It almost goes without saying that the most interesting thing about climbing is climbers. The act of climbing — reach, grab, step, repeat — is about as exciting as watching C-SPAN. Of course, there’re those turbocharged moments: the all-points-off dyno, the mondo whipper, the down-to-the move comp tie-breaker — but these are the rare homeruns at an otherwise sleepy ballgame. Ultimately, it’s the intense, obsessed, and eccentric characters who really make climbing memorable. It’s because of them that we bring you our annual Interview Issue. Here, we dedicate the whole issue to “getting it straight from the horse’s mouth” — the “horse” being some of the strongest, brightest, boldest, and coolest guys and girls in climbing.

To show you how our heroes hit homeruns, we asked them about stuff other than climbing, too. Inside you’ll hear from, among many others, Matt Segal (p. 40), a Miami-born climber who studied Buddhism and went from crushing comps to plugging pro on some of the world’s hardest trad routes. Then there’s Chuck Fryberger (p. 48), a filmmaker who makes commercial and climbing flicks, DJs, boulders double digits in his free time, and has worked with a foundation that builds clean-water infrastructure in Ethiopia. And you’ll meet Dave Hume (p. 56), one of climbing’s unsung badasses, who quietly put up many of the Red River Gorge’s hardest routes, and today works as a physicist on an atomic-clock project. . . .

Because the climbing community is so small and full of characters, we all seem to know one another. We often meet at destination crags — Hueco, Bishop, the New River Gorge — forming bonds we take back to our respective towns. This is one reason it hits so hard when tragedy befalls the tribe, as it recently did Jonny Copp, Micah Dash, and Wade Johnson, three Colorado- based boys killed, probably by avalanche, in late-May/ early-June on China’s Mount Edgar. As I write this, their absence around Boulder is solidifying into of kindness, intelligence, and dedication — made the world a better place, which, really, is all we can hope for in our fellow human beings. And despite any divisions that might, at least on paper, exist between groups of climbers — alpinists, sportos, tradsters, boulderers — when any climber passes on, it makes even more clear the pettiness of those divisions. We share a common bond, as climbers and as people.

Such tragedy also underscores climbing’s serious nature. Even bouldering on plastic comes with no safety guarantee, as Rustam Gelmanov discovered at the IFSC Bouldering World Cup in Vail this June. In the finals, he escaped a wild 15-foot header into the mats with a tweaked back…but it could have been worse. My point: be careful, and respect the 9.8 meters per second squared — it adds up quick. This issue, then, is dedicated to every climber who works (or has worked) to make the world a better place by setting an example and living with integrity and passion. Jonny, Micah, and Wade were that sort. Their loss is a loss for us all.

—Justin Roth

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