Vertical Life Magazine

I remember the first time I felt a heel hook. Not the first time I ungainly draped my hoof on a hold, still taking all my weight on my arms. I mean the first time I placed the heel and turned the toes out and down to engage my mighty buttocks and hamstring. It was a revelation. It was like the first time that I put on seeing spectacles after fighting against the tide of blindness for years and realised that trees were not watercolour smudges but were instead fractured and you could make out..." go to full review

So there you have it, Black Diamond’s Mondo Crash Pad. You can call it The Motherload if you like, for in the world of highball bouldering pads this thing is made out of pure muscle. Just don’t call it a ‘fat bastard’.go to full review

If you are looking for one harness that does it all, this is the one for you. Light enough for sport climbing, supportive enough for big walls, with plenty of options for racking gear to satisfy even the biggest gear freak.go to full review

The harness is aimed at the sport climbing market and it performs quite well for that. It looks great, it enhances, it shaves off a spoonful of breakfast in weight and it won’t rub you up the wrong way. It performs reasonably as a trad harness – there is enough room on the gear loops to fit a rack, though you might have trouble getting your belay device off the back loops. I give it three-and-half out of five “Fuseframe Technologies”.go to full review

By a curious coincidence, the weekend I tested this harness, I led my hardest route, which was five grades (truly, five) harder than my previous toughest lead. We are still investigating this phenomenon, and in the meantime I am eluding the editors’ attempts to confiscate the harness – their hopes being to enhance their own rock powers with what, it turns out, may be one of the best sport-climbing harnesses out there.go to full review

For the past couple of months Vertical Life has been out and about using Black Diamond’s shiny new RockLock Magnetron locking ‘biner (the only one in the country no less). The Magnetron is BD’s purported paradigm-busting piece of kit that does away with screw and twist-locking mechanisms in favour of magnets as a way of securing the gate of the ‘biner shut. It’s touted as removing the need to make things complicated to make them secure.

Wherever we have pulled the Magnetron out, be it..." go to full review

To look at, this isn’t the prettiest harness in the world. While the belay loop and front gear loops provide a splash of fluoro-green pizzazz, the waist and leg loops are a dark grey that is unlikely to clash with most outfits, but doesn’t really shout ‘look at me!’ either. Aethetics aside, the Summit might just be the most feature-packed harness that this author has ever slipped up his inner thigh… If you consider yourself a ‘technicolour’ rock-god and your current workhorse needs to be..." go to full review

The big difference between the Sirocco and all other climbing helmets on the market is what it’s made from: expanded polypropylene. The advantage expanded polypropylene has over expanded polystyrene is that it is far more flexible and it won’t crack when bent, crushed or bashed. In fact, the expanded polypropylene is so tough you can basically smash the helmet against the rock – which I have done as a demo at the crag – without worrying about it cracking. Whereas an expanded-polystyrene..." go to full review

These CAMP hexes are functioning fine and predictably, they are after all hexes, their dyneema slings colour-coded to the heads form quite the rainbow together and the colour makes the sizes easy to identify; they seem light as feathers; the Carvex heads are curved for maximum hex-to-rock contact, ensuring better placements. I love the distinct muted clang of them and I do still love placing them but ethereally floating beyond all that they are proving to be wonderful talismans.go to full review

The first thing I noticed about the Anniversary Rope – as I spent half an hour untangling it – is that it has a really nice ‘hand’, that term climbers use for the feel of a rope. This initial feeling proved to be accurate. Many ropes, particularly the first couple of times you use them, can often get annoyingly kinky, but the Anniversary Rope has run smoothly from the beginning, only really giving me problems when I have lowered climbers off badly set up anchors (like the clip-and-goes on..." go to full review