For the Love of Climbing
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
55: A Price Too Big
01 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On October 29, 2019, Michelle Xue and her climbing partner, Jenny Shedden, set off to climb Red Slate Mountain in the Sierra Nevada when they were str...
54: Good Mom, Bad Mom
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Glinda asked Dorothy when she crash-landed in Oz for the first time. The theory of everything is that every...
53: A Guy Walks Out of a Bar...
01 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Addiction is the kind of topic where judgment is easy, and empathy is hard. Shame is at the core of addiction. It thrives best in secrecy when we feel...
52: My Friend Kris
01 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is Jess and Chelsea. They’re both climbers, they both live in Colorado. They both love dogs, and they’re forever inextricably tied together b...
Bonus Episode 51: 40 Years to Freedom (Part 2)
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Amin has been climbing for over 23 years, starting in Shiraz, a historical city in Iran. In 2017, he moved to the U.S. to work as a head routesetter, ...
50: 40 Years to Freedom (Part 1)
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Amin has been climbing for over 23 years, starting in Shiraz, a historical city in Iran. In 2017, he moved to the U.S. to work as a head routesetter, ...
49: Good Grief
01 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There are those who see grief as the final form of love—this one final act that we give to those we’ve lost. It’s also been said that it’s the...
48: We Are the Currents
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Civil discourse is a dying art, a complex practice that takes patience and well-rounded perspective to really master. Asking folks to be brave enough ...
47: How We Grow
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kids have a lot of questions when someone in their family is sick. But when you don't know to ask, certain things become the norm. In our parents' gen...
Mini-Episode 11: Climbing Doesn't Change You
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome back to the podcast. I’ve always been a huge advocate of change, but not always the good kind. Usually the “shake the snow globe, throw ca...
46: Mason’s Retirement Sucks Tour
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome back to the podcast. This is season five’s final episode which may or may not be two months late, but what are deadlines if not social const...
45: The Letter
01 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca spent hours of her childhood, outside on her front lawn, catching caterpillars and fireflies. She was timid, liked to play alone, and was neve...
44: Mission Possible
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lucho grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District with the belief that the only way to survive his neighborhood was with the protection of a gang. S...
43: Becoming Katie
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you Google “Katie Brown” on the internet, there’s a Reddit thread called “What Ever Happened to Katie Brown?” and that’s a valid questi...
42: Something's Gotta Give
01 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The world of adaptive sports is changing, and quickly. Ronnie’s disability hasn’t held him back, but social stigmas that are still caught behind i...
41: Emily “Gwyneth Paltrow Rocked Apple” and She Doesn’t Want a Lemon Baby
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Emily miscarried in March of 2021 and she struggled with how the experience felt so shameful. It was her job to keep him alive and growing, after all—...
40: Lowest Common Denominator
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle destigmatizes substance use and mental health by opening up about his own journey through recovery after a two-decade-long battle with drugs and ...
39: Where the Redwoods Grow
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Savannah lived in a truck for a year in an attempt to pursue a career in adventure photography. She learned that the privilege to electively suffer st...
38. Are You Safe There?
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dan always knew he was different growing up, but he didn’t have a name for it. Growing up gay in rural America shaped the way he moved through the w...
37. The Arc
01 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pam didn’t have a lot of tragedy in her life, so she didn’t know about the arc. And as a grieving person, it was hard to look forward to anything,...
Mini-Episode 10: Hope is Here
25 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hope isn’t perpetual optimism. It’s an inherent part of being human that requires determination for things to change for the better. We’re back ...
36: The Climber & the Poet
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Climbing can be, er, kinda selfish. We go up, we go down—and then we do it all over again. It's also where Oliver and Alyssa’s interests diverge. ...
35: The Bipolar Ape
01 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Humans are capable of acts of such bravery but also, acts of such cowardice from one moment to the next. And of course, sometimes we’re going to do ...
34: Dreamers Only
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dreams don’t just fall into our heads out of nowhere. They require patience, self-compassion, and the courage to pursue them, regardless of the odds...
33: From the Inside, Out (Part 2)
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is one transgender climber’s story. And it’s hard to sum up in just a few sentences not just Lor’s identity, but the human being that they ...
32: From the Inside, Out (Part 1)
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Lor had to decide. They could go on hating themself, or could be a part of making the world a place that was more healed—and that started with heali...
31: Sober as F***
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What role does excessive boozing in a community of athletes play? And let’s be really clear—this isn’t just the outdoor industry and trade show ...
30: The Prince
01 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Phillip Schaal, an elite rock climber and one of the world’s best boulderers at the time, died in 2016 after a severe reaction to a suspicious drug ...
29: Cat Like a Cat
01 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We’re increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves up in various social contexts, but identity is complex. Being transgender is just another way of be...
28: Brittany
01 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2017, a forty-foot fall broke Brittany’s L1 vertebrae, sending a piece of bone into her spinal cord. She describes it as one of those surreal dre...
27: A Splash in the Pan
01 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On April 16th, 2019, elite climbers Jess Roskelley, David Lama, and Hansjörg Auer lost their lives in an avalanche climbing Howse Peak in Alberta’s...
26: I’m a Liver, Not a Fighter
01 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cedar, who was named after a tree, has something called Progressive Familial Intrahepatic Cholestasis, otherwise known as PFIC 2. This devastating gen...
Mini-Episode 9: I Did Not Know
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do you measure something that definitively changes your life forever—whether it be for better or worse? Like, what kind of metrics are we suppos...
25: A Knot Like Infinity
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Last September, North Bennett sent me a personal essay and told me that he thought it wasn’t send-y enough for most sports publications, but also a ...
24: The Process
01 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Just shy of twenty 5.12 free solos, Austin Howell had climbed nineteen unique routes without a rope—one of them without shoes and butt ass naked. In...
23: Si me muero, me muero
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Jack used to do all the things, like surfing and jiu jitsu. But an incomplete spinal cord injury in 2018 changed his plans indefinitely. What’s a li...
22: The '59 Sound
01 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On March 9th, 2016, Eric was working on linking the crux moves of Moonlight Buttress, one of the most classic test pieces for hard climbing in North A...
21: Come As You Are
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Body positivity isn’t about “fat” versus “skinny”, despite barrages of criticism from armchair philosophers. The body positivity movement is...
20: Sarah
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Addiction is a need-hate relationship. It can be a terrible secret, it can frame the very shape of your life. It’s the white noise behind many lives...
19: Light at the End of the Tunnel
01 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout America’s history, hallmarks of our democracy have been largely reserved for cis white people through intentional exclusion of BIPOC peop...
18: Life Through a Sieve
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Going through a traumatic experience is kind of like putting your life through a sieve. In 2009, Kareemah was diagnosed with cancer and underwent an a...
17: What We Know
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve been paying attention to the news, this is what we know: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd are victims of three separate crim...
16: A Hunger For Joy
01 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On May 12, 1986, students and teachers from the Oregon Episcopal School Basecamp Program set off to climb Mt. Hood. Three days later, nine of the clim...
Mini-Episode 8: How The F*ck Are You? (No, really.)
02 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We’ll be back on May 1st with new episodes. Until then, enjoy a mini-episode while I try to do things like not burn a film festival into the ground ...
15: A Winter in Pakistan
01 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When you go on a climbing trip, everybody thinks it’s a vacation. And you can’t get PTSD from a vacation, right? Except that a winter in the Himal...
14: Donuts for Savvy (Part 2)
01 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
To know Savannah was to love her. Nina and Court loved Savannah to the ends of the earth, and her unexpected death forever changed the climbing commun...
13: Donuts for Savvy (Part 1)
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Grief is the one human experience that we all have in common, but there are no words for losing a child. Savannah Buik was 22 years old wh...
12: Life, Interrupted
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Life is full of interruptions we’re rarely ready for, so the more doctors tried to convince Hans how serious his condition was, the more he denied i...
11: A Woman Knows Her Place
01 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Women are a lot of things. We’re complex, we’re coffee-fueled, we smell good—sometimes we smell bad. Sometimes we’re hangry. But one thing is ...
Mini-Episode 7: The Moral of the Story
18 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It's Still (Mostly) Not a Climbing Podcast. We took the summer off to stand fully in our truth, which means sometimes we have to sit in those uncomfor...
10: I'll Spare You the Platitudes
15 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Corey's dad introduced him to climbing and the outdoors. In 2010, Corey’s dad died by suicide. We don’t actually have a complete count of su...
9: Shit in the Woods
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is about eating disorders, body positivity, and just owning your shit, specifically through the lens of climbing and one woman’s experi...
8: The Heart of the Matter
15 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Matt is the editor-in-chief of Climbing Magazine, a published author, a husband, a father, and a pretty well-seasoned climber. And even though most of...
7: Why Not Now
15 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Fact: fear stops so much of what we do. But after one life-altering day in the Gunks, Caitlin stopped putting things on hold and made some big changes...
6: #NWS
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Angela has loved to the end of the earth, which is exactly how far she would travel in order to say goodbye to Scott. After two flights that covered e...
5: Hold Fast
15 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a remarkable beauty of relative perspective. Two weeks before leaving for Patagonia for a climbing trip, Alex’s life was turned upside dow...
4: All This Death
15 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is about best friends and healing, and it’s a reminder that grief happens, but so does joy.
3: She, Her, Hers
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When we're born, a doctor proclaims that we are male or female, based on what our bodies look like. But some people's gender identity is just differen...
2: A Unique Relationship
15 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bryce’s brother Tyler died in a climbing accident but because of his death, Bryce became more intrigued with the sport that took his brother’s lif...
1: Unbroken
15 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
You haven't heard this story yet. But, maybe you have. Maybe it's a sister, a girlfriend, a best friend. Maybe it's you. Survivor stories like these a...
Mini-Episode 6: I Didn't Know at the Time
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Did you ever do something you loved, but for all of the wrong reasons?
Mini-Episode 5: Packing Up to Leave
19 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Every job has its pros and cons. Some can be pretty chaotic and most, if not all, don’t always pay employees what they’re worth. But what if one o...
Mini-Episode 4: Dying Slowly
12 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When you’re alive and vibrant and healthy enough to choose to go climbing, but your dying mother doesn’t have that choice. What do you call that k...
Mini-Episode 3: I Got One of Those Brains
30 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Scarecrow always wanted a brain, but sometimes those things don’t really work as well without the other two.
Mini-Episode 2: All You Can Do
20 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What do you look for in a climbing partner? Stoke, strength, or most importantly, suffering with you and feeding you cookies on top of pitch twelve? H...
Mini-Episode 1: Bleed Into My Life
16 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever talked to a stranger about some of your deepest fears? Sometimes people mistake vulnerability for weakness, but it takes more strength ...
0: This is Not a Climbing Podcast
09 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This is not a climbing podcast. It's a podcast about choosing vulnerability and talking about real moments (even the painful ones) and how we are all ...