Celebrate climbing and our community at these 15 events, starting in June and running through November.
The post 15 Climbing Festivals You Need to Attend This Year appeared first on Climbing.
Climbing has always been a community sport, a shared passion that transcends the vibes of a mere hobby or sporting event. We play on the same walls and rocks, fight with the same gravity (9.8 meters per second squared), battle the same doubt and fear, and—let’s face it—share a lifestyle that’s very much built on putting nearly all our free time and resources into getting vertical.
This is also what makes climbing festivals so great: we come together with no need to explain ourselves and our motivations, but instead to—in our own, unique climber way—celebrate and improve the sport, the rocks, our skill sets, and our community. Here are 15 must-attend climbing festivals/events/opportunities for 2024, starting in June and running through November.
This Denver-based group has a robust schedule of regular, well-attended events for self-identified climbers of color in and around the Denver Metro and Front Range area, including ice-climbing clinics, rock-climbing clinics, gym meetups, and speaking events. Founded in 2019 as the Melanin Climbers of Colorado, Cruxing in Color has also been able to offer its members perks like free or reduced-cost day passes to gyms, as well as gear giveaways.
This national nonprofit, founded in 2016 and which co-created the wildly popular Color the Crag festival—last held in 2019, at Horse Pens 40—with the affinity group Brothers of Climbing, holds regular meetups, intro-to-climbing classes, speaker series, discussions centered on race in climbing and the outdoors, and so on. Stay tuned to their events page for upcoming opportunities in 2024.
Led by Jordan Cannon, this three-day event offers clinics and community climb time around Donner Summit, near Truckee, California, at a variety of crags and trailheads. Free camping is available, or participants can book a subsidized night at the Truckee Hotel. “I’m just looking to bring together more queer climbers in a fun, laid-back way,” says Cannon. The event will be MC’d by Pattie Gonia and also feature film screenings, live music, presentations, and more.
This unique event will take place in Civic Center Park, Denver, Colorado, and will feature music, films, keynote speakers, and a climbing competition. On June 1, watch eight pro climbers, including Daniel Woods, Kai Lightner, and Nina Williams, set and compete on their own boulders. On the following day, you can try out the boulders yourself.
This venerable event began in 1994, co-created by the late legend Todd Skinner and other Lander, Wyoming, locals and semi-facetiously branded “international” because a friend from Germany was visiting that first year. The event is based out of Lander’s City Park, on local boulders, and up on the white dolomite cliffs of Wild Iris, a pocket-pulling, pure-Wyoming paradise with mini-classics from 5.10 to 5.14. The Central Wyoming Climbers’ Alliance, soon to rebrand as WyoClimbers, uses money raised at the event to fund local rebolting and stewardship, regional youth-climbing programs, recreation advocacy, etc. It’s a massive midsummer party, replete with clinics, a dyno comp, pullup contests, night bouldering, and the Limestone Rodeo redpoint competition up at the Iris.
Self-billed as the “world’s largest queer-friendly climbing convention” (though you need not be queer to attend), Homo Climbastic is held each year at the New River Gorge, West Virginia, the Nuttall-sandstone mega-destination known for its perfect rock and technical face and crack climbing. The event also includes rafting on the area’s local rivers, but be aware that there is a baseline requirement of at least six to 12 months experience lead belaying, lead climbing, and cleaning anchors, unless you’re chaperoned by a more experienced climber.
This weekend-long climber party first began in the 1990s in Rifle Mountain Park, Colorado’s premier destination sport-climbing area, as a way both to bring the community together and to tackle stewardship projects like rebolting, installing and maintaining permadraws, building bridges across the creek to the crags, brushing off heavily chalked routes, and shoring up and cleaning up staging areas and trails. August is a great time of year in the canyon, with cool morning temps on the overhanging limestone, so come out, climb, help with the cause, and raise funds for the Rifle Climbers Coalition to continue their ongoing work in the park.
This is one of the American Alpine Club’s (AAC’s) six Craggin’ Classic events to be held in 2024; it’s a series that annually attracts 3,500 climbers, partnering up with local climbing organizations (LCOs) and outdoor-industry brands to host festivals that combine pro climber– and guide-instructed clinics, stewardship projects, delicious local food and beverages, dances and parties, and stacks and stacks of climbing. Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, might have diminutive cliffs and boulders, but its quartzite is steeped in climbing history, going back to the legendary Stettner Brothers in the 1920s, on up through the bouldering pioneer John Gill in the late ‘50s, and then, in the ‘70s, Pete Cleveland, who established one of America’s earliest 5.13s, Phlogiston, on its bullet-hard rock. This Craggin’ Classic gets climbers out on the Midwest mecca’s cracks, thin-face climbs, and boulders, with plenty of communal topropes hanging in true Devil’s Lake fashion.
The High Uintas are a great place to beat the Utah summer heat down in the valleys below, which is why the Salt Lake Climbers Alliance holds its annual festival/campout up here, staging the event for ten years running. Based out of the YMCA’s Camp Roger, the festival takes place on the mountain range’s friendly, featured quartzite crags and boulders, with an emphasis on instruction, skills clinics, and climbing, with fun extras like yoga, a scavenger hunt, a trail run, live music, and a culminating dance party you’d best save some mojo for!
New England’s premier sport-climbing destination, with hundreds of boulder problems and sport classics on the variable-angled schist from 5.3 to 5.15a, plays host to yet another AAC Craggin’ Classic. This one teams up with the Rumney Climbers Association on a stewardship project, in additional to the usual Craggin’ Classic offerings, including clinics with guides and pros targeted to a wide range of climbers, from beginners to veterans looking to up their game with advanced skills like onsighting and fancy footwork.
A mashup/outgrowth of the New River Gorge Rendezvous, which ran for ten years and served as the annual fundraiser for the New River Alliance of Climbers (NRAC), this Craggin’ Classic builds off the inclusive and celebratory spirit of the original event to bring all lovers of the New together. In addition to the usual clinics, workshops, and Vendor Village, the event also has a stewardship meetup hosted by Climb United x Queer Climbing Ohio, and a dance party in the area’s dense, serene deciduous forest. Just bring a good tent and bomber raingear—the New can be damp, any time of year!
Get your fill of steep, forearm- and finger-crushing Southern bouldering with this institutionn, which has since 2003 combined three comps across three outdoor venues—Hound Ears, North Carolina (October 5); Stone Fort, Tennessee (October 19); and Horse Pens 40, Alabama (November 23)—into one mega-competition to raise funds for the Southeastern Climbers’ Coalition and the Carolina Climbers Coalition. (The event takes its name from the first Hound Ears comp, in 1994, when any climber who completed a “triple crown” of the Pocket Problem, Court and Spark, and Parley vu Parkway on the Pocket Wall got a bonus 50 points.) Competitors across all the categories (beginner–open) strive for their highest score, tallying their 10 hardest problems; strategy comes into play, as you figure out the best way to tick those 10 problems without getting totally crushed.
While the specific dates have yet to be announced, it’s certain that this festival/massive climber party will be held in October or it’s simply not a real “rock-toberfest,” highlighting the month when climbing conditions are ideal at the Red River Gorge, Kentucky. The Red is America’s best sport destination, with monster classics from 5.9 to 5.14+ on grippy Corbin sandstone that feels sculpted by the gods. One of my wildest memories from the Red is sharing moonshine around the campfire with an Appalachian good ol’ boy, in true Kentucky fashion, at Torrent Falls during an early Rocktoberfest. The Red River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition does an exemplary job of crag stewardship, having bought and continuing to maintain nearly all the area’s crags; this event supports the cause.
This hugely popular AAC Craggin’ Classic sells out quickly, not surprising given Colorado’s warm, mild weather and Shelf Road’s hundreds of fun, technical crimp and pocket climbs on tan-and-orange limestone, and proximity to the populous Front Range. One of America’s first true sport-climbing destinations, beginning in the mid-1980s, Shelf might also be familiar to connoisseurs of old Westerns, who will recognize it as a backdrop in films like the 1969 John Wayne classic True Grit. The high-desert scenery here remains as pristine as ever, and this event is a blast.
Bishop, California, has so much good climbing—from the boulders of the Buttermilks and Tablelands, to the volcanic cragging of the Owens River Gorge, to the high-country granite—that it’s a no-brainer as a festival venue. The Bishop event originally began as a way for climbers to gather and do stewardship work at the Buttermilks, but has since grown into a massive, multifaceted, über-popular event with clinics, parties, workshops, walking tours, yoga, etc., as well as a performance by the AkaMya Culture Group, who each year gives an educational presentation on and a Native American dance to celebrate Payahuunadü, “Land of the Flowing Water,” the original, Paiute name for the Owens Valley.
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