Features

  Australian Editor’s note to issue four of Vertical Life. Click here to download the full magazine. Memory may be a fickle, unstable landscape but some monuments on its surface are so powerful they remain recognisable forever; every climber remembers their first climb – that initial disorienting, fumbling journey into the vertical realm. It is our first rite of [...]

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Gonzo Part II: España

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The Bugaboos, massive granite and mental disturbance.

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  Australian Editor’s note to issue three of Vertical Life. Click here to download the full magazine. In Chelsea Brunckhorst’s excellent article in this issue, ‘El Toro’, she writes about walking into the crag with ‘60s climbing legends Bob Bull and Peter Jackson: “It is a scene that is familiar to me. The dry humour, musing over epics, [...]

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Two brothers retrace their father’s footsteps 44 years after his first ascent of Titan on Geryon’s East Face. It is 1968, the dying days of a Tasmanian summer. My father, Rob Taylor, and his climbing partner, Roland Pauligk, maker of the legendary brass wires RPs, stand beneath the vast dolerite spine of Mt Geryon in [...]

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There is little doubt we are now living in a golden age of sport climbing. Consider that we have: multiple 9b (37) routes scattered through Europe; 8c+ (34) onsights; Dani Andrada, limestone sport route–machine and veteran of more than a thousand 8a (29) or harder ticks, bolting up a storm in Catalunya and leaving a [...]

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Editor’s note to issue two of Vertical Life. Click here to download the full magazine. If Victorian climbing legend Malcolm ‘HB’ Matheson had super powers his alter ego would definitely be dubbed Beta Man (and would be decked out in very tight Stubbies rather than tights). No one can recall, despite the passage of time, [...]

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  Just before the baking Christmas heat descended on Victoria’s Western Plains, making the very quartzite itself sweat and turning the Mount into a spooge-fest, Man mountain from the mountains, Zac Vertrees, repeated his new route Treat ‘em Mean, Keep ‘em Keen (29) for our cameras. Treat ‘em Mean Keep ‘em Keen crosses some amazing [...]

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Rob LeBreton delves into the glorious memory bank to reveal the story of the first ascent of one of Thompsons Point’s finest routes Back in the ‘80s I’d been to Nowra a few times when Graham Hill and Steve Bullen started to develop routes around the Grotto and Ben’s Walk. While I was laid up [...]

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Do Bishop better by following Duncan Macinnis’ Beta Depending on where you intend to climb there are three major areas to camp when climbing in Bishop. The first is the Happy Valley Campground, better known amongst climbers as the Pit. Despite the name, it’s a fairly pleasant place to stay, with toilets and garbage and [...]

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