Trad Climbing

2019 Goals: For 2019, I’m guessing that this post will morph and evolve over the next six months as I sort of reshape my goals for the year. For now, I would like to just kind of spit out some ideas that are starting to form in my head and fill in the gaps throughout […]

Every year, I try to set up a list of achievable climbing goals that will help me focus on improving the areas where I am the weakest. In 2018, my main focus was pushing grades. I focused on number grades as a benchmark for where I wanted to be as a climber. I didn’t quite […]

In the summer of last year (2017), we attempted the Direct North Ridge on Mount Stuart, but retreated once we reached the notch about 1,500ft up the route. Storm clouds had completely covered the peak above, and without sufficient rain gear, we were afraid we would become hypothermic if we got wet. We figured our […]

Kim and I recently took a trip out to San Francisco to visit our friend Brent and see his new place. We didn’t really have any plans to do any rock climbing, but inevitably it’s what we always end up doing. After spending a few days in the city riding bikes across the Golden Gate […]

For some reason, we thought it would be fun to drive down to Moab and give the classic route Fine jade (.11a | 5 pitches) a try. It is a route that is a bit beyond our climbing ability, but we figured that we could just aid through any tough spots on the route. We […]

Kirk and I recently took our first trip to The San Rafael Swell in southern Utah. On that trip we just cragged and found some awesome single pitch routes. However, we wanted to return and try out the more adventurous side of climbing in The Swell. We looked up a bunch of routes on Mountain […]

Kirk recently climbed Standard Ridge in Big Cottonwood with our friend Nathan. Not long after he suggested we solo it. After a few weeks, an opportune day arose and so we went for it. We brought our harness, a light twin rope, and a super small rack just in case we got intimidated. We scrambled […]

We began our hike in around 4:00am and made our way to the base of the direct start of the Ellingwood Arete. With two teams of two, Martin and Brent started up the first, 5.5/5.6 pitch while Kim and I waited restlessly to begin. Kim and I started climbing once Brent had made some progress […]

Castleton Tower is an iconic climbing destination for trad climbers all over the world. With two routes on it rated in the 5.9 range, it makes it one of the first towers that many climbers do. Because if this, the tower is popular and there are generally multiple parties on every route. We chose to […]

A few weeks ago, my friend Kirk and I were trying to decide on an adventure. Being from Salt Lake, we had plans to go to Yosemite, but ended up not working out for the timeframe that we wanted. We did have a couple days to make something happen, so the Elephant’s Perch stood out […]