About multi-pitch.com

Kalabaka in Greece looking majestic.

This site has been spun from a mixture of passion, concern and frustration.

Passion & Inspiration

A passion for rock climbing clearly underpins this site. The site also comes from a desire to create and build something unique that can be used and shared with friends to plan great trips and create memories that will last a lifetime. The site has been designed and structured to inspire climbers. Hopefully it will give fuel to a diverse and growing community of people who share a passion for adventure and life.

The more important lesson is to value the struggle, in and of itself. The obstacle isn't in the way it IS the way. As climbers this should be intuitive because, you can usually always walk round! We purposefully seek out the hardest pieces of rock to get to the top of because we see the value in the obstacle itself not because there is no other way round it. - Hazel Findlay

Promote the Traditional Ethic

Bouldering and sport climbing are wonderful disciplines and should hopefully form an important part of any climber’s repertoire. With the growth of climbing walls and the upcoming inclusion of rock climbing in the Tokyo Olympics, these disciplines are well represented. Trad climbing on the other hand feels less accessible (see trends here). This site hopefully goes some small way to helping promote trad climbing and the unique experience it can create.

Bolting a route isn’t a bad thing, in-fact it’s sometimes vital to keep climbs safe. In addition, sport climbing lets people push themselves and their limits with reduced risk. However, if a traditional ethic isn’t also promoted, eventually more mountains will be bolted which reduces the opportunity to experience traditional climbing. This seems especially true in climbing areas of mainland Europe. It would be a shame if what is arguably one of the purest forms of safe climbing were to dwindle. Hopefully this site will help people understand the joy and uniqueness of trad climbing and can therefore help climbers make more informed bolting decisions. Great article from Andy Kirkpatrick on Bolting.

Ken Wilson was a massive advocate of traditional rock climbing. The below quote from him sums up some of the important differances in both skill and experiance the climber gains from trad climbing.

On real cliffs with real dangers, one has to rapidly master the skill and judgment required to avoid accidents. One must find the route, assess the problems, make the moves while also placing reliable protection. In addition, the powerful aura and complexity of cliffs has to be faced, together with descent problems, benightment and bad weather. - Ken Wilson

John Ewbank's keynote at the Escalade Festival in 1993 touched on a key aspect of the magic involved in traditional climbing, especially true of multi-pitch routes that sit in quiet isolation in the mountains.

It may serve us well to remember though, that just as aid climbing, as an end in itself, became more or less passe – or at least not the ultimate skill to aspire to – the times will change again and today’s hardest and most highly-prized bolted sport routes may well come to be viewed as the quaint relics of a passing phase that climbing had to go through. Climbs achieve their own market value within the psyche of each new generation. Personally I believe that the wheel will turn a full 360 degrees and that the most valued climbs of the future will once more be routes where all that exists is the illusion of the absence of previous human passage – as opposed to those climbs which bear the rusting or stainless steel evidence of it. - John Ewbank

A Useful Tool to Find Adventure

It’s difficult and expensive to plan great climbing trips. It can be quicker and sadly cheaper to fly from the UK to Spain, than get a train to somewhere in the UK like the Lakes, Cornwall, Wales or Scotland.

Although there are many useful websites out there like UKC or the mountain project, they tend to focus on volume. This can mean the quality of the information suffers. Many routes don't have any information and most don't have any pictures, let alone good imagery or topography. This means buying lots of guidebooks becomes essential. These have the information needed but are also full of information you don't need. E9 anyone? To assess options and plan properly can require dozens of books. Further frustration comes because they never index routes via height, only grade. The result is spending lots of money and reading thousands of pages to find a handful of climbs that match what you want.

Multi-pitch.com hopes to solve this. Nothing gets added to the site without an image of the crag and the exact geo-location of the crag. Everything is filterable by length and grade and many other factors so you can find the exact adventure you want.

Squamish Chief in British Columbia in Canada offers challenge on a big scale.