A 60-year-old Czech climber died on March 27, 2026, on Kalymnos after three fixed anchor points failed one after another on a route bolted in 2002. It was an extraordinarily rare accident, and it raises urgent questions about how one of the world’s premier sport climbing destinations handles rebolting. Between volunteer burnout, murky finances, and responsibility spread so thin it almost disappears, the accident exposed the weak points in a system already under severe strain. A route setter on Kalymnos © Klara Stein On March 27, 2026, a Czech climber finished climbing St. Savvas, a 5.12c (7b+) in the sector known as Jurassic Park, on the Greek island of Kalymnos. At the anchor, he went through the standard sequence to lower off and started coming down to clean his quickdraws, the clipped pieces left on the bolts while leading. As he weighted the system, both anchor bolts failed at the same time. The force then transferred to the lower bolt beneath them, which failed too. The man fell 15 meters, about 50 feet, and hit a ledge. He was conscious at first, but difficult access delayed the evacuation by several hours. He later died in the hospital from his injuries. The Worst-Case Scenario The news hit the climbing world hard. Kalymnos is not some obscure crag. It is one of the biggest sport climbing destinations on the planet. On this Greek island in the Dodecanese, between 12,000 and 15,000 climbers come every year to climb roughly 4,500 bolted routes, according to Aris Theodoropoulos, president of Rebolt Kalymnos and one of the major figures in Greek route development. A few hours after the accident, Rebolt Kalymnos posted a statement on Instagram that read: “The climber did nothing wrong. The main cause appears to have been a series of failures in aging hardware.” The group is at the center of the island’s rebolting effort. Since the accident, it has announced inspections of every route equipped before 2005 and precautionary closures of sectors considered suspect. The reaction was immediate and international. On social media, the dead climber’s wife called on people to support Rebolt Kalymnos. Donations quickly began coming in, though Theodoropoulos told us he could not confirm how much money had been raised. “It’s the worst accident I’ve seen in 50 years of climbing” Aris Theodoropoulos, Greek route setter and president of Rebolt Kalymnos What he could speak to was his distress. Reached by Vertige Media, he said he was “devastated” by the accident. The route where it happened was one he had personally bolted in 2002. “It was one of my first routes on Kalymnos,” he said in a video call from the island. “It’s the worst accident I’ve seen in 50 years of climbing.” There had already been one fatal accident on the island tied to human error. But March 2026 was different. Never before had an anchor on Kalymnos failed like this. The expansion bolts Theodoropoulos used at the time were 10 mm 304 stainless steel, a material considered standard in the early 2000s. Twenty-four years later, that stainless steel has proved poorly suited to Kalymnos’ marine environment. “The anchor was completely corroded inside the rock. Even the best stainless steel can’t last more than 20 years here,” he now says. After checking different sectors, the picture has become stark. Roughly 1,000 routes equipped before 2005 have never been rebolted. On an island with about 4,500 routes, that means nearly a quarter of the network could pose a danger to anyone climbing on it. Rebolt Kalymnos now recommends avoiding all of those older lines until they have been fully inspected. Fifteen sectors are also being considered for temporary closure. The Titanium Option Among local bolters, there now seems to be broad agreement on the technical fix: Grade 2 titanium glue-ins paired with epoxy. Titanium does not suffer from the same kind of corrosion, and the epoxy comes with a theoretical 100-year guarantee. That choice is based on ten years of research by the UIAA, the international climbing and mountaineering federation, which updated its anchor standard in 2020 after documenting the different forms of corrosion that affect stainless steel in marine environments. The biggest danger is stress corrosion cracking, a failure mode invisible to the naked eye that can cause an apparently intact anchor to break under very low loads. In other words, a bolt that looks fine on the surface may already have lost its strength inside the rock. An anchor on the island of Kalymnos © Aris Theodoropoulos Theodoropoulos knows all of this well. He says the Thai precedent has now become the reference point. “The only solution, not just for Kalymnos but for the whole Mediterranean, is titanium,” he said. The problem is cost and supply. According to Theodoropoulos, only one manufacturer, the Greek producer Peter Lappas, currently offers anchors certified against stress corrosion cracking under UIAA standards. Reached by Vertige Media, Lappas said the alloy is much harder to work and therefore much more expensive. “You’re looking at 6 euros per bolt on a large order,” he said. “That’s twice the price of regular stainless.” Installing glue-ins also requires careful, skilled work. “And you have to know how to do it,” Theodoropoulos added. “What we need even more than extra help is experienced, well-trained bolters.” At the current pace, he estimates it will take 10 to 15 years to secure the entire island. Backed Against the Wall Rebolt Kalymnos was created a year and a half ago. It now coordinates about 20 volunteers and operates almost entirely on donations. So far, the group says it has completed around 50,000 euros’ worth of work. That is real progress, but tiny compared with the scale of the job. “We go sector by sector. It takes us 10 to 15 days for each one,” said Theodoropoulos. “We’re getting lots of offers, even from France. But it’s not easy to coordinate all of that.” So how did one of the world’s best-known climbing destinations end up relying on a small group of volunteers for both equipment and safety? “Everything is amateur because nobody has ever put a cent back into the safety of the activity” Claude Idoux, former route setter at Kalymnos Few people have asked that question as relentlessly as Claude Idoux. After moving to Kalymnos, the French climber poured himself into opening, bolting, rebolting, cleaning, and making the island’s climbing safer. He has since left, but not before leaving a massive mark: more than 700 routes established, between 80 and 100 routes maintained each year, and the creation of a volunteer rescue team. In his view, the Czech climber’s death could have been avoided. “As early as 2013, when I inspected the sector where Peter fell, I warned that the area was inaccessible in the event of an accident,” he told Vertige Media. Several accounts also say the Kalymnos rescue team took too long to reach the victim on March 27. For Idoux, all of it points to the same deeper problem. “Everything is amateur because nobody has ever put a cent back into the safety of the activity,” he said bitterly. “I often felt like I was doing everything by myself.” He says he personally spent 40,000 euros over twenty years on the island. When he arrived on Kalymnos in 2005, this former transport-company owner had left France to fully devote himself to climbing. At the time, the island was on its way to becoming one of the major hubs of international sport climbing. After an Italian climber, Andre Di Bari, discovered the area and helped reveal its potential in the late 1990s, Kalymnos kept attracting more and more climbers. In time, it became one of the beating hearts of international climbing, with the Kalymnos Climbing Festival drawing stars of the sport as early as 2010. “As we have seen for years, if we do nothing and wait for something from them, we are going to die” Aris Theodoropoulos “At first, the municipality understood the opportunity,” Idoux said. “It paid bolters, supplied hardware, and provided housing.” The goal was to build a tourism economy on an island in decline, where the small local population had mostly lived on modest tourism and sponge fishing. Today, nearly the whole local economy depends on the flow of climbers, yet little of that money seems to make its way back into cliff maintenance or rescue. In Massouri, the island’s main village, the streets are lined with packed tavernas, gear shops, bars, and rental agencies. Climbing is good business for a long list of local players. Over time, the municipality stepped back. Aris Theodoropoulos on Kalymnos © Simon Montmory “To the point where it basically stopped doing anything,” Theodoropoulos said. “And worse,” Idoux added, “when they did do something, they did it without consulting anyone. So they did it badly.” The two men, who know each other well, point to the same example. In 2018, the municipality of Kalymnos reportedly received 600,000 euros in European funding. Exactly what that money was meant to cover remains unclear. But this winter, a municipal project began to rebolt between 150 and 300 routes, depending on the source. The problem, Theodoropoulos said, is simple: “They didn’t use titanium. They used stainless steel.” “That’s a Band-Aid fix,” Idoux said. “We now have all the information we need to know that the hardware they placed will be obsolete again in a few years.” Idoux says he knows the company handling the job. “The guy who got that contract is from Athens. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has no history here. Odds are he’ll rebolt routes that don’t even need it.” Theodoropoulos reached a similar conclusion, in less colorful terms: “Officially, they are the ones responsible. They are in charge of climbing on the island. But as we have seen for years, if we do nothing and wait for something from them, we are going to die [sic].” Contacted by Vertige Media, the municipality had still not responded to our questions. Money and Blood Now that he has broken his silence, Idoux says the first step is obvious: stop opening new routes and focus on making the existing ones safe. “Honestly, nobody even knows anymore how many routes there are on Kalymnos,” he said. “Some people say 4,500, some say more than 5,000. There’s no point in having more lines if the ones already there aren’t being maintained.” Unless, of course, some people benefit from that situation. That includes Theodoropoulos himself, who is both president of Rebolt Kalymnos, whose mission is rebolting, and owner of the guidebook, whose commercial value depends in part on new routes being added with each edition. Asked about that by Vertige Media, the Greek climber said some of the guidebook revenue does flow back into his association, though he did not provide an exact amount. “The economic players need to get off their asses. They all profit from climbing, and at some point they have to put some money back in” Claude Idoux According to Idoux, very few people on Kalymnos handle cliff maintenance with no personal stake in it. He does not directly blame Theodoropoulos, but he says he would not want to be in his shoes. “I’ve always preferred my position to Aris’ because he makes money off volunteer work,” he said flatly. After a fatal accident, everyone has a reason to point somewhere else. On Kalymnos, where the interests are tightly entangled, that becomes especially easy. But for Idoux, the responsibility is collective. Long before the Czech climber died, he had already been pushing for a professional rescue team and for three full-time people dedicated to route maintenance year-round. That costs money. “The economic players need to get off their asses,” he said. “They all profit from climbing, and at some point they have to put some money back in.” He has no shortage of ideas. He first tried, unsuccessfully, to set up a membership-card system to fund his rescue team. Today he believes an arrival fee could work. “Every climber comes over by boat from Kos. You catch them when they arrive and make them pay a fee. I’ve got plenty of friends who’d be willing to pay. When a Swiss friend tells me he pays 30 bucks for four hours in a climbing gym, well, this would be the same price to climb in one of the most beautiful places in the world, safely.” Claude Idoux, a former route setter on Kalymnos © Claude Idoux Idoux has ideas. But Idoux is gone. The Frenchman abruptly left the island, selling off all of his assets there. On the phone, he described what he called a complete breakdown after another episode in which he again found himself at the center of an emergency. “I had to help some young people who’d wrecked their car. Nobody came to help them. Meanwhile the mayor of Kalymnos was having dinner with the Japanese ambassador. I walked into the restaurant covered in blood and told him this had to stop. That’s when I realized there was no will on their side anymore.” A few days later, he left the island, leaving behind the same knot of responsibilities and failures, still very hard to untangle. The UIAA is now trying to do exactly that. From May 1 to May 6, the organization will hold a meeting on Kalymnos. It had been planned before the accident, but it now carries a very different weight. The municipality, Rebolt Kalymnos, and the local rescue team are all expected to sit down together. Two days will be devoted to rebolting training based on international standards, and the bolts from St. Savvas will be analyzed in a lab. For Theodoropoulos, the meeting represents a measure of hope. “I hope something good comes out of it,” he said simply. In the meantime, doubt is already settling in on the island. Local professionals say they are seeing concern rise among clients, with some now asking for guarantees or limiting their climbing to sectors that have already been rebolted with titanium. The March 27, 2026, accident brutally exposed the reality on Kalymnos: a municipality that is officially responsible but barely involved, an economic model whose profits do not seem to flow back into safety, and volunteers overwhelmed by the size of the task. Can the UIAA meeting finally force a clearer distribution of responsibility? If not, how long will it be before another anchor fails? The questions are not new. But after a climber has died, no one can ignore them anymore.

A strange image has been making the rounds in both climbing and space circles: Ocún crash pads, the thick foam mats used for bouldering—climbing without ropes on shorter problems—strapped to the launch tower of an Isar Aerospace Spectrum rocket. So what exactly happened? © Isar Aerospace Climbers noticed the detail right away, especially because the Czech brand itself seemed to discover the scene at almost the same time as the rest of the internet. The image has an almost perfect absurdity to it. In a setting full of cables, steel, and cryogenic procedures, you can clearly make out Ocún crash pads fixed to the launch structure . This is the kind of gear you expect to see underneath a tall boulder, not next to an orbital launch vehicle. The shot was spotted and discussed in particular on Reddit , where several users tried to figure out what the pads were doing there based on where they were attached to the tower. Ocún, for its part, leaned into the surprise. On social media , the brand said its Dominator crash pad had ended up on Isar Aerospace’s “Onward and Upward” mission, using wording that suggested this was not part of any planned collaboration on its side: “We definitely didn’t see this coming... but we’re in.” Without a detailed official explanation, the most plausible theory is still the one put forward by several online observers: the pads may have been used as protection in spots where parts of the infrastructure—especially components involved in quick connection or disconnection during launch—could strike the structure or need to absorb impact. That remains a theory, not an established fact. The image spread so widely in part because it arrived during an already messy stretch for Isar Aerospace. The first test flight of its Spectrum rocket, on March 30, 2025, got off the ground from Andøya, Norway, before the flight was terminated about 30 seconds later. The launcher then fell into the sea in a controlled descent . Even so, the company described the test as useful, saying it confirmed the rocket could lift off and provided valuable data for what comes next. The second mission, called “Onward and Upward,” matters more. This time, the goal is not just to test the rocket. Isar also wants to validate a key stage of its program and send a small payload into space, with five mini-satellites and one experiment onboard . But again, nothing has gone according to plan. A first attempt, in January, was canceled because of a technical issue. Another, on March 25, had to be scrubbed first because a boat entered the safety zone, then because of a fuel temperature problem. Then, on April 9, the company called off yet another attempt so it could check a leak in a pressurized tank. As of this writing, the mission still has not launched. That may also explain why this crash-pad story took on such a life of its own in both climbing and space communities. It brings together two worlds that seem to have nothing in common, suddenly linked by the same piece of protective gear. In one case, it cushions human mistakes. In the other, it may be there to soften purely mechanical force. And there is something about that collision between bouldering culture and the launch industry that feels almost too good to be just a logistical detail.

A meta-analysis published on January 9, 2026, in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living delivers a blunt assessment of scientific research on high-level climbing: its conclusions rely overwhelmingly on male data. Across a pool of 246 studies measuring performance, 66.5% of participants were men, compared with 22.7% women, and only 34 papers offered a real sex-based comparison. For years, then, climbing science has operated under a thin veneer of universality while quietly treating male physiology as the default. (cc) Simon Spieske / Unsplash The review, led by Kaja Langer and her team, focuses specifically on performance factors in “advanced to elite” athletes across bouldering, lead, and speed. That is exactly the level where training optimization and injury prevention require real precision, and it is also where the imbalance is hardest to ignore. Of the 246 studies included, 102 looked only at men. Just 8 focused only on women. This is not a new problem. In late 2025, a study led by Danielle Lee had already flagged the chronic underrepresentation of women in climbing research, both in the athlete groups being studied and in the research teams themselves. The myth of the universal body For a long time, sports science has generalized findings from samples that were never truly representative in the first place. That does not always come from a conscious decision, but the consequences are real. When researchers test mostly male subjects, the data they collect on strength, endurance, and recovery mostly describes men. “Women are not simply small men” As the study’s authors note in pointing to an “obvious male bias,” that kind of extrapolation quickly runs into limits. Frontiers puts it plainly: “women are not simply small men.” Different physiology means different biomechanical and metabolic responses. That lack of representation directly affects the areas that matter most in athletic preparation. Among the 34 comparative studies identified, the research base is especially thin on key topics. Only two papers deal with training and adaptation. Two focus on injury and mental health. Three look at cognitive and psychological factors. Put simply, sex-specific data is missing in exactly the areas where coaches and medical staff need it most. Injury research is a clear example. Existing studies suggest that women climbers are more likely to deal with issues affecting the shoulders, neck, and head, while men are more exposed to finger, elbow, and ankle injuries. So when prevention protocols are built mainly from male injury data, they leave out a meaningful part of the clinical reality. The point is not to split climbing into two sealed-off categories. It is to recognize that the drivers of performance, and the body’s points of vulnerability, may differ by sex. The cost of the scientific gap Nutrition and energy availability may be where the research lag does the most damage. In a sport where power-to-weight ratio matters, low energy availability, including RED-S, can pose a major health risk for athletes. And yet coaches and support staff still lack well-validated benchmarks for adjusting training load and nutrition to the realities faced by women climbers. A 2025 review on nutritional needs in climbing had already pointed to a glaring lack of documentation and the absence of recommendations specifically designed for women. What little data does exist still raises concern. In the cohorts studied, 80% of women climbers did not meet recommended daily iron intake, and 30% showed clear iron deficiency. This goes well beyond an academic debate. It is about bodies that struggle to recover and absorb training with a much smaller margin for error. That is exactly why the international SAGER guidelines, short for Sex and Gender Equity in Research, call on scientists to report clearly and rigorously how sex and gender are handled in their studies. Their message is straightforward: leaving out that dimension “limits the generalizability of results.” In the end, this major review challenges the idea that elite climbing is somehow neutral. It is a reminder that even in a sport that measures performance through precise metrics and technical language, watts, grip strength, grades, gender bias does not disappear on its own. The issue for sports science is no longer just whether participation numbers look balanced on paper. It is whether the field is ready to adopt the methodological rigor this work demands, and stop confusing the most studied body with the universal one.

At 25, Laura Pineau has climbed her way into the sport’s top tier with a string of huge performances over the last 12 months. It’s the product of relentless work from a climber who has never left much to chance, and who has recently decided to own the parts of herself that don’t look polished. A portrait of “Mademoiselle Fissure.” Laura Pineau on “The Nose” on El Capitan, in Yosemite © Thibaut Marot You have to see her to get it. In front of hundreds of people onstage at the Grand Rex in Paris, she just stops giving the mic back. She hypes the crowd, translates, jumps in with follow-ups, answers her own questions, invites the film crew onto the stage. After 15 minutes of Q&A, Laura Pineau has quite simply taken over the event. Cyril Salomon, whose job is supposedly to manage the conversation, has to admit it: “Next time, you’re MCing the whole night.” That’s just how it goes. The co-founder of Montagne en Scène has just met Laura Pineau in person. And he got steamrolled. The Crown The Paris crowd has just watched the premiere of The Queen Swing , one of the night’s films, which tells the story of the feat Pineau pulled off with American climber Kate Kelleghan. Between June 6 and 7, 2025, the two women completed the legendary Triple Crown of Yosemite — El Capitan, Mount Watkins, and Half Dome — in less than 24 hours. Those are three of the most iconic walls in Yosemite National Park, in California. Altogether, it meant 2,200 meters of climbing and 30 kilometers of hiking, finished in 23 hours and 36 minutes. The audience had spent much of the film holding its breath, wondering whether the pair would actually pull it off. When the credits rolled, The Queen Swing  got a thunderous ovation. The performance warranted it. No all-women team had ever completed that linkup in under a day. “I’ve loved improv since I was little. I love getting people around me on board” Laura Pineau The next morning, sitting in a café across from the Grand Rex, you would almost have to guess that the person in front of you is one of the best climbers on the planet. Technical shell, jeans, approach shoes, big round glasses — Laura Pineau doesn’t exactly look like a showgirl. You have to wait until she starts talking to feel the energy filling the room at what seems like 280 beats per minute. “I’ve always been like this, super extroverted,” she says over a cappuccino that’s literally shaking. “I’ve loved improv since I was little. I love getting people around me on board. And last night, all my close friends were there.” Fired up and emotional, the 25-year-old had no trouble stepping into the spotlight. Partly because it was her first real brush with this kind of public attention. But also because she wanted to balance out what the film sometimes suggests: that she was just some “unknown French climber” answering Kate Kelleghan’s Instagram call. In that version, Kelleghan — an American speed climber — takes the French climber under her wing, coaches her, and teaches her the basics of big wall climbing, meaning long routes on huge rock faces, at record speed. “And you didn’t even see the first cut of the film,” Pineau says. “In that version, I really came off like a beginner. We changed the story a little, because by the end I was the one moving faster on every route, and I was the one carrying the team too.” By then, Pineau already had major climbing achievements to her name. In climbing circles, she is “Mademoiselle Fissure,” one of the best crack specialists in the world, especially in trad, where climbers place their own protection as they go. Among other things, she had already put up a major repeat of an 8b/8b+ trad route — roughly 5.13d/5.14a — in Italy’s Valle dell’Orco. That kind of background would make her more and more comfortable in Yosemite, and over the film’s 53 minutes it becomes increasingly clear that she is the one carrying the Triple Crown project. “I gave up everything to make this film,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “When we started, I told Kate, ‘You know I quit my job for this. We’ve got eight months of training ahead of us, and I’m going to be living in my van off my savings.’” Once she committed, the French climber went all in. She brought in fellow Frenchman Thibaut Marot to shoot and direct the project. She paid for a large part of the production herself. She worked on the post-production with the technical team. She turned down help from a production company. She was also the one who contacted Montagne en Scène to get the film shown. “I wanted us to control the story from start to finish,” she says. “I wanted the film to belong entirely to us.” That makes sense for someone who, her whole life, has never wanted to leave much to chance. Where Does All That Energy Come From? Laura Pineau grew up in Toulon with a mother in sales and a father who ran his own business. By then, the two parents were starting to clash. In a home that she describes as “a little chaotic,” Pineau learned to move through life by holding on to certain phrases. “I remember my parents saying to us all the time, ‘Go play, you’re free.’ And then right after that: ‘But don’t come back crying.’ So I basically never cry. I feel like if you’re given that kind of freedom, you can’t complain afterward.” A top student and intensely athletic, she developed her own working method earlier than most people around her. “Everyone was talking about prépa, the ultra-competitive French prep track,” she says. “But by the time I was 15, I already had a method that worked for me. I could sit at my desk for five hours and work with no problem. So I told my mom, ‘The second I graduate high school, I’m leaving home.’” That is how, at 17 and a half, Pineau ended up in San Francisco for business school. Before that, while boxing was more her sport at the time, she had discovered climbing almost by accident through a local climber named Fred, whom she never saw again. “We were deep-water soloing — climbing above the sea without a rope. I loved it right away. There was something kind of mechanical about it. I’d fall, then start again.” A 7c+ in Toulon, with a smile on her face © Charlie Caille Once in the United States, Pineau got closer to the world of big walls, but first spent a lot of time in climbing gyms. She studied hard, adapted to a different culture, and leaned even harder into her workhorse personality. One story says a lot. “The first time I walked into a classroom, everybody was taking notes on laptops. I had never seen that before. So I downloaded a game that taught me how to type as fast as possible without looking at the keys.” Everything in Pineau’s life seems to run through a series of micro-goals: school, English, climbing. As she improved, she eventually ended up on a 150-meter route with an American friend. “And it was trad too,” she says. “I was in 10th grade, carrying the big bag, and it was scraping in the crack the whole time. I thought I was going to die. It was awful.” Trad and Pineau had a pretty rough relationship at first. “I decided to try leading — climbing first with the rope below me — on an easy route. I do not remember it fondly. I was terrified, and after that day I didn’t do it again.” In 2020, a lot of young people spent their time staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine a future. Pineau, back in Toulon for a gap year, was dreaming about El Capitan, probably the most famous cliff in the world, rising roughly 1,000 meters. Her idols were Lynn Hill and Babsi Zangerl. By then, there was no real doubt anymore. The former boxer knew climbing would be part of her life, one way or another. Back in the U.S., and maybe trying to force fate a little, Pineau embraced the full American climber lifestyle: she moved into a van. In the summer of 2022, after finishing school, she set up in Red River Gorge, one of the most iconic climbing areas in the U.S., in Kentucky. Working remotely for a luggage company, she spent most of her free time outside climbing. “And then one day all the dirtbags — climbers living cheap so they can climb all the time — told me I had to go to Ten Sleep, Wyoming, for a climbing festival,” she says. “I didn’t think twice. I just followed them.” When she started the van, she had no idea that 1,700 miles later, a meeting would change her life. A Gift, the Desert, and Bloody Hands “I see this woman I don’t know at all. I have no idea who she is. But she’s speaking into a mic about her experience, and it hit me hard. She talks about setting routes in gyms with awful guys, about having to carve out space for herself. And about how she did that through crack climbing.” Sitting in the screening room in Ten Sleep, Pineau felt something deep. And like every time she senses an opening, she decided not to let it pass. “So I went up to her and asked if she wanted to climb together.” The woman was Brittany Goris, one of the best trad climbers in the world, and not someone who was exactly used to another woman walking up with that kind of invitation. She said yes. A few months later, Pineau found herself in Moab, out in the Utah desert, relearning trad with an American star. “She taught me so much,” Pineau says. “She let me use all her gear. She passed on her technique. She taught me how to manage fear. It was one of the most important encounters of my career.” “I don’t think I’m the smartest person out there, but I work like crazy. Nobody will ever put as much pressure on me as I put on myself. Nobody” Laura Pineau Through Goris, Pineau rediscovered crack climbing and the grinding apprenticeship that comes with it. “That’s what I loved most about it: starting over from zero,” she says. “It’s a magical gift to become a beginner again, to suddenly have a whole world to learn all over.” In cracks, Pineau also found something that felt almost elemental. “It was made by nature. You can see that. When you climb it, it feels like the most obvious thing in the world.” With bruises on her body and blood on her hands, she found in those crack systems a new way of asserting herself. But crack climbing was not the only calling she found in Ten Sleep. The same day she heard Brittany Goris speak, she also watched a film that shook her: Pretty Strong . “Four short films about women climbing hard projects together,” Pineau says. “It was just unbelievably inspiring. When it ended, I cried for ten minutes because it hit me so hard.” When she walked out of that screening, she made herself a promise: do the same thing. In other words, climb truly hard projects with women partners. Laura Pineau on Half Dome © Thibaut Marot Ultra-Climber Since then, Laura Pineau’s career has moved between two tracks: film producer and pro climber. The Triple Crown allowed her to leave her sales job behind and pick up a few sponsors. That achievement, which she says “left a mark on Yosemite history,” changed her status. Pineau now has an agent, Marine Thévenet. The recognition she had been waiting for? “Maybe,” she says, searching for the answer in the last of her cappuccino. “I think work pays off eventually. I don’t think I’m the smartest person out there, but I work like crazy. Nobody will ever put as much pressure on me as I put on myself. Nobody.” Built to perform — and to make sure it shows — Pineau is often described in the media as “a machine.” She has just finished another extreme project with Elsa Ponzo: climbing the 100 most beautiful routes in Provence. The numbers are massive. Nearly 18,000 vertical meters, 691 pitches, all in 43 days. Enough to plant a new concept in the world of high-end climbing performance: “ultra-climbing.” It’s big. It’s impressive. But where does it lead? Stirring the bottom of her cup with a spoon, Pineau has started thinking differently about constant performance. She no longer wants to come across as some kind of engine you just switch on and point at a wall. “After the Triple Crown, I started working with a mental coach,” she says. “It was my grandmother who realized I couldn’t close the chapter, couldn’t move on.” With that coach, “the machine” has been learning to apologize, to give herself a break, to accept vulnerability. “I wanted to stop showing people a perfect version of Laura.” Six months after the Triple Crown, in November 2025, Pineau climbed Wet Lycra Nightmare, one of Yosemite’s steepest big walls, graded 8b — about 5.13d. It was another female first. Another major feat. But this time, in the film she produced about it, the climber chose to show the doubts and the cracks too. At the premiere last January at the Salon de l’Escalade, the woman who “never cries” broke down in tears after the screening. “And you’re really not ready for the one about the 100 routes in Provence,” she says, laughing. At 25, is this hyperactive athlete starting to settle down a little? Maybe. The energy is still spilling over, but now she wants to pass something on to the generation coming up behind her. Pineau is preparing to earn her French state diploma, the certification that allows her to teach professionally. “To pass things on,” she says. Her big ascents. Her technique. Her strength. But also her failures, and the questions that came with them. After all, what could make more sense for “Mademoiselle Fissure” than finally letting the armor crack?

Accused by some private gym operators of being too commercial, the future National Training Center in Salt Lake City has become a flashpoint. Now USA Climbing’s athlete commission has finally broken its silence. In an open letter and in comments to Vertige Media, American climbers are presenting a united front: this facility is essential if the sport is going to build real structure and keep pushing U.S. climbing to the top. Climbing World Cup in Chamonix © David Pillet Up to now, the back-and-forth over the future National Training Center, or NTC, had one glaring omission. In one corner were private gym owners, openly hostile to what they saw as an overly commercial project for a national governing body. In the other was USA Climbing, defending a hybrid model built around high performance, public access, events, and long-term financial viability. Caught in the middle of that fight were the people most directly affected by it, and until now, they had largely been absent from the conversation. That is no longer the case. Through its athlete commission, chaired by Danny Popowski, Team USA’s climbers have made their position clear. The tone, first laid out in an open letter and then expanded on in an exchange with Vertige Media, is firm. The NTC is not a luxury. It is an urgent need. In the commission’s words, it is “needed to help make the US more competitive on the international stage, to have a dedicated event stage, and to provide education and development opportunities for our broader community.” The athletes go even further, calling it “foundational to athlete development and the continued growth of competition climbing in the United States.” The point of speaking out was not just to endorse the project. It was also to change the way people are talking about it. Forget the idea that this is just another climbing gym about to crowd an already busy Utah market. In the athletes’ view, the center is first and foremost a response to a major infrastructure gap, and to years of making do with whatever the sport could piece together. Out of the garage That is really the core of their case. Behind the medals and podiums, American high-performance climbing has long relied on a patchwork system. As the letter puts it plainly, the U.S. team has succeeded up to this point “without a permanent, purpose-built training facility.” The next line lands even harder. To prepare, American climbers have depended on “borrowed gym time, temporary warehouse setups, and personal resourcefulness.” In its conversation with Vertige Media, a commission spokesperson drove the point home. Private gyms have historically carried the sport in the U.S., they said, but those facilities “are not designed to consistently replicate international competition environments.” The list of shortcomings is both specific and hard to argue with: wall angles that do not match modern comp climbing, route turnover that is too slow, and event builds that fall short of the world standard. Even now, some qualifiers and national-level events are still being held on structures that do not reflect what athletes face internationally. Lead walls are often missing the kind of steep terrain now standard at the top level. Bouldering walls can lack a real range of angles, “particularly true slab,” meaning low-angle, balance-heavy terrain. And speed climbing remains chronically underserved. On that front, access to four-lane speed walls is still “extremely limited,” which is a striking gap at a moment when the discipline is continuing to evolve worldwide. “It is not designed to serve the same purpose as a typical commercial gym” Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission What this intervention really shows is a clash between two very different readings of the same project. Where private operators see commercial overreach, athletes see a long-standing structural deficit. For them, the U.S. has simply been missing a true home base, one capable of absorbing the technical, logistical, and symbolic demands of elite performance over the long term. Built to produce champions That is also the argument athletes are using to push back against the private-sector revolt. Yes, the NTC will be open to the public. But calling it a standard commercial gym, they argue, misses the point by a mile. “The primary focus is on competition-style climbing,” the commission says. This is not a facility designed to maximize density or squeeze in as many members as possible. The terrain will be “more specialized, less dense, and frequently reset,” including entire areas that can be closed off for weeks at a time for national-team training or events. Their conclusion is blunt: “It is not designed to serve the same purpose as a typical commercial gym.” “As athletes, we just want to see the project handled in a way that builds trust across the sport” Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission The defense is straightforward. The NTC should not be seen as just a bigger gym backed by a national federation. It is meant to be a performance lab with a public-facing side. But the athletes are just as clear that they do not want it to become an ivory tower. “From our perspective, it’s important that this isn’t just a closed-off, national team facility,” the signers write. In a country where climbing grew through openness and broad access, they argue that a project of this scale needs to carry “that same standard of accessibility and openness in some capacity.” That goes beyond a political talking point. It gets at something deeper in the American sports model. Rather than an elite bunker, the center is being pitched as a hub, a place where young prospects, coaches, setters, para-climbing specialists, and recreational climbers could all cross paths. The letter points to a whole network of possible uses: talent ID sessions, coach education, and stronger development pathways across the sport. In that sense, the NTC is being sold as both a champion-building machine and a central node for the broader climbing community. It is also a much easier vision to defend politically when the price tag comes up. The elephant in the room But that is also where the athletes’ case runs into its clearest limit. Because the anger from private gym operators has never really been about whether the project would help athletes. The real issue is the hybrid business model, and whether a federation should be stepping into a space that private operators already occupy. On that question, the commission has very little to say. Asked where the line sits between financial sustainability and direct competition with commercial gyms, the athletes declined to engage, responding with a brief: “No comment.” That silence matters. It does not undercut the legitimacy of their sporting concerns. But it does confirm that athletes are not the ones trying to solve the financial side of this fight. The open letter says as much, acknowledging that the team is “not in a position to speak to business projections or operating models.” Their expertise, they argue, is narrower and more specific: whether the facility is the right tool for performance, development, and the competition calendar. In other words, everybody has their lane. The private-sector backlash is not dismissed, but the message is clear enough: do not sacrifice our training environment to settle somebody else’s business dispute. “From an athlete perspective, it feels more complementary than competitive” Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission On governance, the commission is a little more forthcoming, though still careful. Can USA Climbing be both regulator and market actor if it is involved in running a public-facing facility? Here the athletes point to Momentum. The fact that the private operator was chosen to run the NTC is, in their view, “an important step” toward easing concerns. Handing the keys to an experienced outside operator was, as they understand it, “the responsible way to bring the NTC to operational status.” It is a smart way to shift the argument. Outsourcing, in this framing, acts as a kind of firewall, though only if the process remains above reproach. “Transparency and continued engagement with the community are going to matter,” the athletes say, before landing on the key word of their entire intervention: “As athletes, we just want to see the project handled in a way that builds trust across the sport.” That is not a throwaway line. Trust is exactly what starts to erode when a federation moves from being a referee to becoming an economic player. Still, this is not a blank check. While support for the NTC is described as “strong” within the team, and feedback to the commission as “overwhelmingly positive,” concerns do remain. The biggest one is the risk of funneling too many resources into Salt Lake City at the expense of the rest of the country. That nuance matters. It keeps the commission from sounding like a simple mouthpiece for the federation. The athletes’ point is not that criticism should disappear. It is that criticism should push the project’s backers to think harder about governance and national relevance, not kill the center outright. As for the charge of unfair competition, the team answers with a kind of trickle-down sports argument. In their view, greater visibility for elite climbing will eventually benefit the base of the sport. “From an athlete perspective, it feels more complementary than competitive”, they say. The bet is clear enough: a high-profile NTC will attract major events, create exposure, bring more people into the sport, and eventually drive some of those newcomers into local gyms. It is an optimistic theory, but at least it makes the logic of the project explicit. In the end, this public intervention does not resolve the core conflict. What it does do is change the story around it. Where private operators had framed the NTC as an economic aberration, athletes are insisting that it is first and foremost a response to a sporting shortfall. That kind of ground-level legitimacy is something no federation FAQ could ever manufacture. These are climbers who came up grinding through borrowed wall time, improvised setups, and whatever resources they could scrape together. They do not want the next generation to have to do the same. The closing lines of their letter read like a handoff: “The National Training Center is that same kind of investment, made permanent by USA Climbing in ways we never could have believed growing up, and made available to every athlete who comes next.” Still, athlete testimony has its limits. It may now be harder to reduce the NTC to a simple real estate play, but their case does not answer the founding question at the heart of this fight: how does a federation build stronger infrastructure without draining the private ecosystem that helped make the sport what it is? That question remains unresolved. But what started as a two-sided clash between an ambitious federation and anxious gym operators has now become a three-way contest. On the same wall, management logic, market reality, and athlete needs are now colliding in full view. And as is often the case in fights like this, everybody is at least a little bit right, just not in the same place.

With urban gyms, a traveling van, some of climbing’s most recognizable athletes, and a deliberate return to the sport’s outdoor roots, La Sportiva’s 2026 Climb World Tour is trying to be more than another brand roadshow. For the family-owned company, founded in the Dolomites in 1928, the idea is clear enough: reconnect parts of climbing that the modern scene too often treats as separate worlds. © La Sportiva In climbing, “community” can sometimes feel like a convenient word. It gets thrown around easily, printed on event graphics, and then everyone goes home. La Sportiva is trying to build something more tangible. With the 2026 Climb World Tour, the Italian brand is bringing back its touring format with a van dressed in the project’s colors, a run of European stops, and a roster of athletes that includes Caroline Ciavaldini, James Pearson, Siebe Vanhee, Klaas Willems, and Lara Neumeier. The road is part of the story This tour did not come out of nowhere. For La Sportiva, the idea of moving beyond a simple product-customer relationship has been in the works for a while. In 2022, the company launched Climb Europe, a project that reached 14 countries and 71 gyms. La Sportiva now presents that first chapter as the template for what later became the Climb World Tour. So this is not just a matter of adding a few more dates to a busy calendar. The format itself matters. The travel, the venues, and the people met along the way are all part of what the tour is supposed to say. © La Sportiva That is also what stands out most about the 2026 edition. Turin, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Munich, Vienna: the route links major urban gyms across Europe while also leaving room, between stops, for more direct contact with the outdoor terrain that shaped the brand’s identity in the first place. On paper, it is a simple idea. But it says something real about where climbing is right now: the sport keeps growing indoors without fully wanting to cut itself off from rock. One culture, several scenes Of course, the tour is also a visibility play for the brand. It would be pointless to pretend otherwise. But what makes the project interesting is that it does not stop there. Product testing, technical challenges, climbing sessions, and athlete talks give the tour a broader purpose than a standard promo stop. The goal seems to be not just to show gear, but to create moments where different parts of the climbing world actually share the same space. That also comes through in the spotlight on the Skwama Lite. With its moderate downturn, roomier forefoot, and 4 mm FriXion® Black sole, the shoe is aimed at intermediate climbers, not only at the sharp end of performance. In other words, La Sportiva is not speaking only to the climbers chasing the hardest grades. It is also speaking to the much larger group of people who want to improve without turning every session into an exercise in foot pain. That may be where the Climb World Tour feels most on target: in the way it takes today’s broader, more mobile, more mixed climbing culture seriously, without giving up on the idea that the culture still has roots. Full tour details are available on La Sportiva’s official website. Sponsored by La Sportiva.

What really happened when the old Kilter app vanished at the end of March? Based on documents reviewed by Vertige Media  and direct exchanges with both Aurora and Kilter, this follow-up looks back at the sequence of events, the gray areas it left behind, and what it reveals about the structural fragility of connected training boards. The Block'Out Evry Kilter Board, near Paris © Vertige Media When we first investigated the conflict between Kilter and Aurora in the fall of 2025, the heart of the story was never just the legal fight. It came down to a more uncomfortable question for the entire connected-board ecosystem: what is a “smart” wall worth when part of its intelligence lives somewhere else? By late March 2026, that question was no longer theoretical. The old Kilter app was gone, training histories disappeared from the interface, and thousands of climbers realized that years of accumulated sessions could suddenly end up hanging on a dispute involving brands, code, hosting, and usage rights. The quickest explanations naturally took over. An app goes down. A third-party provider cuts access. A new app gets rushed out. But that version of events is too thin to explain what actually happened. Because behind the incident, a whole dependency structure suddenly came back into view. Not a Software Bug To understand what happened in late March, start with one basic point: the old Kilter app did not stop working because of a technical bug in the usual sense. It broke at the point where law, software, and infrastructure met. “On March 19, Kilter demanded that Aurora immediately stop using Kilter's trademarks and copyrights with the threat of legal action if Aurora did not comply” Peter Michaux, founder of Aurora Climbing On March 19, 2026, Kilter sent Aurora a cease-and-desist letter that Vertige Media  was able to review. In that document, the company demanded the immediate end of any use of its trademarks, along with certain visual elements tied to the “Kilter Board Design,” and threatened to add further claims if Aurora did not comply within five business days. By that point, this was no longer just a deteriorating business relationship. It was an IP takeover. Aurora, for its part, was very clear with us about how it read that sequence. Peter Michaux, founder of Aurora Climbing, said: “Yes, Kilter's cease and desist letter was the direct trigger for the app going offline.” He continued: “On March 19, Kilter demanded that Aurora immediately stop using Kilter's trademarks and copyrights with the threat of legal action if Aurora did not comply.” He then added: “On March 24 and 25 Aurora notified Kilter and their counsel that we understood the demand as requiring Aurora to stop offering or supporting the app, and for them to let us know if that was not what they meant to happen. Kilter did not respond directly, and their counsel left our counsel a voicemail advising that they required strict compliance with the demand.” That is also where its communication seems to rest on the gap between the letter and its effects Vertige Media  also reviewed the letter Aurora’s attorney sent to Kilter’s attorney on March 25. It states that “it is clear to Aurora that it cannot continue to offer for download or support the Aurora App,” then says the company would request that the app be removed from the Apple and Google stores, shut down the website, stop hosting, and end support. Put plainly, Aurora put in writing that it viewed the cease-and-desist as incompatible with continuing the service. We also reviewed the March 25 email Peter Michaux sent to Jackie Hueftle, head of Kilter, as well as text messages making the same point. In substance, Michaux said that if Kilter’s intent was not to force the app offline, it needed to say so clearly. That distinction matters, because it separates two things Kilter later tends to blur together, both in its written response to Vertige Media  and in its public communication around the new app. On one side, there is the lack of public notice to users. On the other, there were warnings sent to Kilter before the cutoff. Those are not the same thing. That is where Kilter’s position gets more interesting. In the written response it sent to Vertige Media , the company acknowledges that “Aurora indicated it did not see a path forward and intended to remove the app.” But it also says that “the app was ultimately removed without advance notice to Kilter or to users,” and adds that “Kilter was not given advance notice of the timing of the app’s removal, eliminating any opportunity to inform users or support a responsible transition.” The wording is careful. Kilter is not claiming there were no warning signs at all. It shifts the conversation from whether a warning existed to whether it was told the exact moment the cutoff would happen. That is also where its communication seems to rest on the gap between the letter and its effects. Kilter never explicitly says it asked for the app to be removed. But it also does not answer the reverse question, which is the central one here: what, exactly, did it expect Aurora to do after receiving a cease-and-desist demanding the immediate end of any use of the Kilter name, logo, and visual elements that made up the app as it then existed? In other words, it all reads as if Kilter is trying to separate the letter from its real-world consequences: not writing “take down the app” in black and white, while leaving Aurora with an extremely narrow, if not impossible, set of options. We followed up with Kilter on that exact point, along with two other simple questions: yes or no, did it expect Aurora to stop operating the app after March 19, and what, point by point, was “factually inaccurate” in Aurora’s version of events? The reply we received was brief: “This is all we are able to send at this point.” Again, that partial silence does not erase Kilter’s position. But it does leave the most sensitive parts of its version unanswered. The Wall and Its Brain The most revealing part of this may not be in the lawyers’ letters, but in Kilter’s own public communication. In a post published March 31 on Climbing Business Journal , explicitly presented as a “press release,” Kilter says the new app was launched earlier than planned, that it was never meant to go out in that condition, and above all that, “for the first time,” the company now controls “the entire stack.” The site also notes that the “releases are written by the sponsor and do not represent the views of the Climbing Business Journal editorial team.” That phrase deserves a closer look. To say the company now finally controls the whole stack is to admit that it did not before. Put differently, the core issue is not just that an app disappeared. It is that for years, the industry treated as normal a product whose most critical pieces were split across multiple hands: the brand on one side, the code and infrastructure on the other, and the user experience in the middle, suspended on the strength of that arrangement. That is exactly what our first investigation had already brought into focus in the fall of 2025. Behind the apparent magic of connected boards, there is not just a panel, backlit holds, and a global community. There is governance. Who decides what lights up? Who manages versions? Who owns the memory of past sessions? Who decides compatibility between hardware, firmware, app, and data? As long as everything works, those questions stay invisible. The moment the agreement breaks down, they become central again. The Climbing  article adds an important piece of context here. It notes that the Kilter–Aurora relationship had already been deteriorating for several years and reports that Kilter had been quietly developing a new app since 2022. It also says that in March 2025, that new app was reportedly modified so it could potentially replace Aurora’s controller. That point matters. It does not prove that the March 26 shutdown was fully premeditated by Kilter. But it does rule out the idea that this was an entirely improvised scramble from start to finish. The separation was already underway before it became public. The cutoff just made it irreversible. One public clue points in the same direction: on Google Play , the listing for the new Kilter app shows an update dated March 16, 2026, three days before the cease-and-desist was sent to Aurora. That obviously does not tell us when development began. But it does confirm, at minimum, that an Android version of the new app already existed before the situation suddenly accelerated. On March 30, in an order reviewed by Vertige Media, a federal judge in Colorado dismissed Kilter’s lawsuit against Aurora without prejudice Here too, Kilter’s written response to Vertige Media  says a lot through what it leaves unsaid. Yes, the company acknowledges that a new platform was already in development. No, it does not say exactly since when, or how far testing had progressed by the time the old app was removed. And that timing matters. Because it tells us whether we are looking at a backup plan that got shoved forward, or a future that was already waiting in the wings. The Memory in the Holds There is one last thing this case reveals: what data means, and maybe more broadly what ownership means, in connected sports. In the days after the cutoff, a lot of people talked about “lost data.” That makes sense from the user side. It is less accurate if you try to look at what is actually at stake. Aurora says it has kept the data and is providing exports to users who request them. Kilter, for its part, says climbers “deserve their data,” says it is working on an official recovery solution, but acknowledges that access to older histories remains limited because the old app was operated by Aurora. In its public communication, Kilter also says it cannot promise recovery of users’ “logbooks” and “history,” while highlighting a process that allows some users to recover the problems they created. But it is important not to blur two different things here. Recovering problems created under an account is not the same as restoring a full history of sends, attempts, projects, and progress. For climbers, then, the issue is not just whether the data still exists somewhere. It is whether that data can actually be retrieved, reviewed, and reused in the new app without a pile of friction. And on that front, things are still a long way from a full recovery. That asymmetry probably is not trivial. Individual training histories matter first to users. Community-created problems matter to users too, but they also matter to the board’s value itself. They feed the catalog, thicken the offering, sustain the network effect, and contribute in a very concrete way to the strength of an ecosystem like Kilter. That does not mean Kilter is indifferent to personal histories. But it does help explain why the recovery of user-created problems has such a visible place in its communication, while the full restoration of individual tracking remains, at this stage, much more uncertain. On March 30, in an order reviewed by Vertige Media , a federal judge in Colorado dismissed Kilter’s lawsuit against Aurora without prejudice. That does not mean Kilter lost on the merits. It means that, in the judge’s view, Colorado is not the place to decide the case. The dispute belongs in British Columbia, Canada, in part because the contract between the parties already designated British Columbia courts as the proper forum in the event of litigation. A court may later decide who was legally right. But one thing is already clear: at the end of March, connected indoor climbing got a look at its own fragility. Behind the promise of a product that seemed simple, seamless, almost transparent, there was a setup far less stable than it looked. And climbers were the first ones to pay for it.

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.