Grade

Mike Foley is a climber who climbs really, really hard.

I mean, 9A plus.

I think he's done a 5.15 route, bunch of really hard 5.14 routes, and is also one of the lead designers over at Arc'teryx.

And so as a climber as well as a gear designer, we had a really fascinating conversation with him, predominantly focused on their new harness, the Lethos SL harness, which I've been testing, field testing, as just a regular weekend warrior for the past, uh, few months now, and it's a banger.

Yeah

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I didn't take the, the 9A+ points, so-

Okay

But if we look at what the modern role of the professional climber is, at least the way most people do it, it's pushing the sport.

If you look at the guys who, I guess my argument was, right or wrong, but the guys that have climbed 9A, if you take that list on climbing history, the number of them that have committed a large amount of time to developing new areas and developing first ascents is actually relatively small.

like should there be like more people that actually do do that to like get paid and actually give like something back to the sport

Yeah I mean I actually thought I like interpreted a bit of that just from the way you wrote the question in that like the assumption was the role of a professional climber is slightly the development.

It's more just this constant cycle of news.

For example, if you take this list of nine, eight climbers, realistically for a climber to find a project, commit so much time to like figuring it out and developing a new climb you could probably climb like three 9a's in the time you could develop one it's massive undertaking comparatively to like develop climbs this hard than it is to like repeat them

But my argument is less that we should have an area where we go in and develop loads of 9As, but more of like we go to a new area and develop loads of good 7, like the professional climbers, I guess, would come in and do loads of 7C to like 8C boulders, rather than like cutting edge level stuff.

There's a lot of 9A climbers who just like just go for this cutting edge stuff.