Over the first 12,000 or so years after Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan wall was scoured out by glaciers, no human had ever climbed up it without a rope. Then, last year, Alex Honnold scaled the 3,000-foot monolith without assistance of any kind. It is an utterly elemental human achievement, and while people have…

“This was the original price,” Serap Jangbu Sherpa assured them as he pulled down a waterproof jacket from the rafters, “but now you get 35 percent discount.”

K2 is perhaps the most dangerous mountain in the world. One in every four people who makes an attempt to summit it dies, and nobody has ever climbed it in winter. Only 300 or so people have ever even reached the peak of K2, and its relatively northern location makes it a particularly unpredictable mountain to tame.

Oregon Army National Guard personnel in this big-ass helicopter extracted a wayward climber and the six rescuers that had been sent after him from the summit of Oregon’s iconic Mt. Hood on Friday. The man had called local police from the summit on Thursday and told them he was initially planning to take his own life…

Naturally, Alex Honnold is in Yosemite right now. This should not surprise you, because if non-climbers know anything about Honnold, it’s that he climbed El Capitan without a rope a year ago, becoming the first person to free solo the legendary big wall. When I spoke to him yesterday, Honnold was enjoying a rest day,…

Famed climbers Marc-Andre Leclerc and Ryan Johnson are presumed dead nine days after disappearing in Alaska’s Mendenhall ice field. The climbers were on an expedition to climb the Mendenhall Towers near Juneau, and were expected to be back in town March 7. The last time the pair sent was heard from was on March 5,…

Here we have Austrian climber Hansjörg Auer stuck on a face. By his own account, he lost his route with “no option anymore to climb up or down.” This is a terrifying place to be, even with the proper safety equipment. Auer, however, was only equipped with a thin rope, one ice screw, his harness, and a belay device. He…

On Sunday, French mountain climber Elisabeth Revol was rescued by a team of Polish climbers on the slopes of a mountain in northern Pakistan and airlifted to a hospital in Islamabad. The rescue effort involved the Pakistani Army, an urgent crowdfunding campaign, diplomatic intervention, and the abandonment of an…

Antarctica is mostly known as a snowy wasteland, an island at the bottom of the world with nothing but ice and the odd penguin here and there. While it is covered in a few kilometers of ice, there is a continent underneath it all, and a rather mountainous one at that. Where there are mountains, there will inevitably…

Earlier this year, climber Brian Koralewski was working on a V6 problem in Little Rock Canyon, Utah, near Provo. The route he climbed was an established one, as several climbers have posted videos of themselves sending it in recent years. However, right as Koralewski was going to finish his climb, a huge blocky chunk…

Unlike many outdoor or outdoor-adjacent sports, climbing requires a lot of crap. When I just went on runs everyday, all I needed were some shoes, but now that I’ve been climbing, I need to maintain and prune a small army of very specific items. There is an essentially limitless arsenal of shit available to enhance…

Last Saturday, Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy were six miles into a backcountry skiing hike up to the top of Imp Peak, a mountain in Montana’s Madison Range, when they triggered an avalanche. The slide was 300 feet long and 150 feet wide at a depth of one to two feet, and both Perkins and Kennedy were swept up in the…

If you’re going to climb the Golden Gate Bridge and perform a series of acrobatics that would make the Grim Reaper shit his pants, don’t say anything about it online or post a video of your exploits in which your face is clearly visible. Peter “Teatime” Kurer and Tommy Rector did not follow this advice when they…

Working out is boring.

Climbing Mt. Everest is an arduous grind that requires months of training and the ability to function at the most inhospitable elevations our planet has to offer, but the suite of technical challenges it presents are not as difficult as nearby peaks of comparable height. It’s not, well, a hike exactly, it just doesn’t…

Mt. Everest season is upon us, as climbers are flocking to the world’s tallest peak and trying to summit it before the spring window closes and the onset of monsoon season makes the summit unreachable. Many have reached the top already, although several mountaineers have died this year, including legendary climber…

This weekend, Min Bahadur Sherchan was preparing to climb Mt. Everest when he died of a suspected heart attack at base camp. The Nepalese climber was 85 years old, and he was preparing to summit Everest again and reclaim his record as the oldest person to climb the world’s tallest mountain. He is the second person…

Ueli Steck’s latest project was maybe the most ambitious undertaking of his long climbing career. The 40-year-old Swissman was preparing to summit Mt. Everest via the treacherous West Ridge, then traverse south along the Nepal-China border and reach the peak of Lhotse, the fourth tallest mountain in the world. Steck…