms workers have organized with Climbing Workers United. Across the climbing industry, more than 1,200 workers at 31 gyms have joined Workers United. Movement remains the most symbolic case, the most closely watched — and probably the most important for the entire North American climbing industry. It is a test for a sector that has grown from roughly 350 gyms to nearly 900 in the United States in the past decade, while working conditions have not kept pace. “Given how fast this industry is growing, there is no reason this shouldn't be a viable career,” Hagenkort said. Meaning: full-time work, decent pay, benefits, and a future. The June 20 picket in San Francisco was the first visible piece of a larger structure now taking shape: a membership-freeze campaign, pressure on USA Climbing, a growing number of cases before the National Labor Relations Board — and on the other side, the deafening silence of the largest climbing gym chain in the United States. No contract has been signed at Movement. But no unionized gym has backed down, either.

Let’s start with a simple compass: at Vertige Media, we will never separate the move from the moment. Martin Stranik - 2025 Chamonix World Cup © David Pillet Climbing is not a portable voting booth, or a clean little escape hatch from the noise of the world. It is the opposite. It is a doorway. A lookout. From private gyms to besieged cliffs, from worn-out bodies to brand logic, we want to document what this century is doing to climbing, and what climbing throws back in the century’s face. We believe lived passions tell us more than disembodied editorials ever will. A climbing wall can say more about the state of our social fractures than a cable-news panel packed with experts paid to perform decline. A plastic hold, a monthly gym membership that keeps getting more expensive, freelance route setters—the people who design the climbs—running on dreams, a locked Paralympic selection system: that is our raw material. This is not a cute lifestyle item at the end of the paper. It is the main story. Vertige Media was born from one conviction: climbing is not a harmless niche pastime. And for anyone who thinks it is too small to matter, beware the blind spots. That is exactly where the social order likes to hide its worst violence: in the folds of everyday life. We can already hear the eternal gatekeepers choking on their chalk: why contaminate the pure movement with politics, gender, class struggle, ecology, or postcolonialism? Let’s flip the question. How can anyone talk seriously about climbing today while pretending the rest of the world is not in the room? To cover the boom in urban climbing gyms without looking at gentrification and the exclusions it creates is not neutrality. It is blindness. To write about the rush on outdoor crags—climbing cliffs, basically—without naming conflicts over access and the stripping of shared resources is complicity. To talk about performance without examining ableism in para climbing or the financial precarity of elite athletes is a lie. And the mountains? They are not exempt from grand national myths or from the aggressive commercialization of our desire to get somewhere “wild.” The world does not stop at the landing pads, the mats below the wall. It is already on the wall. We are simply refusing to look away. This is not a lecture. It is a method. We care about the world because we find it in something physical: a face, a frustration, a lived experience. Cognitive science and social psychology have shown it clearly enough: lasting attention comes from concrete friction with reality, not from moral instruction. We care when a subject collides with our own private map. Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it That is where climbing becomes a powerful journalistic tool. Not a trick for sneaking sociology into distracted climbers’ diets. We are not asking people to abandon their passions in order to look at society. We are showing them that society is already waiting for them inside those passions. That is our answer to the numbness of contemporary democracy. We are drowning in a flood of frightening information that almost nobody still has the energy to metabolize. Crises, wars, climate collapse, class domination: everything has been documented to the point of disgust, and then paralysis. Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it. When psychological distance turns collective tragedies into faraway abstractions, journalism cannot just keep shouting along with everyone else. It has to find side trails. Ours run through grades—the rating systems climbers use to measure difficulty—that split a community in two; everyday sexism; a cliff closed because biodiversity is hanging by a thread; the route setter paid next to nothing; the broke champion; the outdoor brand selling a fantasy of anti-establishment freedom while locking down its financial messaging. We believe in the power of story. Not the pretty story used as packaging, but story as a tool for disruption and understanding. Narrative transportation is not a cocktail-party concept. A strong story moves the line, shakes loose old assumptions, and gives facts a body. It gives political flesh to what had been a cold statistic. Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness That is why we prefer the micro to the macro, the body to the concept. A Ukrainian climber who lost a limb does not represent war in the abstract. He shows what war does to a life, directly, physically, brutally. An athlete shut out of a Paralympic future is not a footnote on ableism. She shows us the machinery working in real time. A climbing-gym chain does not “sum up” urban capitalism. It offers a small working model of it. This is not about forcing politics onto climbing. It is about refusing to keep stripping politics out of it out of cowardice. Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness. That is a fraud. From Pierre Bourdieu to Loïc Wacquant, sociology has been cutting that myth open for decades: movement is social. No one climbs in a vacuum. We climb with our money, our free time, our class legitimacy, our family history, our gender. Sport sorts, ranks, and separates as much as it brings people together. Sometimes it frees people. Often it excludes them, while leaving our consciences plenty of room to stay comfortable. Climbing should not be ashamed of its contradictions. A culture that wants to grow up has to break with ready-made thinking. You can love climbing and still refuse to buy its own mythology. It will only become more alive, more critical, and more free. That is Vertige Media’s obsession: taking climbing too seriously to leave it to the merchants alone. Make room for reporting, analysis, irreverence, and humor, too. Because climbing is an industry, a geography of bodies, a knot of ecological tensions and economic power struggles. Who climbs? Who pays? Who cleans the crag? Who makes the decisions behind the scenes? Who gets erased by the big heroic story of performance? This text is our ridgeline. We will write about climbing fully, passionately, and without turning it into a shadow play for people chasing disconnected thrills. We will look at the holds, of course. But we will never forget the hands worn down on them, the bodies that fall, the monopolies being built, and the resistance taking shape. Climbing is not where we go to disappear. It is where we hit the world head-on.

In 2026, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills are moving through the United States, and trans people have become the top target of a hostile federal administration. In France, one in two LGBT+ people has experienced discrimination in a sports setting, and one in seven has quit a sport because of it. Climbing is not immune. During Pride Month, the question of allyship — actively standing with people who face discrimination — is running through the climbing community on both sides of the Atlantic. A gathering in Salt Lake City, United States (cc) Mike Newbry / Unsplash Written with the help of Jay Bruneau-Bongard. A trans flag, unfurled in the open air on El Capitan. That is what Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who had worked in Yosemite National Park for four and a half years, chose to do on their own time alongside Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmental activist known across the American outdoor community and beyond. A few days later, a criminal investigation was opened against them. On August 12, 2025, SJ was fired overnight. A new rule had just appeared in the park regulations, backdated to the day of the action. “When I was fired, it felt like losing the love of my life. I had never felt that kind of grief. I lay on the floor for two days,” SJ told Vertige Media. The firing was not an isolated incident. Since Donald Trump’s reelection, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been moving through the United States, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Of those, 55 have already been passed, targeting trans rights in 16 states. The MAGA movement has made trans people — who, according to SJ, make up roughly 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population — one of its main targets. The Myth of the Free Space One in two. That is the share of LGBTQIA+ people in France who say they have personally been targeted by homophobic or transphobic behavior in a sports setting, according to a 2022 Ipsos survey for the Fédération Sportive LGBT+, supported by the French Ministry of Sports. The same survey found that 46 percent of people in France had witnessed that kind of behavior, a number that rises to 73 percent among LGBTQIA+ people themselves. One in seven LGBTQIA+ people has quit a sport because of these experiences. Mountain and climbing culture has its own features that can make these dynamics worse. A culture built around risk. Groups that often look and sound alike. A strain of macho behavior that still runs through some corners of the outdoor world. All of it can make discrimination harder to name and harder to fight. Climbing likes to sell itself as a free space, open to everyone, without hierarchy. That story deserves a closer look. What SJ’s story reveals, beyond the firing itself, is how the climbing community responded when something unacceptable happened: mostly, with silence. After the flag action, SJ became an outcast. No more access to volunteer assignments. Friends turned away, afraid of blowback. A few local climbers defended them. The bigger names mostly did not. The reason says a lot: for too many people, Yosemite is too valuable as a backdrop for landing sponsorship deals to risk taking a public stand. Shannon “SJ” Joslin at Camp 4 in Yosemite National Park in the United States © Ryan Moon That silence is not neutral. It says something about what the climbing community protects, and what it leaves behind. Refusing to take a position in the face of discrimination allows that discrimination to keep working. One thing becomes clear from stories like this: the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights is, first and foremost, led by the people directly affected. But in every era, that fight has also been strengthened by people who chose to stand with those most exposed. See, Amplify, Act Being an ally starts with seeing what is happening. LGBTQIA+ hatred does not always arrive as a direct attack. More often, it lives in the details: a joke tossed out at the end of a climbing day, the repeated use of the wrong name or pronoun for a trans person, the comfortable silence after an out-of-line comment, the total absence of LGBTQIA+ representation in magazines, club programs, and brand catalogs. “The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it” Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside, in Climbing magazine Seeing also means taking the time to learn. According to a guide published in November 2025 by the Born This Way Foundation, the organization co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, more than one in three LGBTQIA+ young people experienced online harassment because of their identity in the previous year, and 60 percent reported chronic loneliness. Only one in three had access to spaces they saw as truly supportive. These numbers describe real people — people in our gyms, at our crags, in our clubs. Learning to recognize the mechanisms that push them out is a condition for acting usefully, not just acting around the problem. In recent years, the international climbing community has produced stories that shift the frame. Lor Sabourin, a trans climber, is the subject of They/Them, a documentary portrait that presents their climbing and their identity without setting one against the other. Campbell Harrison, an openly gay Australian competition climber, has spoken publicly in a world where that kind of visibility remains exceptionally rare. Jordan Cannon, an American professional climber, organizes Arc’teryx Queer Ascent, an annual gathering for LGBTQIA+ climbers. Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside in New York, put it this way in Climbing: “The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it.” Those voices exist. Sharing those stories, recommending them — at the gym, at the crag, on social media — helps normalize forms of representation that mainstream climbing media still too often makes invisible. The impact is documented: according to the Born This Way Foundation, LGBTQIA+ young people who have access to genuinely supportive spaces report depression at roughly half the rate of those who do not — 28 percent compared with 53 percent. In France, these kinds of stories are almost entirely absent from climbing media. That absence is not an accident. It is the result of editorial choices and institutional silences that have made certain experiences invisible for far too long. The third lever may be the most effective, because it is within reach for everyone: act where you are. A climbing gym can state clearly that it is a safe space — a supportive place where marginalized people can feel secure without hiding who they are. A club can adopt explicit rules against discrimination and train staff and volunteers to enforce them. But a sign on the wall is not enough. What matters is concrete action: naming a staff contact people can go to if something happens in the gym, offering gender-neutral changing rooms to customers and club members, and making sure people know what will happen when a problem is reported. The more genuinely safe a space is, the more likely a climber is to speak up when an anti-LGBTQIA+ comment is made in front of them. The Fight Goes On Allyship is not built on grand statements. It is built through repeated, concrete choices in everyday spaces. Economic support for the organizations doing the work is part of that, too. In the United States, groups such as Flash Foxy, Queer Crush, and All Rise Outdoors — founded by climber Ashima Shiraishi — organize gatherings, mentoring programs, and inclusive climbing spaces. “Our gear sponsors allow us to offer sliding-scale programs — without them, we would have to charge three times as much,” Lou Bank of Flash Foxy told Climbing. France has few national equivalents. Grimpe et Glisse, an LGBT+ association and member of the FFCAM, the French federation of alpine and mountain clubs, offers outdoor activities and is one of the rare initiatives working at the intersection of outdoor sports and LGBTQIA+ identities. It remains fragile, held up by volunteers. The Fédération française de la montagne et de l’escalade, France’s national climbing federation, does not currently have a publicly stated policy on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. Most clubs have no effective protocol for preventing or handling discrimination. Still, models exist. Project Pride, founded in 2022 in Squamish, British Columbia, by kinesiologist Michelle LeBlanc, offers bouldering sessions for 2SLGBTQIA+ people — a Canadian acronym that includes Two-Spirit people — along with mentoring and partnerships with local gyms. Four years after its creation, the project has expanded to Calgary and Canmore, in the Canadian Rockies. Its model — nonprofit organizing, gear partnerships, sliding-scale pricing — can be adapted elsewhere. SJ Joslin, for their part, found the strength to get back up. They decided to sue the U.S. federal government to defend the right of public employees to exercise freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and more broadly, to strengthen trans rights. On June 13, a federal judge dismissed SJ’s case. They are now awaiting a final decision from the Office of Special Counsel in August. “Climbing happens on public lands that we all manage together. When the people who protect those lands are silenced, fired, or pushed out because of who they are, it affects everyone,” SJ told Vertige Media. The crag is not outside the world. It is shaped by the same power dynamics, the same silences, and the same possibilities for resistance. Being an ally in the climbing community is not about checking a political box. It is about deciding, whenever the moment comes, where you stand.