Over the past few days, PFAS have come roaring back into the news, often through a name that, by itself, sums up decades of outdoor mythology: Gore-Tex. If the issue feels especially urgent right now, it is not because the harm tied to these chemicals has just been discovered. It is because the issue has entered a more concrete phase. Since January 1, 2026, France has already banned some consumer clothing, footwear, and waterproofing products that contain PFAS, while a broader restriction is still being reviewed at the European level. © Gore-Tex PFAS—short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—refers to several thousand compounds used for their nonstick, water-repellent, and heat-resistant properties. ANSES, the French public agency that evaluates health risks tied in particular to food, the environment, and work, notes that these substances are extremely persistent in the environment , contaminate water, soil, air, sediment, and the food chain, and that some build up in living organisms, especially in humans. For some PFAS that have already been well studied, the agency also cites documented health effects. For a long time, this issue stayed in the realm of public-health and environmental warning signs: thoroughly documented, but still abstract for a large share of the public. The first textile bans change that. The issue is no longer just about the toxicity of highly persistent chemicals. It is also about manufacturing timelines, regulatory compliance, and the tradeoffs facing brands that built their reputation on the promise of performance. When the Shift Became Legal In France, the issue moved into a new phase with the law of February 27, 2025 , aimed at protecting the public from risks linked to PFAS. Article L. 524-1 states that, as of January 1, 2026, consumer clothing, footwear, and waterproofing agents containing PFAS are banned. The same law, however, creates an exception for clothing and footwear designed to protect people and keep them safe, especially in the context of national defense or civil-security missions. Starting January 1, 2030, the ban is supposed to extend to all textile products containing PFAS, with exceptions for certain uses tied to national sovereignty and for some industrial technical textiles, including protective clothing and footwear used by the military or firefighters. That point matters because it changes how the whole issue reads. PFAS are not being phased out through one uniform, simultaneous, total erasure. The phaseout is happening in stages, by product category, with an exemption system that immediately shows some professional or strategic uses are still seen as harder to replace than consumer textiles. These exemptions are not some side detail of the regulation. They are a reminder that PFAS are not just a story of proven danger or of industry finally doing the right thing. They are also a matter of prioritization: which uses should be phased out first? Which sectors really have alternatives? Which performance levels are considered replaceable without major risk, and which ones are still treated as critical? At the European level, the issue is still moving forward, but it is not settled. In early March 2026, the European Chemicals Agency’s Committee for Risk Assessment (ECHA) adopted its final opinion on the proposed broad PFAS restriction , while the Committee for Socio-economic Analysis finalized its draft opinion a few days later. A new public consultation on that draft is now open through May 25, 2026. So the European framework is getting clearer, but the core questions—uses, timelines, and exemptions—are still very much in play. A “PFAS-Free” Membrane Does Not Make the Issue Go Away In that context, Gore-Tex occupies a special place. For years, the brand stood in for a kind of technical gold standard in the outdoor world, and it is now promoting its ePE membrane as the foundation of its new generation of products. On its website , Gore-Tex describes that membrane as “PFAS-free,” then immediately adds a note explaining that these products are made without intentionally added PFAS and may still contain trace amounts. That wording is not just legal caution. It also reflects an industrial reality: no longer adding PFAS on purpose is not the same thing as guaranteeing the total absence of any trace. Patagonia uses very similar language . The brand says that, since the Spring 2025 season, all of its new products have been made without intentionally added PFAS—that is, without adding fluorinated compounds to achieve a technical function. It presents that shift as the result of long-term work: first moving away from C8 treatments, among the oldest and most criticized PFAS; then rethinking C6 alternatives, which also relied on fluorinated chemistry; then rolling out its first PFAS-free durable water repellent finishes in 2019; and finally phasing those changes into membranes and finishes until the announced 2025 transition. Patagonia also benefits from a more favorable position in this moment. Where Gore-Tex draws most of the scrutiny as the embodiment of fluorinated technical apparel, the California brand is more often associated with getting ahead of the transition—even though it, too, relied on PFAS for years. This industrial shift has an important consequence: it makes technical tradeoffs that long stayed in the background much more visible. Gore-Tex itself says that its PFAS-free water-repellent finishes require more frequent care . In its FAQ, the brand explains that these finishes are generally less resistant to oils, need regular maintenance to work at their best, and that when the outer fabric’s water repellency stops doing its job, the garment remains waterproof but may become less comfortable to wear. The recommendation is straightforward: wash it, dry it, reactivate it with heat, and, if needed, reapply a waterproofing treatment. In other words, moving away from PFAS is not just an invisible swap of molecules from the end user’s point of view. It also changes the user’s relationship with the product. Technical apparel is still being sold as waterproof, breathable, and durable, but its performance now depends more on upkeep, on preserving surface water repellency, and on a more explicit acceptance of use-related constraints. Gore-Tex says as much itself : without an effective surface treatment, the membrane still keeps water out, but the outer fabric can wet out, leaving the garment colder and less comfortable. A New Phase for the Outdoor Industry For outdoor brands, this opens a new communication challenge. For years, the pitch around technical performance could stay pretty simple: a high-performing membrane, a promise of waterproof protection, a reputation for reliability. The transition away from PFAS now forces brands to talk about more complex materials, more carefully worded formulations, and products whose performance can be more conditional. Patagonia stresses the time and resources it invested to maintain performance while removing intentionally added PFAS. Gore-Tex, for its part, highlights a lighter, thinner membrane with a lower carbon footprint, while also acknowledging that non-fluorinated water-repellent finishes require more maintenance. So this is not a story of industrial absolution, and it is not just a matter of changing the vocabulary. The real question is more concrete: how good is the proposed tradeoff over time? How will brands actually inform customers about the limits of PFAS-free water repellency? And how far will consumers accept a less automatic, more demanding kind of technical performance in exchange for reduced chemical impact? Right now, those questions matter at least as much as the headline announcement that PFAS are being phased out of consumer textiles. At bottom, the PFAS moment is not just about the end of a chemistry whose health and environmental costs are becoming impossible to ignore. It is also about the outdoor industry entering a less comfortable era—one in which performance has to be renegotiated, exceptions have to be justified, and tradeoffs have to be made visible. For a sector that spent years selling the idea of protection with almost no downside, that is a major shift.

In climbing, fluidity often gets lumped under “style,” as if it were mostly an aesthetic bonus. But a 2025 study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology  offers a much sturdier way to think about that intuition. In more experienced climbers, the next move starts leaving its mark on the move already in progress. What we call style may have less to do with some vague notion of grace than with a deeper kind of motor organization, where the body is already setting up what comes next before it fully appears. © Hugo Perez At the base of a boulder, the comments come fast: “That looked a little forced.” “You sent it—the successful ascent—but it wasn’t super clean.” “That went up with plenty in reserve.” The language can sound fuzzy, but it is often pointing to something real: the difference between climbing that treats each hold like a separate problem and climbing that already seems to contain the next sequence in the way the climber settles, pivots, or loads a foothold. The study published by Antonella Maselli and her colleagues takes that intuition seriously. In the most experienced climbers, the next move shows up earlier inside the current one. The right word The key term in the study is coarticulation. It sounds a little dry, but the idea is easy enough to grasp. In a sequence of movements, the move you are making in the present does not stand alone; it already carries the imprint of the one coming next. The future does not simply follow the present. It starts shaping it. Applied to climbing, that becomes immediately legible. A hip position is not just about staying close to the wall; it is already preparing a transfer. A hand is not just gripping the current hold; it is also positioning itself for what it will need to allow a second later. A shoulder opens, a foot takes load differently, the torso turns slightly, and suddenly it becomes easier to understand why some ascents do not feel built hold by hold. That is a good reminder that in climbing, movement starts a little earlier—in route reading, in visualization, in the way the body begins organizing what comes next before the climber even leaves the ground. That is where this becomes genuinely interesting for climbing. Style stops looking like a decorative layer added on top of performance once everything else is already in place. It starts to look like the visible effect of a different way of preparing movement—earlier, more distributed across the body, and almost certainly more economical. To test that idea, the authors built a controlled protocol that still stayed close enough to the real logic of climbing for the question to matter. The sample included 21 participants, six of them women. The researchers divided them into three groups in pragmatic fashion: non-climbers, beginners, and experts. They also acknowledge that this classification is imperfect, since real experience sits more on a continuum than in neat boxes. © Whole body coarticulation reflects expertise in sport climbing de Antonella Maselli, Lisa Musculus, Riccardo Moretti, Andrea d’Avella, Markus Raab et Giovanni Pezzulo Participants had to complete 80 trials on an experimental wall, with 10 repetitions for each of the eight routes in the protocol. The task was intentionally simple. The first two foot moves stayed the same, while the next two hand moves varied across several configurations. The goal was to create a sequence stable enough to observe how the body prepares what is about to happen. One detail in the protocol matters a lot: before each trial, participants had to rehearse the upcoming sequence without actually doing it. That is a good reminder that in climbing, movement starts a little earlier—in route reading, in visualization, in the way the body begins organizing what comes next before the climber even leaves the ground. To capture the movements, the researchers used 10 cameras and 25 markers placed on the main joints. They then reduced the trajectories using spatiotemporal component analysis, and used LDA classifiers to measure how much the body was already revealing the upcoming movement—especially which hand would move next or what final target would be reached. The body gets there early The study’s answer is fairly consistent. Coarticulation shows up in most participants, but it does not appear at the same moment or in the same way across levels of experience. In non-climbers, that preparation tends to emerge closer to the onset of the next move. In experts, anticipation appears earlier and involves more joints. So the difference is not just whether the move succeeds in the end. It is also about when the next step starts existing in the body. Another result points the same way. Information related to the target often showed up more clearly than information tied only to hand choice. That confirms a very concrete intuition: the next move rarely announces itself in the hand alone. It shows up in a broader set of signals—a pelvis that gets into place, a chest that turns, a foot that takes load, a center of mass already starting to go. The figures in the paper also tell a story about timing. They show distinct temporal profiles, with beginners moving more slowly through certain events. That points less to raw speed than to continuity. In other words, what sets more experienced climbers apart is not simply moving faster or succeeding more often. It is that the next move gets written into the current one earlier. Whole-body kinematics reconstructed from actual spatiotemporal principal components © Whole body coarticulation reflects expertise in sport climbing de Antonella Maselli, Lisa Musculus, Riccardo Moretti, Andrea d’Avella, Markus Raab and Giovanni Pezzulo Maselli’s study does not arrive out of nowhere. It resonates with several earlier pieces of research on expert coordination in climbing. A 2016 systematic review by Dominic Orth, Keith Davids, and Ludovic Seifert had already described climbing expertise through very concrete signs: fewer prolonged pauses, relatively simple movement paths on the route, and smoother transitions between moves. From that angle, style stops looking like an ineffable extra and starts looking like a more efficient way of organizing continuity. Seifert’s work on ice climbing adds an equally useful nuance. It suggests that expertise is not about rigidly repeating an ideal pattern, but about using variability more functionally—with less unnecessary exploration and better calibration to the environment. That matters because it helps avoid a common misunderstanding: a strong climber is not necessarily the one who varies the least, but often the one who varies better. On the perceptual side, research by Vicente Luis-del Campo and colleagues on eye-tracking during route reading rounds out the picture. Holds fixated during pre-planning are more likely to be used later, and experience is associated with more relevant fixations as well as faster climbing. Once again, research lines up with a very ordinary scene from everyday climbing. Reading a route is not a ritual that sits outside movement. It is already part of the movement. What Maselli and her colleagues add is a clearer link between that preparation and the material reality of the move itself. It is no longer just a matter of saying experienced climbers look better. It is a matter of showing that this organization of the future gets written earlier into the body—even into segments still occupied with the previous move. What that changes As with most good studies, part of the value lies in what it does not  let us conclude too quickly. The authors list several important limitations: short and relatively simple routes, a small sample, and an imperfect distinction between beginners and experts. Those caveats do not undo the result, but they do keep it from turning into some final truth about style. The study does not prove that training “style” would automatically produce these coarticulation signatures. It also does not say there is one correct way to climb—a smooth, continuous, canonical form every body should resemble. What it shows is narrower, and probably more useful: expertise changes the way the body distributes anticipation through time. That is already a lot. It gives us a new way to read a very familiar climbing moment: the point when a sequence finally starts to flow after several burns—attempts—because it has stopped feeling like a string of separate problems. The body is no longer treating the route as a series of local negotiations. It has already started organizing the whole thing. In climbing, style often gets trapped between two thin meanings. Sometimes it means looking good, as if it were just an aesthetic bonus. Other times it gets reduced to a kind of flourish, tolerated as long as it does not get in the way of performance. The value of the work published by Maselli and her colleagues is that it nudges us out of that trap. The study does not take anything away from the felt dimension of a beautiful ascent, and it does not reduce fluidity to a number. It simply shows that behind that impression of continuity, there is a deeper bodily organization at work. An expert climber is not just someone who can hold on or pick the right beta—the sequence solution. It is also someone for whom the next hold has already begun. At that point, the word style  starts to shift. It no longer refers only to what the eye admires. It also refers to what the body has already understood. For the full study, see Whole body coarticulation reflects expertise in sport climbing .

At 79, Jean-Luc Marion—one of France’s best-known philosophers and a member of the Académie française—has published La Raison du Sport  ( The Reason of Sport ), an essay that is both rigorous and accessible about what is really at stake in physical effort. A former middle-distance runner, he puts forward a simple but powerful idea: sport is not primarily about beating other people. It is about coming fully into contact with yourself. We spoke with a thinker determined to take sport seriously, in a way few have before. (cc) Fionn Claydon / Unsplash Vertige Media: What is the reason for this book? Jean-Luc Marion:  There are two reasons. The first is a kind of coming out. Sport has been a fundamental experience for me, both in the way I perceive the world and in the way I experience myself. I even think it was a great stroke of luck, because it gave me strengths that helped me in other activities, including philosophy. The second reason is that I believe sport deserves to be treated seriously—that is, analyzed seriously. And I don’t think that happens very often. Usually, that’s because the people talking about sport have not really practiced it, or because they bring technical knowledge about results and training methods but no broader view of sport as a social phenomenon. I think that if you want to talk about sport, you need a few precise concepts. Philosophy gives you those concepts. So I wanted to pay tribute to sport by trying to bring out its logic, its rationality. Vertige Media: You were a middle-distance runner, right? Jean-Luc Marion:  Yes, when I was a teenager. I did it seriously at Stade Français and took part in a few competitions. Then I more or less stopped to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure. After that, I came back to it and ran road races for 20 years. I was a solid regional-level runner. But as my coach used to say, I was good, but not ready. I was never going to be an Olympic champion. Vertige Media: How does your work as a philosopher help shed light on sport? Jean-Luc Marion:  I’ll give you a clear example, one many readers noticed right away. In contemporary philosophy—more specifically in phenomenology, the tradition founded by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher and logician—there is a crucial distinction in how we think about the body. Because the body has at least two statuses. First, there is the mechanical body, which treats our physical body as a machine. A great deal of medicine is built on that idea. A great deal of sport is too. The body then becomes an instrument we use. That mechanical interpretation of the body may be partly true, but it is largely insufficient. Because there are cases in which my body becomes what Husserl calls Leib —lived flesh, the body as it feels itself from within. In other words, that which senses itself. Vertige Media: What do you mean by that? Jean-Luc Marion:  Take Descartes’s principle: it is not the body that feels, but the soul. I feel myself when I feel something, when I undergo an experience. And in sport, you can reach that state of fully sensing yourself relatively easily. That state of exaltation in effort, where you no longer know whether you are enjoying yourself or suffering. What is interesting about that state is that you experience yourself much more intensely than when the body is at rest. “In fact, I think that when you are making a serious effort, you do not watch yourself doing it. You are fully inside it” Vertige Media: So is that the primary reason to do sports—to push past yourself, in a sense? Jean-Luc Marion:  Not exactly, though that matters a great deal. It is not really about beating someone else; that is secondary. It is about truly experiencing yourself. In daily life, our minds are almost always somewhere else. We are not really ourselves. We do not quite know what we are doing. There is a common feeling now that professional activity is wasted time. That expression doesn’t really mean anything, except that we are there without fully being there. We do not feel our bodies. As I’m speaking to you right now, I do not feel my body. And when you are swallowed up by work, moving at a relentless pace, you feel as though you are giving yourself away, yet not really finding yourself in the process. The worst feeling is that anyone could do it in your place. Sport—climbing especially—is something no one else can do for you. Jean-Luc Marion © Jean-François Paga Vertige Media: In your other work, you develop the concept of the adonné. The term does not appear in La Raison du Sport, but it seems to describe sport very well as an “exercise of the self.” Could you explain it? Jean-Luc Marion:  To be adonné  means to receive oneself at the same moment one receives the phenomenon that happens to them. Put differently, I come into myself at the same time things happen to me. The obvious example is birth. At birth, suddenly, the world happens to me, and I arrive with it. So to be adonné  means that I myself am received. And I think that when an athlete gives everything, they are in fact giving what they do not possess in advance. They receive it. “In sport, by contrast, the limit—whatever it may be—is always the thing to be exceeded, without knowing whether we have the means to do so. You cannot calculate in advance where the limit will be. That is what makes it exciting” Vertige Media: Climbing is often described as a meditative practice because you cannot think about anything other than what you are doing in the moment. Is that related? Jean-Luc Marion:  Yes, absolutely. In that moment, you are entirely in what you are doing. You are not in the position of a spectator. You are not watching yourself climb. In fact, I think that when you are making a serious effort, you do not watch yourself doing it. You are fully inside it. You surrender to what you are doing. You do not let yourself be distracted. You do not step back from yourself. Vertige Media: You write, “No one knows what they may end up being able to do. The true possible is the impossible that one has nevertheless done.” What makes that surpassing of the self specific to sport? Jean-Luc Marion:  As far as I can judge from ordinary professions, most of the time we calculate what is possible. Professional performance is based on goals we are supposed to meet and on the means available to meet them. We set achievable goals. We are calculating the relationship between ends and means. So we are working within a definition of the possible, within a limit. Of course we hope to go beyond the limit, to generate growth. But in principle, we plan what we are going to do and how far we are going to go. In sport, by contrast, the limit—whatever it may be—is always the thing to be exceeded, without knowing whether we have the means to do so. You cannot calculate in advance where the limit will be. That is what makes it exciting. Vertige Media: Even in a world now saturated with data? Jean-Luc Marion:  What we call data helps define limits—limits we reinforce because we can calculate them, quantify them, fix them. But in sport, data is never the last word. At most, it is the first word. Vertige Media: Many mountaineers say they discover who they are when they reach the summit. How can your philosophy help explain that feeling? Jean-Luc Marion:  I studied the climber Erhard Loretan, the Swiss alpinist and mountain guide, who decided to do Himalayan ascents in alpine style—fast and with the lightest gear possible. At that point, alpinists have the impression that they are freeing themselves from earthly constraints. They feel a kind of liberation. This phrase—that sport reveals the athlete to themselves—has been used by many champions. The sprinter Christophe Lemaitre said it. The middle-distance runner Michel Jazy said it. I think there is indeed a moment of self-revelation. © Jean-François Paga and Grasset Vertige Media: You write that sport tends to become more and more spectacular. Can it lose credibility through that escalation? Jean-Luc Marion:  Oh yes, absolutely. Some sports have already lost their credibility. Boxing, for example, used to be a global sport. It drove some of the first live radio coverage between the United States and France, for fights involving Marcel Cerdan and Tony Zale. It was enormous. Fights still happen, of course, but now most people do not care. I think soccer is also under serious threat. There is a growing gap between spectators and players—economically, in fame, in lifestyle. The bond of identification between spectator and player is weakening. The moment sport splits in two, between practitioner and spectator, that bond becomes both essential and fragile. For the spectator to stay invested, they need to be a former participant themselves—or, in one way or another, whether through nationalism, ideology, or something else, they must still identify with the spectacle. “Through spectacularization, sport tends to become more extreme. And in doing so, it pushes spectators farther away” Vertige Media: What exactly is at stake there? Jean-Luc Marion:  We should not forget that it is the spectator who makes the sports economy possible. If sport becomes a market, a field of investment, it is because spectators exist. So spectators have to believe that what they are watching is real. And that it belongs to them in some sense—that it involves something they themselves can feel and participate in. Through spectacularization, sport tends to become more extreme. And in doing so, it pushes spectators farther away. Vertige Media: How do you see the future of sport? Jean-Luc Marion:  In general, it is in danger. Some sports will survive—perhaps not the ones people expect. That is why I attach great importance to mass-participation road races. People are not there to fool themselves. They are not there to be seen. They are there to experience themselves. That is serious. In a way, it is sport outside the spectacle. And that is the kind of sport that seems to be growing, which is a rather good sign. Any sport that cannot maintain a close relationship with the broader base of people who actually practice it, and is reduced to spectacle alone, is in danger. There has to be a real social and historical grounding for sport not to be reduced to a moving image. Read: La Raison du Sport  by Jean-Luc Marion (Grasset, €20, 240 pages).

In March 2026, the U.S. government officially transferred nearly 2,422 acres of public land—among them Oak Flat, one of the premier bouldering areas in the American Southwest, known for short, powerful climbs done without ropes—to a mining company. Sacred to the Apache and a major destination for thousands of climbers, it is likely the most significant loss of a public climbing area in the United States. © Mike Schennum “This is devastating news for Oak Flat and everyone who loves this sacred place.” Three days earlier, Russ McSpaden, who has spent years fighting to protect this iconic Arizona landscape, learned that the site was being handed over to a mining company. Oak Flat—or Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, as it is known to the San Carlos Apache—had been protected public land for seventy years under a federal executive order. It now belongs to Resolution Copper, a joint venture between mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP. For the Apache, it is a sacred place where religious ceremonies have been held for generations. For climbers, it is one of the crown jewels of climbing in the American Southwest. The mine will win Oak Flat covers about 2,400 acres of public land roughly 40 miles east of Phoenix, Arizona. Set in Tonto National Forest, it is a landmark American bouldering destination. For fifteen years, it also hosted the Phoenix Bouldering Contest, one of the biggest bouldering competitions in the world. In 1955, President Eisenhower designated Oak Flat as protected land, banning mining there and preserving its sacred status for the Apache and other tribes. That protection held until December 2014. That year, Senator John McCain pushed through a measure buried inside the annual defense spending bill. The mechanism was simple: Resolution Copper would get Oak Flat in exchange for other parcels elsewhere. The goal was to tap an underground deposit estimated at 1.4 billion tons of copper beneath the site. The method is block caving, a mining technique in which the ore body is made to collapse in a controlled way as material is removed from below. In practical terms, underground infrastructure is built beneath the deposit, and the ground gradually caves in as the copper is extracted. The result would be a massive crater more than two miles wide and nearly 1,000 feet deep. Oak Flat, its climbing, its Apache sacred sites—everything would disappear. “Consuming Oak Flat and all of its fantastic recreational and cultural resources” says the Access Fund, the national climbing advocacy organization in the United States, which represents more than 8 million climbers. Resolution Copper, for its part, says it will keep access open “as long as possible” and build a replacement site “someday.” In the meantime, Resolution Copper president Vicky Peacey told KJZZ that “If people want to come and use the campground, it is open. If people want to use it for cultural purposes, absolutely welcome to do so. And we’re excited to work with everybody.” In her view, it will take about a decade for the underground mine to advance far enough for Oak Flat to close for good. The climbing community up against a steamroller Three lawsuits were filed in response. The first came from the San Carlos Apache Tribe. The second was brought by a coalition of environmental and climbing advocacy groups, including the Access Fund. The third was filed by individual Apache women seeking to protect their access to the site for religious ceremonies. On August 18, 2025, one day before the U.S. Forest Service had planned to transfer the land to Resolution Copper, the Ninth Circuit granted an emergency injunction temporarily blocking the handover. It was only a temporary win. The next day, Donald Trump publicly responded by calling the Access Fund and its co-plaintiffs “anti-American” for trying to block what he described as a “public land giveaway.” The legal protection lasted only a few more months. On March 13, 2026, the court lifted the injunction. It was a major legal defeat, and it exposed the limits of the tools the climbing community has to protect its crags and climbing areas. The Access Fund, which was part of the coalition, is not a lightweight player: it has more than a century of combined public-policy experience and has helped protect more than 4 million acres of public land across the country. But when the law itself was passed by Congress in 2014, folded into a defense budget bill, and backed by an administration determined to move forward, the legal fight hit a wall. “The fight isn’t over, even if Oak Flat becomes the property of a multinational mining giant,” Russ McSpaden said. Still, the reality is now clear: the site has changed hands, and the first exploratory drills are on the way. A natural heritage site blown apart Behind the transfer is a doctrine the Trump administration has made plain. The message is clear: public lands are first and foremost reservoirs of extractable resources. Natural heritage, sacred sites, recreation areas—all of that comes second to industrial priorities and security rhetoric, the same logic that has already led the Trump administration to blast through protected natural areas to build its wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Oak Flat is now a case study in what that doctrine produces: fast-tracked action, sweeping political backing, and total disregard for the multiple uses and values—cultural, spiritual, recreational—held by these landscapes. For the climbing community, Oak Flat says something broader too: no site, no matter how iconic, is permanently protected. A seventy-year-old executive order can be wiped out by a legislative rider tucked into a defense spending bill. Regional parks, national forests, and all the outdoor spaces where millions of Americans climb could be threatened by the precedent this sets. If Oak Flat can fall, any site can. As long as climbing areas depend on protections that can be revoked by legislation, and as long as public lands are treated first and foremost as resource deposits, the fight will remain lopsided. The legal tools exist, and so do the organizations, but they are not enough on their own. What is happening at Oak Flat reaches far beyond Arizona. It is a model for what could happen elsewhere, and a warning about how fragile the spaces the climbing community once thought were secure really are—assuming people keep fighting to protect them.

In 2024, the U.S. outdoor industry cleared the symbolic threshold of $1.3 trillion in economic output. But for the first time since 2020, its growth came in slightly below that of the overall U.S. economy. Taken together, the numbers paint a more nuanced picture of an industry that is still massive, but clearly changing. (cc) Blake Cheek / Unsplash In early March 2026, three Colorado outdoor-industry figures — Bryan Wachs, Gary Montes de Oca, and Stephen Barnes — announced the launch of Outdoor Rec Collective. The new holding company plans to acquire outdoor brands and gradually move them into employee ownership, as an alternative to private investment funds seen as too focused on short-term returns. The initiative arrives just as the latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show slower growth across the sector. It also says a lot about where the industry may be headed next. Big numbers, with a catch Since 2016, after the passage of the Outdoor Recreation Jobs and Economic Impact Act, the Bureau of Economic Analysis has measured the annual economic contribution of outdoor recreation in the United States. These statistics, now published for the eighth straight year, are the most comprehensive source on the sector. The data is collected nationally and state by state, then adjusted for inflation, which makes year-to-year comparisons more reliable. The 2024 numbers confirm just how large the outdoor economy has become: $696.7 billion in value added, or 2.4% of U.S. GDP. In gross economic output, not adjusted for inflation, outdoor recreation hit $1.3 trillion. The sector employs 5 million people, or 3.2% of the national workforce — more than agriculture or utilities. None of that is exactly new. The real change is the slowdown. After growing 2.7% in 2024, down from 5.3% the year before, the outdoor sector fell just below the growth rate of the overall economy, which came in at 2.8%. That matters all the more because, over the long run, the sector has been a standout performer: up 84% in current dollars since 2012, and 43% after inflation.  « What we see today from our members is that people want to be outside. Demand for outdoor experiences continues to grow » Kai Twanmoh, responsable de l'engagement de marque chez AllTrails The BEA places three activities in a single category: climbing, hiking, and tent camping. Because those activities are bundled together, it is impossible to isolate climbing-specific figures. The agency says the grouping reflects a methodological problem: it is hard to separate spending and gear tied to each activity. A pair of hiking shoes might also be used for the approach to a route, and a backpack can serve equally well for a bivy or a trekking trip. In 2024, this “climbing-hiking-camping” category generated $7.75 billion in value added. It was also one of the fastest-growing segments, up 6.5% year over year, trailing only hunting — which is indeed classified as an outdoor activity in the United States — at 16.5%. In absolute terms, though, that trio accounts for only about 1.1% of the total outdoor economy. That economic smallness stands in sharp contrast to the energy around the sector. For comparison, boating and fishing represent $38.4 billion. The gap points to a clear paradox: climbing, hiking, and tent camping are active, growing, and culturally visible, but their share of overall outdoor GDP remains modest next to activities with deeper roots in the American market. The tricky paradoxes In 2024, U.S. national parks posted record visitation. At the same time, AllTrails — the trail-mapping app used by tens of millions of people — reported 75% activity growth in 2025, its strongest jump since the first year of the pandemic in 2020. “What we see today from our members is that people want to be outside. Demand for outdoor experiences continues to grow,” said Kai Twanmoh, head of brand engagement at AllTrails, during the presentation of the BEA data. “We honestly expect 2026 is going to be even bigger as more people step away from their screens and the news cycle. We are predicting new highs for outdoor recreation interest and growth,” he added, in the optimistic tone you would expect. « Wallets are thinner, trips are shorter and purchases are fewer » Jessica Turner, présidente de l'Outdoor Recreation Roundtable Jessica Turner, president of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable — an organization representing more than 110,000 businesses tied to the outdoor economy — offered a more mixed assessment: “Americans continue to get outside in record numbers, yet purchasing has slowed.” That paradox runs through the entire 2024 dataset: participation is surging, while spending is flattening out. The sector breakdown shows a pretty clear divide. Lower-cost activities such as camping and hiking are holding steady or growing, while higher-cost categories that require major upfront spending — RVs and boats, for example — are struggling to keep their momentum. “Wallets are thinner, trips are shorter and purchases are fewer,” Turner continued. It is a concise summary of the pressures weighing on the sector in 2024: persistent inflation, high interest rates, uncertainty around household budgets, and tariffs. Small retailers absorbed some of those costs themselves, which squeezed margins. Politics also played a role. In 2025, the federal government carried out major layoffs across public-lands agencies, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Those budget cuts weakened stewardship of natural spaces just as visitation hit new highs. The irony is hard to miss. At the end of 2024, Congress passed the EXPLORE Act, a law designed to expand access to outdoor spaces, improve infrastructure, and streamline permitting. But that law now faces implementation by a federal administration that is weaker and more underfunded than before. An industry in transition Beyond the short-term ups and downs, the numbers show an industry that remains huge and is still growing in absolute terms. The 2024 slowdown looks more like post-pandemic normalization than collapse. The extraordinary boom from 2020 to 2023 — fueled by lockdown restrictions and remote work — was probably never going to last forever. The uneven resilience of different sectors also hints at a deeper structural shift. The data shows that outdoor recreation generates $350 million a day on federal lands alone, which is a strong argument for public investment. But the industry appears to be moving, little by little, away from a model centered on selling expensive gear and toward one focused more on experience and access. The rise of Outdoor Rec Collective fits that shift. By offering employee ownership as an alternative to private capital, its founders are betting on an industry that will have to balance profitability with local roots. “There is a nervousness and anxiety right now throughout the outdoor recreation industry because of the tariffs or the economy or the low snow year. We want to offer both the business owners and their workers a way to ease that anxiety,” Bryan Wachs told The Colorado Sun . The model is drawing attention. Loren Rodgers, executive director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, notes that employee ownership is gaining ground in the United States, and that workers at those companies hold, on average, 92% more household wealth than employees with no ownership stake. 2026 as a turning point? Forecasts for 2026 are split. Kai Twanmoh at AllTrails is expecting “new records for interest and growth in outdoor recreation.” Jessica Turner at the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable is calling for action: “To keep this economic sector strong in 2026, we need action: invest in access, reduce friction in supply chains and permitting with stable business environments, and pass commonsense policies that support outdoor recreation infrastructure and public lands and waters.” The same question also hangs over Europe, and France in particular. U.S. trends often foreshadow changes in European markets, even if major structural differences remain. Still, the shared pressures are obvious: inflation, the cost of gear, and tougher tradeoffs in household spending. The 2024 U.S. numbers show an industry that is still a powerful economic engine, but one that is entering a more mature phase. The American outdoor industry is questioning itself, adapting, and testing new models. Like it or not, the rest of the world has every reason to pay close attention. Read the full Bureau of Economic Analysis report , published March 5, 2026.

An Australian study suggests climbing has traded its old anarchist pose for a broad-based environmental ethic. Behind the tired dirtbag cliché, there may be a community finally acting its age. (cc) Chewool Kim / Unsplash There is something almost endearing about the way climbers like to tell stories about themselves. Rebels. Outsiders. People who don’t answer to anybody. A lot of climbing lore still likes to picture the community the way it once photographed itself: barefoot, headband on, harlequin leggings, the whole thing. It was the late ’70s. France was still reading Salut les copains , and “yé-yé” hadn’t become embarrassing yet. Goodbye stranger In the popular imagination, that story has always had real power. We still like to talk about climbers as punks who escaped consumer society by heading upward, leaving the flatland neuroses of ordinary life below. But how much of that fantasy still holds up? According to an Australian study published earlier this year in the Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education , not much. Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland surveyed 239 climbers across Australia. The result is pretty clear. Ninety-five percent said the environment is “very important” or “extremely important” to their climbing. Eighty-four percent are actively involved in protecting and conserving climbing areas. More than half take part in stewardship work—basic site care like trail maintenance, cliff cleanups, invasive species control, and revegetation—at least once a month. “I believe negotiation between all groups can be made. Climbers are generally very respectful of and active in protecting the natural environment and the traditional owners claim to it/sites of significance (compared to hikers/tourists)” A respondent to the Australian study That is a long way from the old dirtbag image: the anarchist climber sleeping in an unfinished van and taking a leak behind a boulder. The contemporary climber looks a lot more like a member of a B-Corp-certified environmental nonprofit who listens to a philosophy podcast on the hike in. We should probably just admit it: the vertical Beat Generation is over. At the base of the cliff, you are now more likely to run into readers of Hugo Clément than readers of Jack Kerouac. For some people, that will feel like an unfortunate edit in the great international climbing novel they still prefer to read through the psychedelic kaleidoscope of wild, untamed climbers. But honestly? It may be the best thing that could have happened to climbing. The Sky, the Birds, and Mother Nature And yes, it is hard not to feel a little nostalgic when you read those numbers. The pioneer generation—the one that bolted without permission, slept in parking lots, and treated restrictions as administrative suggestions—helped build climbing’s rebel DNA. That mythology of the fringe served a purpose. It set climbers apart from “normal athletes” and kept a sense of transgression alive, giving the sport meaning beyond performance alone. But that posture was also the luxury of a community so small it barely registered. When a few hundred climbers were developing crags out of sight, land managers looked the other way. The environmental impact was minor. Conflicts over use were rare. You could play pirate without really threatening the ship. That is no longer the case. Australia alone now has more than 100,000 outdoor climbers. In France, even with fuzzy data , people like to say close to 2 million people climbed in the past year. The Australian study, for its part, points to a more precise number in the United States: 6.36 million Americans climbed indoors between 2017 and 2023. Whatever your preferred method, the point is the same: scale changes everything. What is harmless at 500 becomes a problem at 50,000. Trails erode. Vegetation disappears. Nesting birds are disturbed. Indigenous communities watch hordes of climbers arrive at sacred sites. In that context, the rise of a collective ethic of responsibility is not a betrayal of climbing’s original spirit—assuming that spirit ever applied to the whole community in the first place. It is a condition of survival. What the Australian study documents, then, is a real sociological shift. Respondents are not just talking about picking up trash now and then. They describe a broader set of preservation practices that climbers will recognize immediately: avoiding nesting areas, keeping chalk use to a minimum, brushing off tick marks, installing fixed anchors at the top of routes to protect trees and reduce erosion in descent gullies. Even more telling, several respondents say they want to “work with park managers and Indigenous peoples” to negotiate lasting access. One respondent puts it this way: “I believe negotiation between all groups can be made. Climbers are generally very respectful of and active in protecting the natural environment and the traditional owners claim to it/sites of significance (compared to hikers/tourists).” “Climbing is a spiritual pursuit. For me, I choose the energy that connection to nature brings. To me, this is my religion” A respondent to the Australian study Some people will read that as surrender, as a rejection of the autonomy climbers prized in the 1970s and ’80s. But that misses the point. Real freedom is not the absence of rules. It is the ability to help shape them. Climbers are learning—late, awkwardly, imperfectly—that they can take part in managing natural spaces instead of just showing up as recreational consumers. Mount Arapiles, also in Australia, is a good example. When Parks Victoria proposed restrictions to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage, the climbing community did not just throw a fit. Local climbing organizations opened a dialogue. The process is slow, messy, and sometimes tense. But it is a lot more mature than the adolescent reflex of keeping your middle finger in the air. In the Name of Ecology and the Holy Spirit There is still a tension here, and it is almost existential. Sixty-three percent of Australian respondents described climbing as having “spiritual, meditative or nature-based benefits.” Some went even further. “Climbing is a spiritual pursuit,” one respondent said. “For me, I choose the energy that connection to nature brings. To me, this is my religion.” That is no longer the language of the hedonistic rebel. It is the language of a contemplative practice shaped by personal meaning and ecological responsibility. This spiritual turn reshuffles the old status hierarchy. The hardman climbing 5.13b (8a) without fear starts to look less legitimate than the “conscious” climber cleaning up the crag after a session. Symbolic status shifts from performance and courage to ethics and connection with the natural world. That is a sociological shift. And, if we are being honest, it is probably a class shift too. Climbing has become more bourgeois, with all the upward mobility that brings and all the ways it can go sideways. On one side, there is the risk of excessive moralizing, of turning the crag into a place of constant policing—several respondents said they worried about sounding preachy. On the other, there is the possibility of a community capable of self-regulation, ecological education, and positive social pressure. Because the study shows that stewardship is not just a collection of virtuous individual acts. It is becoming an identity marker. Not packing out your trash is now a way to put yourself outside contemporary climbing culture. That is exactly how a social norm gets built: through the soft ostracism of behavior that no longer fits. The Australian study raises one last question, and it is a political one. If 29.5 percent of climbers cite “access issues” as the main limit on their practice, then the future of climbing will be decided in negotiation rooms, not in illegal bivies. Land managers are not going away. Indigenous communities are not going to abandon territorial claims. The number of climbers is not going to drop off a cliff. That leaves two options. The first is to cling to the rebel myth, reject dialogue, dig in around an outdated moral code, and watch restrictions multiply. The second is to accept that climbing has become a full-fledged social fact, with all the responsibilities that come with that. Teach gym climbers the ethical norms of the crag. Join park management committees. Help build conservation plans with scientists and local communities, as is already happening in Spain at Peralejos de las Truchas, about 30 miles from Madrid. Some people will call that domestication. It may be better understood as a subtler kind of rebellion: refusing the easy posture of the outsider and accepting the complexity of the real world. Being rebellious today is no longer about breaking the rules. It is about making sure you are in the room when they are written. The Australian numbers do not hedge. Eighty-four percent of climbers are involved in conservation. Fifty percent take action every month. That is not the death of climbing’s spirit. It is climbing growing up. And honestly, after decades of playing Peter Pan on rock, it was about time. Read the study:  “Rockclimber’s motivations for participation, their stewardship of cliff environments, and access issues.”

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

The 2024 books from World Climbing (IFSC) tell a less glamorous story than the idea of a sport that has suddenly become a cash machine. What they show instead is something more interesting: an international circuit still driven, above all, by its tour. International climbing is growing. It is spreading. It is drawing attention. But its economy still rests first on a calendar sold to host cities, on media rights that remain fairly modest, and on an Olympic year that swells the flow of money without, by itself, creating durable profit. Put differently, this is still a model that depends more on staging events than on monetizing them through broadcast. World Cup in Chamonix in July 2024 © David Pillet There is a kind of cold truth in the financial statements of international federations, the kind promotional language does not always like to sit with for very long. World Climbing publishes its numbers in black and white: financial statements, fee structures, Executive Board expenses. It is all there, accessible, audited, organized . And as is often the case with information that is publicly available, almost nobody really looks at it. That is a shame, because these tables do not just tell us how much money comes in and how much goes out. They show where the money comes from, what it pays for, and what is left once the machine has run. In 2024, the IFSC posted €6.13 million in operating revenue against €5.31 million in costs, for a net result of €56,724. There is nothing spectacular about that number. But it sets the scene very clearly: plenty of movement, not much structural surplus. The calendar is king The heart of the model sits in a single accounting line: “calendar fees.” That is where the real economic backbone of the circuit lives. In 2024 , that line alone accounted for €4.07 million, or the bulk of the revenue gathered under “Sport & Events.” Once you see that, one common misunderstanding falls away. When people ask how much a World Cup stop “brings in,” they often assume there must be a simple answer, as if every event generated the same value through the same mechanism. That is not how this circuit works. A big part of an event’s economics plays out locally: in ticket sales, in the organizing committee’s partners, in the economic spillover a region hopes to capture, and very often in the financial risk the organizer agrees to carry. What World Climbing is billing for, in the end, is not the full value of a World Cup stop. It is entry into the series. It is the right to place a city on the global calendar, with everything that comes with that: standards, services, visibility, and institutional prestige. In 2024, World Climbing reported €665,453 in broadcasting rights and €330,000 in sponsorship. Together, those two lines add up to just under €1 million. In 2024, hosting a bouldering or lead World Cup cost €25,500, with a non-refundable deposit of €5,000. In 2025, that figure rises to €28,000. For speed, the price of entry was €14,500 in 2024, then €16,000 the following year. So before anyone even starts talking about audience, streaming, or sponsors, the first thing a host has to do is buy its place on the tour. The document also lays out a “no-show” policy aimed not at local organizers, but at national federations. If a federation registers significantly more athletes than it actually fields, beyond a 10 percent tolerance, World Climbing sends it an additional bill at the end of the season. The idea is simple: prevent inflated registrations from distorting event logistics. Here again, the message is clear. The circuit is selling a standardized framework, not just a show. That distinction matters. For now, international climbing is not yet making most of its money by selling its image. It is first selling a place on its calendar. Great visuals, modest engine To understand where climbing really sits in the economy of televised sports, you have to look at the “Marketing” line. In 2024, World Climbing reported €665,453 in broadcasting rights and €330,000 in sponsorship. Together, those two lines add up to just under €1 million. That is not trivial. But it is not yet a foundation strong enough to carry the circuit on its own. The note attached to the accounts is revealing. It says the change was mainly driven by the renegotiation of the agreement with Dentsu, the Japanese advertising, marketing, and consulting group. That detail matters because it says something concrete about the structure of the model. The circuit does have media value, but that value still depends heavily on a few major channels, and therefore on a few decisive negotiations. This is not a machine that automatically turns visibility into stable revenue. It is still an economy where a small number of major deals can noticeably change the overall picture. That is not the sign of a broken model. But it is not proof of settled prosperity either. That has not stopped World Climbing from looking for bigger distribution channels. On September 11, 2025, the organization announced a deal with Bilibili , presented as the new “home of climbing” in China for the final events of 2025 and the full 2026 season in the Chinese market. In its release, World Climbing highlighted the scale of the platform, with more than 360 million monthly active users and more than 100 million daily users. The signal is interesting. Climbing is managing to connect itself to massive storefronts. But precisely because the deal came after the 2024 accounts, it is still too early to know what it will actually produce economically. If the effect is meaningful, it will show up only in later financial years. That is the paradox. The sport is highly watchable. It has verticality, immediate tension, the clear drama of a miss or a send, that rare ability to compress a full narrative into a handful of moves. But visual potential does not automatically turn into economic power. First, because producing the product costs money. In 2024, the “TV production” line came to €459,083. In 2023, it was €952,056. You can read that as welcome streamlining, or more cautiously as a scaled-back investment. Either way, the core fact does not change: climbing is not yet in a position where broadcast naturally finances the sport. It is still in an economy where the federation has to spend money in order to remain broadcastable. There is another limit too, less visible in the accounts but just as important. For part of the general public, climbing is still less immediately legible than other Olympic sports. You have to explain the formats, make the logic of a boulder problem or a lead route clear, and help viewers understand why one move matters more than another. Attention is cyclical too. The Olympics create huge spikes in visibility, but turning that occasional curiosity into regular engagement with the circuit between Olympic cycles remains a challenge. Climbing is very watchable. For now, it is much harder to monetize. The Olympic high The 2024 accounts are readable enough. But they come with a trap: they correspond to an Olympic year. And an Olympic year always brings in flows of money that inflate the totals, distort the picture, and sometimes make a sport look more economically powerful than its underlying model really is. The engine behind that special sequence is the Olympic Qualifier Series. In the notes, World Climbing explains that the increase in “Sport & Events” revenue was driven in part by the compensation agreed with the IOC and local organizing committees for staging the OQS in Shanghai and Budapest, along with the acquisition of media and marketing rights for those events. Chez World Athletics, les comptes 2024 annoncent 99,4 millions de dollars de revenus. Dans cet ensemble, 44 millions proviennent du « commercial and broadcast ». So this is not just classic event revenue. It is a more hybrid structure, where the federation gets paid because it organizes the events, because it controls certain rights, and because it provides a whole range of services tied to Olympic qualification. On paper, the effect is striking. But focusing only on incoming money would be a mistake. The OQS does not just generate revenue. It also generates outflows. Some of what comes in is redistributed almost immediately in the form of travel grants, prize money, and the coverage of ITO costs, meaning the international technical officials essential to running the competition. Those expenses appear in the accounts under “Olympic & Multi-Sport Games Preparation / Games Services.” In plain terms, an Olympic year can increase the flow of money without making the structure durably richer, simply because a large share of what is collected is also money that has to be redistributed, absorbed, or earmarked. The final result shows that clearly. Gross operating surplus reached €820,850. That is a solid number. But then it gets eaten away line by line: €60,307 in depreciation, €30,021 in exchange-rate effects, and €36,866 in financial charges. Above all, there is the allocation to “Operating Funds,” worth more than €600,000, in other words the operating cushion that helps the federation stabilize its trajectory. By the end, net profit drops back to €56,724. That is not the sign of a broken model. But it is not proof of settled prosperity either. It is the portrait of a structure using an unusually dense year both to reinforce its footing and to keep the show running. Even with the Olympic boost, the World Cup economy still does not generate the kind of structural ease that would justify talking about a real rent stream. Young sports, old gaps To understand where climbing really stands, the most useful comparison is not with long-established federations that have spent decades building powerful rights-based economies. The better move is to put it back in its real family: young sports, recently added to the Olympics, whose economics still depend heavily on the event itself. « We get nothing for Tokyo from the revenue sharing of the Games »  Fernando Aguerre, International Surfing Association president From that perspective, climbing is not unusual at all. In 2024, the International Surfing Association posted total revenue of $5.74 million, of which $4.16 million came from “event revenues.” At World Skate , in 2023, the logic was even clearer: $4.25 million in “events organizational fees and biddings,” while the “advertisement and TV contracts” line sat at zero. In this family of sports, the base is the same. They live first off the tour, off the ability to make competitions happen, find host cities, and sell a calendar. The image comes after. That is exactly what separates these sports from older, more powerful federations, ones that are far more firmly rooted in a rights-based economy. World Athletics, for instance, reported $99.4 million in revenue in 2024 . Of that, $44 million came from “commercial and broadcast.” On top of that sits another revenue stream on an entirely different scale: the IOC’s quadrennial distribution, meaning the share of Olympic revenue redistributed to international federations, which here reached $39.6 million. At World Climbing, the picture is more fragmented. The 2024 accounts do isolate €174,145 under “IOC Funds,” but some of the money connected to the Olympic orbit shows up elsewhere too, especially in services tied to the Games and the OQS. So the gap is not just a matter of size. It is also a matter of how revenue is structured and how it appears in the books. Federations that entered the Olympic orbit more recently have sometimes said this very bluntly. In 2020, International Surfing Association president Fernando Aguerre summed it up this way to Reuters : “We get nothing for Tokyo from the revenue sharing of the Games.” The quote is a few years old, but it captures a durable tension. Not every Olympic sport plugs into the major systems of redistribution and value creation at the same pace, or in the same proportions. At World Aquatics , the structure is even more telling: $107.83 million in revenue, split among $38.86 million from the “Olympic movement,” $36.54 million from “Hosting & commercial revenue,” and $32.07 million from TV rights and sponsorship. There, broadcast and commercial are no longer promises. They are already pillars. So the point is not that climbing is somehow “behind.” It is that the sport still mostly speaks the language of the calendar, service fees, host cities, and tours that need financing. The bigger federations speak the language of audiovisual rights, major commercial partners, and large-scale Olympic dividends. This is not just a gap in size. It is a gap in structure. The real product In the end, everything comes back to a fairly simple question. When a sport lives first off its calendar, it depends mechanically on the ability of cities, organizers, and local partners to buy a stop, produce it, and carry the risk. When a sport lives first off its rights, it depends much more on public attention, on the monetization of that attention, on the strength of its broadcasters, and on its leverage in the image market. These are not just two shades of the same model. They are two different centers of gravity. In 2024, international climbing still sits mostly on the first side of that line. The Olympic year acted like a turbocharger. It increased the flows, thickened the revenue, and created the impression of rising power. But it also reminded everyone of something essential: Olympic money is not a simple annuity. A lot comes in, and then a lot goes right back out. It inflates the totals more than it installs lasting comfort. That may be the real blind spot in this debate. The Climbing World Cup does not lack images. It is filmed, broadcast, watched, and discussed. What it still lacks, structurally, is the ability to make those images the main foundation of its economy. Until that shift happens more decisively, the circuit will continue to rest first on its tour, on the sale of its events, on the ability of hosts to pay for entry into the series. And as long as that balance holds, everything else remains a matter of distribution: prize money, production, working conditions, safety, and the steadily rising standards imposed on events. All of those demands are real, often legitimate, and sometimes urgent. But they are still competing within an economy that is not quite the one the images suggest. That may be the least spectacular lesson in these accounts, but it is also the most useful one: in international climbing, beauty alone has not yet become a profitable business model.

In Canada, Squamish is showing that climbing can power the economy of a city—or even an entire region. A first-of-its-kind study conducted over seven months has now put a number on that impact for the first time: in 2025, climbers injected 25.4 million Canadian dollars into the local economy. It is a striking figure, one that shows the sport’s economic weight without brushing aside the question of how that growth should be managed. (cc) Chewool Kim / Unsplash Between the granite walls of the Stawamus Chief and the thousands of boulders scattered through the rainforest, Squamish has spent the last 50 years building its reputation as a world-class climbing destination. What no one had measured until now was just how much the sport shapes a significant part of the local economy. On March 23, 2026, the Squamish Access Society (SAS), the local climbers’ association, released the first socio-economic impact study ever conducted in Canada on a climbing area . “Squamish isn't just Canada's best climbing. It's world class, and now we have the data to prove it,” the group said on its own channels. The study is built on a substantial research setup: 566 surveys, 128 days of field counts at nine major sites between April 2024 and September 2025, interviews with local experts, and econometric modeling carried out by a firm that specializes in measuring the economic impact of outdoor recreation in British Columbia. For a Few Million More The numbers confirm that climbing is now a pillar of the local economy. In 2025, climbers directly generated 25.4 million Canadian dollars in Squamish’s local economy. The total impact across British Columbia reached 42.3 million dollars. That gap comes from indirect and induced effects: business for suppliers and subcontractors, but also spending by workers in the sector at other businesses across the region. The study counted 462,000 climber-days—a standard unit that counts each individual day of climbing activity, so two people climbing for one day equals two climber-days—a 40-fold increase since 1986. That level of use supports 148 direct jobs in Squamish, 214 province-wide, and generates 7.1 million dollars in tax revenue. “People who are rock climbing, they have careers, they have money. We are becoming more affluent than we were 20 years ago” Ashley Green, manager of a historic climbing shop in Squamish The spending breakdown points to two complementary economies. Visiting climbers—who account for 80% of all climber-days—spend 21.1 million dollars on lodging, food, transportation, and gear. “Climbers are also a particularly valuable segment. They tend to stay longer, travel outside of peak periods and are highly engaged with the landscape,” Lesley Weeks, CEO of Tourism Squamish, told the CBC . Local residents add another 4.3 million dollars a year through spending on technical gear, apparel, and gym memberships. Ashley Green, operations manager at Climb On Equipment—a longtime shop that has been in Squamish since the mid-1990s—has seen that social shift up close. “People who are rock climbing, they have careers, they have money. We are becoming more affluent than we were 20 years ago,” she told the CBC. Her business employs 22 full-time staffers and 10 to 15 seasonal workers. In July, the peak of a season that runs from May through September, sales are six times higher than they are in January. Samuel Fagan, a local guide with Squamish Rock Guides—a company founded in 1991—sees the same trend. “Climbing has really gained in popularity in the last couple of years … and people are incorporating it into their vacations,” he told the CBC . He has been guiding for 10 years and leads up to four days a week in the field during peak season. “I think this economic study really shows that climbing is a booming industry in this town,” The data confirms climbing’s central place in the local tourism economy. According to Tourism Squamish, the town’s overall tourism sector generated 408 million dollars in visitor spending in 2024 and supported 3,640 jobs. Climbing therefore accounts for 6.2% of total tourism spending, while playing an outsized role in shaping the area’s economic and social identity. Climbing to Live Here Because beyond the money, the study highlights a rare form of migration by choice tied directly to climbing. Eighty-one percent of resident climbers—estimated at 1,567 people—said climbing was “an important factor” in their decision to move to Squamish. Eighty-eight percent said it is a major reason they stay. According to the study, three out of five residents moved to Squamish specifically for climbing. Another 10% became climbers only after they had already moved there. Peter Larose, lead researcher at Larose Research & Strategy, which led the study, stepped back to frame the bigger picture: “Squamish attracts mobile, educated workers who choose where to live based on outdoor quality of life rather than proximity to a fixed employer.” The respondent profile points the same way: 35% of resident climbers are over 40, and 30% climb more than 70 days a year. Climbing does not just shape leisure time here. It organizes daily life, social networks, and housing decisions. Self-reported health and wellness benefits came in at remarkable levels: 99% of residents said climbing improves their mental health, with 91% saying they “strongly agree.” Another 99% said it improves their physical health, and 99% said it strengthens their connection to nature. That near-total consensus suggests climbing functions as a shared value system, not just a recreational activity. The Limits of Growth That economic and social success also has a downside. The study identifies three major tensions: parking, crowding, and informal camping. Field counts showed usage spikes at three of the most popular sites, with as many as 160 vehicles parked at the same time. Forty percent of residents said they are dissatisfied with crowding. The study found no correlation with either climbing style or difficulty level, which suggests the saturation is broad rather than limited to one segment of the sport. “Overcrowding is definitely a problem. But charging residents for parking to access their nature creates an economic barrier that excludes marginalized populations.” A resident of Squamish Informal camping is one of the most divisive issues. Thirty-four percent of visitors camp informally or sleep along the roadside. Residents overwhelmingly call for “regulation and compliance” rather than an outright ban. Open-ended responses show a clear split: some want the practice cracked down on, while others want it legalized and managed. The study also tested a paid-parking scenario—3 Canadian dollars an hour or 10 dollars for the day. The result: 80% of residents said they would climb “much less” or “less” in areas with paid parking. That strong opposition lays bare a basic tension between managing crowding and keeping access equitable. One resident comment summed up the deadlock: “Overcrowding is definitely a problem. But charging residents for parking to access their nature creates an economic barrier that excludes marginalized populations.” Beyond those three major issues, the study lays out a list of urgent priorities: managing climbing infrastructure and recognizing climbers’ specific needs, including trails, access, and hardware; dealing with trash and human waste; providing safety and environmental education for beginners, including around noise, groups leaving ropes fixed on routes, and off-leash dogs; regulating van camping; developing and maintaining new routes; protecting wildlife; and improving environmental awareness through coordination between agencies and users. “Reports specific to activity like this quantify the importance of the sector to our economy now and into the future.” Armand Hurford, Mayor of Squamish In response to those concerns, British Columbia’s Ministry of Environment and Parks noted that outdoor activities such as climbing contribute 4.8 billion dollars directly to the provincial economy and account for 1.5% of real GDP. Squamish mayor Armand Hurford praised the report shortly after it was released: “Reports specific to activity like this quantify the importance of the sector to our economy now and into the future.” The Squamish study sets a precedent. It is the first analysis this comprehensive ever conducted in Canada on the socio-economic impact of a climbing destination. The numbers make one thing clear: climbing is no longer a niche subculture. It has become a major territorial driver, one that draws people in, generates millions, and creates hundreds of jobs. But that success now raises a question that cannot be avoided: how much can a climbing destination grow before it starts wearing itself out? The data from Squamish resonates far beyond British Columbia. In Margalef, a Catalan village of 100 residents that hosts 89,000 visits a year, paid access barriers installed in October 2025 triggered boycott calls and repeated acts of vandalism, according to climbing media outlets. Everywhere, the same equation keeps coming back: climbing helps keep these places alive, but who is supposed to pay for preserving them?

People often pair climbing and surfing for the obvious reasons: the outdoors, the style, the intensity, the seductive feeling of a kind of freedom you do not find many other places. That is not wrong. But the deeper connection may be somewhere else. Surfing and climbing share something more unsettling: both ask for a body, an eye, and a sense of timing—and then, very quickly, turn those skills into a social world, complete with its own habits, hierarchies, and ways of deciding who really belongs. (cc) Unsplash Just watch a crowded surf spot, with everyone sitting in the lineup—the pack of surfers waiting for waves—and you see right away that something can look free without being simple. Nobody has to give a speech for everyone to feel that one extra body in the water changes the balance. A little too much jockeying for position, dropping in on somebody else’s wave, showing up in a way that seems to ignore the local code, and the mellow setting tightens immediately. The ocean has not changed. The social atmosphere has. In climbing, the line shows up differently. It sounds less like waves and more like a conversation at the base of the wall, a comment about a route, a slightly pointed silence after someone lays it on too thick. Here too, people watch, size each other up, and listen to how someone talks about a serious section, a grade, a crag, or a session at the gym. And very quickly, without any rules ever being posted, you understand that there are more or less legitimate ways of being there. Two Norwegian sport researchers, Tommy Langseth and Øyvind Salvesen, put it well : in climbing, risk is not just a matter of personality. It is also tied to recognition within a shared value system. That is where surfing and climbing really start to look alike—not in the scenery itself, but in what the scenery holds. They are not just sensation sports. They are practices that quickly spill past the gesture and become full social worlds: worlds where you learn how to read a place, recognize what matters, pick up on what is done and what is not, and understand, finally, that an activity can imagine itself as free without ever fully escaping the old question of legitimacy. First, You Have to Read It The first real overlap between the wave and the rock may be this: in both cases, it is not enough to act. First, you have to know how to read. Read the water, the set, the current, the break. Read a line, a texture, an exposure, a section that does not give itself up right away. Surfing and climbing ask for more than clean execution. They require attention, situational intelligence, and constant adjustment. That is probably part of what gives both of them such cultural weight. People are not only admiring power or technique. They are admiring a way of understanding what is happening. “What matters to me is that things are done in good style. A climb should be done in style and with margins. If you see that you don’t have margins, you should go back down” Rolf, a Norwegian climber In their article on Norwegian climbing, Langseth and Salvesen write that there is “a clear connection between risk-taking and recognition in the value system of climbing.” That line is worth pausing over, because it punctures one of the sport’s most stubborn myths: the idea that risk is purely personal, almost psychological, as if people climbed alone with nothing but their own temperament. Their point is stronger than that. As climbers move deeper into climbing culture, they “learn what has value,” and eventually make those values part of their own motivation. Risk does not matter only because you feel it. It also matters because a whole world gives it meaning. One of the climbers they interviewed, Rolf, says it plainly: “What matters to me is that things are done in good style. A climb should be done in style and with margins. If you see that you don’t have margins, you should go back down.” What makes that line interesting is that it says far more than “this is what I like.” It reminds us that in climbing, the move never has value entirely on its own. Its value comes from the way it is done—and the way that way of doing it is judged. “We Have to Establish Our Territory” Crystal, a surfer from California Surfing tells a similar story. In a recent study of cold-water surfers in Jæren, Norway, one surfer describes catching a wave like this: “You feel like you’re playing with nature, on nature’s terms ... you have to flow with it.” He then describes the wave as a field of constant motion, where everything is moving and you have to deal with those shifts, “so you’re moving in all dimensions.” Here again, what impresses people is not just physical control. It is the idea that a good move begins with a good read. From there, it becomes easier to understand the very particular prestige of these two activities. They suggest there are still pursuits where skill is not just the application of a method. Places where someone can be good because they see better, feel more accurately, and understand more precisely what the environment allows, rejects, or shifts. That is not only a sporting promise. It is almost an anthropological one: the idea that knowledge can live in the body. Cool Has Its Gatekeepers What is especially interesting is the way these worlds, so quick to describe themselves as free, keep producing boundaries. In surfing, the mechanism is almost textbook. A wave is a scarce resource. Space is limited. Good position has to be earned. Sharing, then, is always sharing under tension. A study of women surfers in California makes the point right in its title: “We Have to Establish Our Territory.” The line comes from a surfer named Crystal, and it cracks the postcard image in one stroke. Sliding across water does not erase power relations. It rebuilds them in a different setting. What stands out in this body of research is how often the question of place comes back. Physical place, obviously: who is where, who goes, who waits, who gets in the way. But symbolic place too: who looks local, who knows the code, who can get away with a certain boldness, and who will have to prove themselves for longer. Surfing likes to picture itself as community. It also works as an economy of scarcity. “The fact that these boundaries are not clear, does not mean they do not exist” Tommy Langseth and Øyvind Salvesen A Norwegian study of surfers says it more bluntly: “Less friends, more waves, that's the old rule.” That is the whole paradox. The surfers interviewed say they like paddling out with a few close friends, sharing a session, reliving the good moments afterward. But they also know that past a certain point, community starts eating into the very thing that brought it together in the first place. A few friends add to the pleasure. Too many people ruin it. Surf culture loves tribes. It is much less fond of crowds. Climbing, on the surface, can seem calmer. Mostly, it is calmer in form. The boundary is less likely to show up as open territoriality than as something more elegant: taste. Here, people sort each other through oppositions that feel natural enough to pass without comment: gym or crag, bouldering or multipitch, commitment or comfort, style or strength, adventure or consumption. The hierarchy is not always spoken aloud. It still shapes how people look, what they notice, and the reputations they build. Here again, Langseth and Salvesen are useful because they do not rush to psychologize what climbers sometimes describe as “their” relationship to risk. They show that the climbing world values certain kinds of risk and dismisses others. They even talk about “Credibility-Zones” to describe the space in which an act will be received as admirable, and the zones where it starts to look merely reckless—or just ridiculous. Their sharpest line may also be their simplest: “The fact that these boundaries are not clear, does not mean they do not exist.” That is both the problem and the fascination of worlds like these: they replace visible rules with more diffuse norms, and for that very reason, norms that are often more powerful. That is why the word style , so common in both surfing and climbing, deserves to be taken seriously. Style is not just aesthetics. It is a socially valued way of doing something. It says you are not only capable, but capable in the right way. In both sports, legitimacy is never just about the result. It is about manner, tone, ease, and the kind of relationship to risk, effort, space, and other people that gets read as correct. It is a quieter hierarchy than a ranking. It is not a gentler one. The Market for Authenticity The parallel gets even clearer once both sports start to democratize. The more open surfing and climbing become, the more obsessed they seem with authenticity. There is nothing mysterious about that. As participation widens, brands move in, gyms multiply, wave pools appear, and social media manufactures desire, the culture has to redraw the line between the “real ones” and everyone else. Authenticity stops being a feeling and becomes a boundary. Surfing offers a particularly harsh mirror here. In Cultural Dissonance , Tommy Langseth and Adam Vyff begin with a basic observation: “Surfers often see themselves as ‘green.’” Then they show something else. Their study, based on a survey of 251 Norwegian surfers and six interviews, found that most saw themselves as environmentally conscious while also buying a lot of gear and traveling a lot. The authors draw a straightforward conclusion: “Our findings show that there is a gap between surfers’ attitudes and actions.” What interests them is not handing out moral grades. It is describing a cultural dissonance: the field values closeness to nature while also rewarding the forms of consumption that keep surf desire alive. Climbing tells no different story. It too likes to imagine itself as a more stripped-down, direct, real practice. It too has become an industry of places, images, moods, stories, trips, and markers of distinction. The point is not to stand above it all and call it fake. The more interesting question is subtler than that: how does a practice keep feeling like privileged access to reality once that access itself becomes a highly desirable product? That tension—between the promise of authenticity and the business of selling it—runs through much of what we now call lifestyle sports, and surfing provides one of the clearest documented cases. That may be, in the end, where the wave and the wall meet most directly. Not just in their taste for the outdoors. Not even in their promise of singular sensations. But in this very contemporary way of building prestige around an escape from ordinary sport, then managing that escape once it becomes profitable, visible, and desirable. Surfing and climbing like to say they loosen the frame. That is probably true. But they build other frames too: softer ones, cooler ones, harder to name—and often, for exactly that reason, more effective. Whether it is saltwater or chalk dust, the same old question is still there, just restyled with a little more flair: who really belongs?

In On Not Climbing Mountains , writer Claire Thomas crosses the Swiss Alps after her father’s death. She never climbs. Her book maps out a Switzerland of waiting rooms, trains, and ghosts—writers who died too young, forgotten communist climbers, hidden military infrastructure. The mountains are everywhere, but they remain out of reach. The result is a feminist anti-climbing narrative in which the mountain becomes a metaphor for grief. Swiss Alps (cc) Photo by Gor Davtyan / Unsplash A train slips between Zurich and Montricher on a foggy late afternoon. Behind the window, the Alps roll by like a stage set—gray ridgelines, spruce forests, tiny chalets clinging to the slopes. Bee watches the landscape with a kind of muted fascination. Her father has just died, a Swiss emigrant who settled in Australia and never returned home. She is moving through the Switzerland of her ancestors in search of something—what exactly, she doesn’t yet know. But one thing is certain: she will not climb. Not a route, not a summit, not even an alpine hike. The mountains will remain where they are, fixed in place, seen from train stations, train cars, and waiting rooms. With On Not Climbing Mountains , her third novel, Australian writer Claire Thomas builds a grief narrative that rejects any metaphor of ascent. There is no catharsis at the summit, no symbolic conquest, no reconciliation through vertical effort. On Not Climbing Mountains  is a geographical and memorial drift in which the mountain stays inaccessible—not because of physical inability, but because of an aesthetic and political choice. Bee, the book’s main narrator, moves around the mountains, never onto them. She sees them from the human systems that cut through them: railroad tunnels, suspended highways, tourist gondolas. Switzerland becomes a country of transit, a place where you pass through without ever really arriving. That position—living beside the mountain rather than climbing it—shapes the entire book. Claire Thomas refuses the alpine sublime, that dizzying aesthetic that turns peaks into metaphors for personal transcendence. In her hands, the mountains are not challenges to overcome but indifferent masses, absent presences weighing on the landscape without offering redemption. Gaston Bachelard used the word “topophilia” to describe love of place. Here, what we get is a negative form of topophilia: Bee is fascinated by her father’s Switzerland, but she remains foreign to it, a spectator, unable to fully inhabit the territory. It is as if grief has placed her behind an invisible pane of glass, separated from the world by a quarter inch of window. The ghosts of altitude Instead of climbing herself, Bee collects stories about people who lived near the mountains—often women, often dead young, often forgotten. These ghosts move through the book like guiding presences. There is Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the Swiss writer and photographer, a 1930s adventurer who traveled through Afghanistan and Persia, only to die at 34 after an ordinary bicycle crash on a Swiss country road. There is Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a pioneer of abstract art and a member of the Dada movement in Zurich, who died at 53 of carbon monoxide poisoning in a poorly ventilated house. These women are not climbers, but they lived in the shadow of the mountains, in a country that glorifies male vertical effort while erasing their artistic and intellectual trajectories. Little by little, the book becomes a feminist critique of the alpine myth. In the Swiss and Western imagination, climbing still belongs to men, a fantasy of conquest in which the female body appears only as spectator or victim. By refusing to climb, Bee also refuses that logic: why should she have to prove something by going up? Why should the mountain be the only way to legitimize her presence in this landscape? There is also Lorenz Saladin, an early 20th-century climber and communist activist, founder of Switzerland’s workers’ climbing movement. Claire Thomas brings him in briefly, as a counterpoint: Saladin wanted to democratize the mountains, to take alpinism away from the bourgeois elite and turn it into a collective, egalitarian practice. But that project failed. Today, Switzerland remains a country where the mountains are privatized, commercialized, turned into an amusement park for wealthy tourists. Bee watches that gap with irony: the gondolas up to the Jungfraujoch—a mountain pass designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—cost 200 Swiss francs round trip. Access to the sublime comes at a premium. The impossibility of a summit Bee’s father never appears directly in the book. He is an absence, a shadow cast over the entire trip. Born in Montricher, a small village in the canton of Vaud, he emigrated to Australia in the 1960s and never came back to Switzerland. Why? Thomas never gives a clear answer. Bee searches for his childhood home in Montricher but never really finds it—or rather, she finds several possible houses, none of them certain. Property records have changed, buildings have been renovated, former residents have died. The search becomes absurd, Kafkaesque. Claire Thomas - On Not Climbing Mountains © Hachette Australia That geographical wandering becomes a metaphor for grief itself. After someone dies, we all go looking for something—an explanation, a meaning—but we never find exactly what we are looking for. We circle it, gather clues, and eventually accept that resolution is not coming. Claire Thomas rejects the usual grief-story arc—denial, anger, acceptance—in favor of something flatter, more uncertain: movement without destination. Bee rides trains, visits museums, reads memorial plaques, sleeps in anonymous hotels. She does not “get over” anything. She moves. The Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, whom Claire Thomas visits in Basel, spent years painting waiting rooms—railway waiting rooms, transit spaces where no one does anything but pass through. Thomas sees in them a metaphor for grief: being stuck in an eternal waiting room, waiting for a train that will never come. Grief as the inability to start moving again. The mountains play the same role. They are there, massive and permanent, but they can neither be crossed nor inhabited. All you can do is move at their feet, just as Bee moves through Switzerland without ever truly arriving in it. Heidi, bunkers, and an alcoholic novelist The Switzerland Claire Thomas describes is not the postcard version. No alpine purity, no flower-box chalets, no Heidi skipping through the meadows. The writer invokes the myth of Heidi  ironically—that Johanna Spyri novel from 1881 which fixed Switzerland in the cultural imagination as a soft-focus pastoral scene—only to tear it apart. Bee visits “Heidi Village” in Maienfeld, a tourist attraction where the little mountain girl’s house has been reconstructed. It is a dollhouse, a studio set, a Disneyfied Switzerland. Thomas notes, acidly, that the real Switzerland—the one built out of military infrastructure, bunkers hidden beneath chalets, highway tunnels blasting through mountains—remains invisible to tourists. Because Switzerland is also a militarized country, an alpine bastion built during the Cold War as a fortress against Soviet invasion. Thousands of bunkers are hidden in the Alps, disguised as barns, boulders, chalets. Thomas visits a few of them, now decommissioned and turned into museums or data centers. She lingers on the paradox: a country that sells the image of peaceful neutrality while building massive war infrastructure. The mountain is not just a landscape; it is also territory colonized by the state—mapped, militarized, made productive. A bunker in the Alps (cc) Thierry Llasandes /flickr That colonial dimension also appears in the history of the railroads. The Gotthard Tunnel, inaugurated in 1882, cost the lives of hundreds of Italian workers—poor immigrants, exploited, buried alive in collapses. Claire Thomas mentions those anonymous deaths briefly, but does not stay with them for long. Rather than trying to offer a comprehensive portrait of Switzerland, the book focuses on a country shaped by a history that still centers mostly white, European, middle-class figures, while immigrant workers—the people who built its roads, tunnels, and hydroelectric dams—remain in the background, barely visible. The mountain was not tamed by heroic explorers, but by disposable labor made invisible by official history. Patricia Highsmith, who lived in exile in Tegna, in the canton of Ticino, during the 1980s, inhabited a bunker-house: thick walls, tiny windows, nearly fortified. Claire Thomas visits it with fascination, seeing in it a metaphor for Switzerland itself—a country that protects itself, folds inward, refuses openness. Highsmith, an American novelist, fled the United States to take refuge in this alpine fortress, but remained isolated there, alcoholic and paranoid. The mountain was not liberation. It was more like a gilded prison. Staying down low Montricher, tiny station, end of day. Bee waits for the train that will take her back to Zurich, then the plane back to Australia. She has not found her father’s house. She has not climbed the mountains. She has not resolved her grief. Behind her, the Alps cut into the gray sky, indifferent and intact. They will still be there long after she has left, long after everyone is dead. Claire Thomas ends her book without consolation, without final revelation. Bee leaves the way she came: a spectator in a landscape she will never possess. On Not Climbing Mountains  is a radical book of passivity, using stillness as an antidote to performative motion. It rejects the usual drama of climbing—effort, fall, victory—in favor of a contemplative, melancholy, feminist form of presence. To live near the mountains without climbing them is also to reject the masculine fantasy of conquest, that vertical obsession that turns nature into an opponent to be subdued. Bee stays down low, and that becomes a political act. As if to say that you can exist in the mountains without needing to defeat them. Read: On Not Climbing Mountains  by Claire Thomas (Hachette Australia, 298 pages).

On March 11, 2026, the strike that began at Climb Up’s gym in the western French city of Angers still looked local. A few days later, it was threatening to spread across much of France’s largest private climbing gym chain. The action was supposed to peak on the morning of March 18. But on the eve of that deadline, it was ultimately defused by the resignation of the group’s CEO and by several last-minute concessions. Here’s how one turbulent week unfolded. During a strike outside a Climb Up gym in Aubervilliers in March 2025 © Vertige Media On the phone, Justin says it right away: he’s exhausted. For days now, and probably through at least a few scraps of sleep, this Climb Up employee has been hopping from call to call, trying to take the temperature across the country’s largest commercial climbing gym network. Since workers at Climb Up Angers walked out on Wednesday, March 11, his days have turned into a blur of meetings and phone calls. And with good reason. For the first time in the history of France’s for-profit climbing gym sector, a strike movement on a national scale was taking shape. When Justin spoke with Vertige Media on Monday, March 16, 2026, nothing had been settled yet. He had just come out of a meeting with several elected members of the company’s employee council and a representative from FERC-CGT, a French labor union federation, to discuss what should come next after the Angers strike. Around the table, everyone agreed on one thing: this time, the anger was clearly widespread. “Management invited the employee council to talk,” Justin told us that afternoon. “But we pretty much know what’s going to happen. They’ll probably try to negotiate something.” He was right. After the meeting, the employee representatives learned that François Charpy, the group’s CEO, had resigned. They also learned that management had agreed to several of their demands. “Even before a national mobilization was really on the table, we realized all the Climb Up gyms were ready to strike” Justin, an employee of Climb Up Gerland representing the FERC-CGT. Ups and downs According to our reporting, several developments in quick succession helped bring about François Charpy’s fall and pushed management to back down on multiple points. First came the isolated strike by employees at Climb Up Angers on Wednesday, March 11. Then came the more or less coordinated preparation for a nationwide mobilization. That effort appears to have taken on a very different scale when 28 gym managers and assistant managers announced their support in a letter sent directly to the group’s executive committee. As late as March 16, Justin told us: “Even before a national mobilization was really on the table, we realized all the Climb Up gyms were ready to strike.” Faced with the unprecedented scale the movement could have reached—potentially affecting most of the chain’s 33 gyms and roughly 550 employees—management chose to give ground on several issues. At this stage, employees have won the reversal of recent decisions that, in their view, symbolized a clear deterioration in working conditions. Among the demands raised by the striking employees in Angers were the restoration of two additional vacation days for workers who do not take four consecutive weeks off between May 1 and October 31, along with the reversal of other cuts to bonuses. But above all, it was the resignation of the group’s CEO that convinced employee representatives not to continue with a strike that, in the end, very few gyms now seem likely to join on March 18. In their eyes, Charpy—a former executive at Quick, the fast-food chain, and at EuroDisney—had come to embody the increasingly obvious disconnect between the company’s headquarters and what was happening on the ground. “We unanimously wish to express our lack of confidence in the overall management policy currently being implemented within the Climb Up group” A majority of Climb Up gym managers in a letter addressed to senior management. For Victor*, a former employee representative and group employee, it was really the unprecedented mobilization by gym managers that changed everything. “Their action was quickly joined by operations managers,” he says. “François Charpy suddenly found himself completely isolated.” In the letter they wrote, which Vertige Media was able to review, the assessment is blunt. It opens this way: “We unanimously wish to express our lack of confidence in the overall management policy currently being implemented within the Climb Up group.” “The problem,” the letter continues, “is a form of governance and executive leadership that is becoming increasingly disconnected from the realities on the ground and from the teams.” The managers denounce “ineffective strategies” imposed “no matter what, with no effort at explanation,” despite repeated feedback sent through their regional delegates. “Today, the level of commitment being asked of our teams is not aligned with the resources they are being given, which is undermining our ability to engage and motivate them,” they write. The text also points to growing “disengagement” among staff, which “reflects a lack of buy-in to the company’s project—something we, as directors and managers, are the first to experience.” Climbing versus frozen food trays Justin has been a coach-setter—a staff member who both teaches and sets routes—at Climb Up Gerland, in Lyon, since 2014, and he also used to manage the gym. More recently, he has been working under a mandate from FERC-CGT to support existing union activity, help it grow, and assist employees across the group. He has had enough time, and enough distance, to watch the split between the gym network and top management grow wider and wider. François Charpy took over Climb Up in the spring of 2025 as the group’s CEO. In September of that same year, he organized a series of regional seminars to present his strategic plan, branded “Exposition 2028.” Justin was there. “He did it like a campaign rally,” he recalls. “He said something one day that really summed up his relationship to the job,” Justin says. “‘You will never see me set foot in a climbing gym’” Justin, an employee at Climb Up, on the CEO who has resigned. Beyond the slogan, the message was crystal clear: national standardization. Communication, events, the bar, instruction—everything had to be standardized. Food service was the first example Charpy used to justify his approach. After all, the new CEO came out of the F&B world. “He talked about that a lot, a lot,” Justin says. “That everything had to change, that every gym was doing its own thing, and that we were wasting time and money.” The solution, management said, was to centralize purchasing at the national level. In practice, that meant local products—organic vegetables, craft beer, zero-plastic initiatives—gave way to a standardized lineup. “Coke, Heineken, and frozen meal trays,” Justin says. The promise was better margins. The result? “We sell less,” he says. “Yes, the margins are better, but sales are way down. It doesn’t work.” Justin says he also experienced that gap between top-down decisions and day-to-day reality from the inside. As Gerland’s former manager, he remembers seminars where route setting and instruction—two core parts of what a climbing gym actually does—showed up as items nine and ten on the agenda. “It was basically the stuff we ran out of time to cover at the end,” he says. In his view, everything that is supposed to make a climbing gym run—safety, training, supervision, classes—kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list. In its place came unattainable performance targets and declining service quality. For Justin, François Charpy’s profile perfectly captured that shift. Brought in from major corporate groups, with no experience in climbing, the CEO applied a cost-cutting strategy while sidestepping the specific realities of the sector. “He said something one day that really summed up his relationship to the job,” Justin says. “‘You will never see me set foot in a climbing gym.’” According to Justin, the impact was immediate. “It made us lose a lot of time, a lot of coherence, and a lot of customers too.” Some loyal climbers, attached to what he describes as the cooperative and sustainable ethos of climbing, “turned away from Climb Up.” The management climate also grew harsher. “He was very intimidating,” Justin says of François Charpy. “Most gym managers were stressed out, even anxious, at the idea of going into meetings with him.” In that reshuffling, François Petit—the founder and chairman of Climb Up—was, according to Justin, pushed aside. “He got erased,” Justin says flatly. Officially moved into a role focused on the “technical management of instruction,” he was “no longer really making decisions in his own network.” One battle after another At the end of this sequence, France’s biggest private climbing gym group now has to deal with yet another major shift. Some former striking employees in Angers and in Aubervilliers, outside Paris—where another strike took place in March of last year—told us they were satisfied with the outcome. Justin, however, is staying cautious. Reached again on March 17, he told Vertige Media that he too was “satisfied that a new balance of power has been established.” “It’s a balance of power we had never seen before, and it clearly scared management, because they were forced to make radical decisions,” he said. Now, he hopes those decisions can lead to real progress. According to our reporting, negotiations between management and employee representatives are far from over. They are expected to continue during France’s legally required annual bargaining sessions, which begin on April 10 and are expected to last a month. “Recognition for our jobs and the quality of our work have been in steady decline for ten years. Ever since climbing started becoming more commercialized, we’ve become adjustment variables”  Justin, an employee at Climb Up “Management is going to have to show something real this time, because the anger now goes way beyond a small core of unionized employees,” Justin says. As he marks his twelfth year with the company, he says he has seen every phase of its history, including the years when the network was thriving. “And even then, we already had all the same problems we have today, long before François Charpy. Recognition for our jobs and the quality of our work have been in steady decline for ten years. Ever since climbing started becoming more commercialized, we’ve become adjustment variables.” Victor also points to what he sees as a reckless strategy that has put the whole group at risk, even though it was once in strong shape. “We shouldn’t forget that François Petit is the one who chose this headlong rush,” he says. “Before Covid, we still had this completely unrealistic goal of opening 100 gyms by 2025. By opening gyms everywhere, including some that don’t work at all, he dragged the whole company into a very difficult financial situation.” What are they hoping for now? “I’d like us to sit down with management and ask a real question: what kind of climbing gyms do we actually want?” Justin says. For him, as someone who joined Climb Up because of his love of climbing and because the company once felt like a family business, the current situation shows that the model no longer works. Earlier this year, a study carried out by Union Sport & Cycle in partnership with the Union of Climbing Gyms and the French Mountain and Climbing Federation found that the sector as a whole posted an average 4 percent drop in revenue year over year between 2024 and 2025. Within the French private gym landscape, Justin believes some operators are doing better than others. And he is convinced they are not the ones that chose a nationally scaled growth model built around pooled costs. “Independent gyms, and even cooperative ones, show that a model works when it pays its staff well and builds strong local roots,” he says. “And I think that lines up much more with the values of what we do than the McDonald’s or Quick version of climbing.” Contacted by Vertige Media, Climb Up management said it had decided not to comment on the company’s current situation, “for now.” As of our latest reporting, François Charpy’s role is being temporarily filled by a three-person leadership group made up of François Petit, the HR director, and the administrative and finance director. In the coming weeks or months, the company’s investors are expected to appoint a new CEO to lead the group. Whatever happens next, as of March 17, all signs suggest that the nationwide action that had briefly been under consideration in many gyms will ultimately be followed only marginally. *Name has been changed.