The Dawn Wall Tipping Point: Part 1
In 2015, climbing became a cultural avalanche. The Dawn Wall was its tipping point. In part one, we talk with the Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter John Branch. We hear about Sandy Russell’s novel project to put The Nose on Google Street View and Tommy Caldwell helps us make sense of the year climbing finally hit the mainstream.
Behind The Lens
Colette McInerney and Austin Siadak, both photographers and filmmakers, have each worked on climbing film projects in remote locations. What does it take to capture incredible outdoor stories?
Risk Roundup
How do you decide to take on risk? Alex and Fitz discuss their five takeaways from talking to climbers, alpinists and experts for this season on risk.
Walking Away
Steve House gave his entire attention and focus to alpinism. He was an iconic figure who seemed poised to finish out a career as a sponsored athlete. Then in April of 2021, Steve announced that he was done with elite climbing, embarking on a new chapter of life. We asked, how do you walk away?
Image: Marko Prezelj
The Power of Negative Thinking
Big, audacious dreams come with real risks. The dreamers are presented with a labyrinth of physical hazards, possible outcomes, hurdles, and dead ends. Often, we are told that success comes down to positive thinking, but maybe there’s a flip side to that coin. Few people have thought about risk more than Will Gadd, pioneer of modern mixed and ice climbing. And he’s got a lot to say. We also get some insight from Brette Harrington.
Image: Christian Pondella
A Necessary Risk
Sometimes you don’t get to choose the risks you take. It’s a matter of survival. Alex talks with climber and photographer Nikki Smith about what she gained when she took one of the biggest risks of her life, how her passion for climbing has evolved as she’s forged her path to live authentically, and the importance of standing up for others.
Image: Nikki Smith
Spotting The Gray Rhino
To manage risk, you first have to see the threat. Best-selling author Michele Wucker and Alex talk about how he evaluates risk, creating safety nets and his greatest fear.
Big Nature
In early 1980’s Yosemite, big wall climbing was tedious, difficult and often terrifying. Enter 19-year-old Lydia Bradey. She’s not good at free climbing, but she has this overwhelming desire to experience the feeling of being on one the steepest bits of El Capitan thousands of feet above the ground. There are people who dream of doing things and there are the people that go do them.
Image: Duncan Critchley
Captain Safety
Best-selling author Michele Wucker has dedicated her career to understanding how humans interact with risk in big and small systems. Her hypothesis: the risks we take create a unique fingerprint. Colin Haley, aka Captain Safety, has shaped his fingerprint through two decades of elite alpinism, soloing and identifying risk factors.
Faffing About
Hazel Findlay and Alex dive deeper into the intricacies of British trad climbing. Just don’t hit the ground.
Image: Hans Radetzki
Cheater Cheater
Far from Yosemite’s spotlight, an unknown climber changed a sport by breaking some of its most sacred rules on a crumbly cliff. Today, we are all very grateful he did. We talk with Alan Watts, pioneer of sport climbing in America, about the highs and lows of breaking the status quo. There’s an upside and a downside to every risk we take.
Image: Cathy Beloeil
The Stuff Of Nightmares
Is British trad an audacious game of risk or merely a fast track to a Darwin award? In 2000, while following in the footsteps of his heroes, a young James McHaffie booted up in front of the famed Masters Wall and launched upwards. What followed was a four hour fight for survival. Hazel Findlay supplies perspective on the strange craft of British trad.
Image: Ray Wood
Soviet Speed
This year's Olympic climbers weren’t the original USA climbing team. That honor actually goes to a rag-tag group of adventurous dirtbags including Beth Wald, Russ Clune and Todd Skinner, who managed to travel to the USSR at the tail end of the Cold War to compete in a one of a kind climbing competition.
Image: Beth Wald Collection
Validate My Beta
Were the Olympics more a bust than a boom? If you had $20 million to grow the sport of climbing how would you spend it? Are we at the end of the era where we climb alongside the pros? The Climbing Gold Team takes a look back at the learnings from season 2 and looks into the future of our sport.
Image: Ben Neilson
The Knife’s Edge
These are the things in the shadows that no one wants to talk about. The open secrets elite athletes carry. The behaviors coaches would prefer not to see. The hard realities fans tend to ignore about the sport playing out in front of them. Today, Kai Lightner and Beth Rodden help us shine a light on disordered eating in climbing.
Image: Julyanna Carvalho
Show Me The Money
As climbing grows and enters into mainstream consciousness, we’d be naive to think that money won’t play a role. What does it take to “go pro” in climbing? How does the business of climbing evolve so that it doesn't fall into the same pitfalls that plague other sports? We dive into these questions with Rick Burton, a professor at Syracuse University Professor and Jonathan Retseck, founder of RXR Sports.
The Competitor’s Mind
What goes through a climber’s brain when the lights shine and the cameras go live at a world cup stop? Ashima Shiraishi takes us on a journey into the heart and mind of a true competitor.
Image: Jimmy Chin
Risk, Intensity, Complexity
To move a sport forward, you have to take it apart and put it back together again. Today, we talk with two thought leaders in climbing’s next chapter -- routesetters Tondé Katiyo and Adam Pustelnik -- about the craft of creating movement and we introduce a concept every climber should know about.
Image: Alvi Pakarinen