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One day, bored up bouldering at Flagstaff Mountain, Colorado, my friends Charley and Hilary and I set out to climb the stupidest boulder problem we could find. We were at the Upper Y Traverse, where we’d been climbing for years, and had grabbed every sharp, snot-slick, over traveled hold on the long wall in every contrived permutation possible. There was nothing left to do but get silly—either that or head to the liquor store a little too early.
Off to the side there was a cluster of chest-high boulders, the kind you sit on to have a snack or introduce your toddler to climbing. But not the kind you climb on—unless you’re skin-crawlingly bored like we were.
“Hey, guys, check these out,” I said. “Untapped potential at Flag!” We began screwing around on the Lilliputian rocks, coming up with a starting point and ending point, holds that were on and off, chalk lines you had to keep your feet above, and so on. The result was something we called Hornucopia into Panache, playing off the names of two famous local sport climbs, Cornucopia and Verve.
Hornucopia Into Panache (unconfirmed V5; possibly V18—Will Bosi, you reading this?) moved in a counterclockwise circle around the blocs, featuring a fingertip traverse on pebbles with your feet so high your knees jammed into your chest, leaps between boulders, a precarious transition off the lip of a tiny shark-fin spire, and a finishing crux that off-routed a slab just below you—like millimeters below, requiring strenuous overhead heel hooks to keep your butt off the rock. This was all made more difficult by the constant heckling of the lookers-on, who said things like “Ooh, you’ve totally got this” and “Looking solid” in the most sarcastic tone possible, putting the climber through a rigorous core workout as their abs rippled with the giggles.
The whole point was to do something stupid and have fun—not really to train or to climb—and on both counts we succeeded.
***
Bored climbers have been coming up with “Stupid Human Tricks” for ages, from Czech tower jumping, to the Camp 4 denizens who’d walk the slack chains in the campground, to pressing out one-armed eliminate mantels, to the Rifle locals setting speed records on the overhanging lap route Pump-O-Rama, to the full-body jump from a giant hueco on What’s Left of Les? on the Mushroom Boulder at Hueco Tanks. These stunts are a good way to pass the time while nominally using some of our climbing skills. But no one ever confused these things with actual climbing—at least, not until recently.
These days, it seems like all that Instagram and YouTube want to feed me, since the algorithms know I click like a well-trained monkey on climbing content, are reels of Stupid Human Tricks. This, apparently, is what these apps think “climbing” is. As just a few recent examples, we have Emil Abrahamsson trying to do a 40-foot paddle dyno, @maxthefuture pinballing sideways around an arete on glossy holds some as large as car hoods, @ogata.yoshiyuki doing some kind of crazy 360-degree ballet move on Star Trek–insignia-looking volumes, and too many climbers to name here showing off their one-armed 6 mm mono-pocket dead hangs on boutique wooden training boards too elite for us weak-fingered peons.
There is nothing wrong with any of this, and it can even be entertaining to watch for, like, five seconds—and I can 100 percent guarantee that these feats are incredibly difficult, and I would have zero chance of doing any of them without breaking my fat, old ass. But they aren’t climbing, just like Hornucopia into Panache wasn’t climbing. They’re just a silly way to pass the time.
***
This would all be good and fine—just another sideshow in the digital circus—if these trends hadn’t spread from comp world onto the interwebs and into climbing gyms, which were originally created as places to train when the weather was too poor to climb outside or if there wasn’t any rock nearby.
Other people have written about this issue already, including Climbing’s own Delaney Miller in “How Climbing Gyms Lost Their Souls” and Steve Potter in “Modern Gyms Are Failing Outdoor Climbers,” as well as former Rock and Ice senior editor Andrew Bisharat in his Evening Sends article “Why Are Climbing Holds So Big?” The trend has been noted, especially by us crusters who just want our gyms to have a good, high-density array of crimp and resistance problems, but instead find ourselves rock-blocked by greasy, sloping, comp-style/parkour/coordination/Instagram-friendly problems on massive volumes that take up 100 T-nut holes where you could put five good problems instead of one shitty problem because somehow this is all supposed to be fun (it isn’t), and the bright, shiny, color-matching blobs are supposed to attract new customers or grow the sport or something, even though everyone I know who’s been climbing for ten years or more seems to hate them with a passion and avoids this style—which has little to no crossover with real rock climbing and in fact is often highly injurious to the joints—like the bubonic plague.
Honestly, I worry for newer climbers, who see these visually alluring but kinesthetically displeasing problems at the gym, watch the videos of these problems and of training stunts online, and think that this is what climbing is supposed to be. Yes, dynamic climbing and training have always had their place, going back to the godfather of bouldering, John Gill, who used dynamic techniques on the rock starting in the 1950s and 1960s, applying his background in gymnastics and training principles to his craft. But there’s a lot to be said also for precision and control, the sort of old-school, “sloth,” lockoff-and-reach style geriatric climbers like me rely on, if perhaps too much, and that has long been a key tenet of climbing movement. If slow, controlled climbing movement is the flour used to make the bread of climbing—the staple food we should be eating—then all this parkour and training content is a pretty plate of doughnuts: nice to look at, photographs well for the Gram, and goes down easily, but in the end is just so many empty calories.
To further prove my point, here’s a list of other things that have deviated wildly and that now suck so badly they’ve tainted the source material—just like Instagram-era indoor climbing:
- The three Star Wars movies George Lucas made after the good ones—you know, the crappy ones with Jar Jar Binks that no one can remember the names of
- Hip-hop, after autotune
- Lost, after season one (trust me, just stop watching…the show has more unresolved threads than a quilt made by cocaine-addicted lab monkeys)
- Cryptocurrency (actually, it always sucked…bro)
- Ironic facial hair that’s no longer ironic
- Metallica, after the Black Album
- Elon Musk (seemed like a “cool inventor” but is in fact just a TCH-addled troll)
- The entire internet
- This column
I have no solution to any of this; nobody does, because bad and annoying things always multiply like crab lice and we’re all powerless against it. However, if you want to step back from the madness and connect with the core of our sport, I’d be happy to guide you up at Flagstaff Mountain. Just don’t ask me to show you Hornucopia Into Panache—it’s not really rock climbing and it never will be, despite what an algorithm tells you.
Matt Samet is a freelance writer/editor and longtime climber based in Boulder, Colorado.
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