This past weekend my friend Denise and I made the trek up to the base of Mount Olympus in Salt Lake City to solo the locally famous West Slabs route (5.5, 1600+ ft). The entire route is one clean piece of bomber quartzite and we had a blast on the way up. It felt great to be able to climb so high so fast and move fluidly all the way up the giant slab. Plus this was a great rehab workout for my pulley injury. My Insights were the perfect do-all shoe for this route with a one hour...

I’ve just returned from the Nor’easter event in the picturesque New England town of Lincoln, New Hampshire and am getting ready for a lot of time on the road this fall. The Nor’easter competition was the finale event of the UBC tour and the fourth time in 2010 I’ve traveled with the USA Climbing Comp Wall. >We’re getting better and better at putting this monstrosity up, running a comp, and taking it down and though I can’t really say the process is light and fast, it’s getting there.

I haven’t blogged yet so I thought I’d say what I’ve been doing over the past year, and how climbing has evolved for me recently. Bit of a rant I’m afraid. For the past few years, my climbing has taken a very different path - it needed to as I started to get bored going to the same old trad venues and doing increasingly more esoteric and arbitrary routes. At the upper-end of trad climbing, risking it all on-sight and 10 foot to the side of a splitter crack while your mate ignorantly eggs you on from...

A little something to let you know who I am. My name is Alex Sosa Manon and I am 13 years old. I started climbing when I was 12 at my local gym that just opened up in brooklyn called Brooklyn Boulders. It was a hot summer day and my mom said there was a rock wall 5 blocks from my house. So I rode my bike over to Brooklyn Boulders and found myself more than a rock wall, a huge rock gym!

I just came back from an incredible road trip through Canada and the northern parts of the United States. The last ten weeks contained a lot of climbing in various places and styles. Starting in Squamish, the Chief gave us the possibility to send some wonderful boulder problems, to do multi-pitch routes at the Grand Wall and to get into the world of placing gear into cracks – a new and very exciting experience for me. Trad climbing attracted me throughout the trip.

Raw, uncut footage of The Never Ending Story V14 send!  Direct to you from Magic Wood, Switzerland.