Australian Editor’s note to issue eight of Vertical Life. Download the brand new Vertical Life App from iTunes or the Kindle Fire App Store here. Climbing is complicated. After years of skill-aquisition, conditioning, adaptation and storytelling it may not always appear so, but it is. Training theories, approaches to conditioning, the satisfaction derived from competence, discipline through dieting, applying mental focus, disarming fear, achieving proficiency with technology, understanding forces and protection, learning to fall, the warmth of camaraderie, confronting challenge and relishing achievement, compartmentalising frustration, being in nature…

It was amidst the vertiginous sandstone walls and smooth-trunked gums of the Blue Mountains that John Ewbank became one of Australia’s foremost climbers of the 1960s. His accomplishments were many. At 18 (in 1966) he climbed Australia’s first 21 (with a rest), the powerful crack of Janicepts at Mt Piddington, a line which would have to wait another eight years before Mike Law finally freed it (Janicepts still repels plenty of people today). At the venerable age of 19, he…

John Ewbank passed away recently (you can read his obituary here), and as a tribute to him we are publishing the brilliant keynote address he delivered at the Escalade Festival in 1993 at Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains. What follows is the text from that speech. Thank you ladies and gentlemen.  It’s a great pleasure to be here and I’m pleased to see you all here as well, it would have been a real pain in the arse talking to…