Jonathan Siegrist

Actually, one of them maybe got downgraded retroactively, but either way, both of them were just sadly not 14d.

I feel like you are different from almost every climber I've met, and other people agree with me about this, that you constantly take the lowest grade on a climb or straight downgrade it.

Why is that?

I mean, I love grades, so I don't want to say that grades don't mean anything to me, but maybe they mean a little bit less to me than, than for some folks because, uh, you know, the things I care most about in climbing are sort of big adventures and big outings and big walls and things like that, and so the grades don't totally matter.

DarthGrader, we've talked about it briefly on the show in the past.

It's this app that allows you to put in the individual moves on a route to give yourself a clearer definition of how hard a route is.

In a way, it helps the climber understand how hard a route is for them because, I mean, let's face it, grades are all over the place.

I mean, I climb at Index here in Washington, and that is wildly different from a lot of other areas.

I'll gi- I'll give you a little recap here before we dive into this episode.

But this episode here is a live conversation that we had on the main stage on Saturday night with absolute crushers, Jonathan Siegrist, Alannah Yip, Tyler Thompson, and Mike Foley, all of the Arc'teryx team.

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

I mean, 9A plus.

[laughs]

Go on over there and get yourself a free harness.

In a second we're gonna bring up crusher Tyler Thompson, and we'll see if Jonathan Siegrist is back from his clinic yet.

But Alannah, I wanted to take a second if we could to ask you about just the evolution of sport climbing itself and hard sport climbing, and just recently in the news here we're seeing people are continuing to find ways to perform at the absolute hardest levels.

Now, there's this forever conversation about how do we build the perfect climber, and in the '60s, John Gill was definitely in that conversation for nearly everyone.

Today, it's going to be Aidan Roberts' high-angle crimp and Alex Megos' strength and Adam Ondra's effort and Janja Garnbret's adaptability and Seb Bouin's knee bars and Daniel Woods' lock offs and Jonathan Siegrist's [laughs] endurance, et cetera, et cetera.

But regardless of your exact formula, it's rare that a single climber shows up in several categories, almost certainly never more than two or three, no matter how you slice it.

And that's because even the best climbers are relatively bad at things.