Latest Episodes
Most Recent
Climbing Gold: Unroped
We love making Climbing Gold. You love listening to Climbing Gold.
When you join Climbing Gold: Unroped, you can listen to Climbing Gold without ads. That's everyone of our new, bi-weekly episodes (no more extended breaks) as well as episodes from previous seasons. With over 100 episodes, you have hours of uninterrupted stories for your next trip to the crag.
More Episodes
Far away from Yosemite’s spotlight on a crumbly backwater cliff, an unknown climber was about to change a sport by breaking some of its most sacred rules. Today, we are all very grateful he did. We ta...
· 42 min 11 sec
British trad climbing might be the most unique flavor of all. Is it an audacious game of risk or merely a fast track to a Darwin award? In 2000, while following in the footsteps of his heroes, a young...
· 44 min 4 sec
This year's Olympic climbers weren’t the original USA climbing team. That honor actually goes to a rag-tag group of adventurous dirtbags including Beth Wald, Russ Clune and Todd Skinner, who managed t...
· 28 min 8 sec
Were the Olympics more a bust than a boom? If you had $20 million to grow the sport of climbing how would you spend it? Are we at the end of the era where we climb alongside the pros? The Climbing Gol...
· 46 min 4 sec
These are the things in the shadows that no one wants to talk about. The open secrets elite athletes carry. The behaviors coaches would prefer not to see. The hard realities fans tend to ignore about...
· 46 min 44 sec
As climbing grows and enters into mainstream consciousness, we’d be naive to think that money won’t play a role. What does it take to “go pro” in climbing? How does the business of climbing evolve so...
· 47 min 13 sec
What goes through a climber’s brain when the lights shine and the cameras go live at a world cup stop? Ashima Shiraishi takes us on a journey into the heart and mind of a true competitor.
· 31 min 6 sec
To move a sport forward, you have to take it apart and put it back together again. Today, we talk with two thought leaders in climbing’s next chapter -- routesetters Tondé Katiyo and Adam Pustelnik --...
· 43 min 12 sec
Right now, the spotlight shines brightly on the newest generation of competition climbers, but the path they’re following was blazed by those before them. Today, we talk with Alex Johnson, or AJ, who...
· 38 min 54 sec
Armando Menocal worked to save climbing in America and helped kickstart it in Cuba. While developing the international climbing destination of Viñales, Armando met the love of his life. They planned t...
· 11 min 53 sec
After four days of alpine starts to watch climbing at the Olympics, Alex and Fitz catch up with producers John Burgman and Leici Hendrix for a laugh-filled breakdown of the good, the bad and the ugly....
· 48 min 31 sec
In 2019, The US Olympic Committee gave USA Climbing a one in 10,000 chance of winning a medal. Two years later, USA Climbing sent four climbers to Tokyo. Americans are winning World Cup competitions l...
· 38 min 50 sec
When it comes to the Olympics, we will probably never see a climbing competitor like Kyra Condie again. While other competitors in Tokyo have had the benefit of robust, government-funded national prog...
· 33 min 26 sec
Alex and producer John Burgman walk us through the upcoming competition, make their picks for the gold and explain why the world’s best climber is probably the underdog.
· 12 min 35 sec
The decades long courtship between the Olympics and climbing reads like some bizarro script for a rom com. It seemed like a sure fire thing until curling got in the way. Alex and Fitz interview John B...
· 44 min 41 sec
Is climbing defined by adventure or athleticism? How does a sport grow and evolve? Alex and Fitz discuss these questions and other nuggets as they reflect on the first part of the series. And we revea...
· 41 min 56 sec
Ship Rock. The Totem Pole. Spider Rock. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean we should climb it. We dive into the troubled relationship between climbers and tribes and take apart the inaccurate story...
· 48 min 18 sec
Sean “Stanley” Leary never got a lot of media attention, but he was a driving force in the progression of the sport and beloved by the climbing community. He held numerous speed records in Yosemite, p...
· 8 min 53 sec
After a protracted battle over bolts and sport climbing, American climbers nearly lost the ability to climb on public lands in the early 1990s. It would have completely altered the course of our sport...
· 48 min 35 sec
From our co-creators at the Dirtbag Diaries, we're sharing a story about a type of climbing that we haven’t touched on in this series: Alpinism. In the summer of 2019, Steve Swenson, Mark Richey, Grah...
· 30 min 26 sec