In the spring of 1968 San Francisco film maker, Fred Padula, drove into the Yosemite Valley and gazed up at El Capitan. He had been approached by one of his film students, Glen Denny, a talented climber and photographer, to advise on making a film…

When it was released in 1998, Hard Grit gave us an insight into something we didn’t often see – the actual ascents of the hardest, most dangerous lines on grit. In an era before everyone had a smartphone, before digital photography was even…

When you look at the books on a shelf of mountaineering literature one thing is quickly apparent: the vast majority are written by men. The same is true with the episodes I’ve produced for Factor Two. The simple fact is that there have historically…

It’s hard to be truly disconnected these days. Even in the weirdness of isolation over the past few months many of us have been working from home, constantly bothered by the connections around us. Sometimes it’s just a little too much. I’ve…

“I climb better when I’m scared.” I’ve heard this quite a few times. I even thought it was true about myself for a while in my earlier climbing career, but it surely can’t be true? After speaking with Hazel Findlay about maintaining the bubble of a…

Flow is a concept that can divide in climbing. For Dave Thomas it was the joyous experience that removed him from other problems in life. For Mina Leslie-Wujastyk it was a performance tool. Mina told me that a lot of her understanding of flow had come…