In 1980 my college roommate, Mark Herndon, fell 100 feet on a two-pitch route. I was belaying from a stance at the end of the first pitch, cooling my feet, shoes off. Mark had just cruised the second-pitch crux, a near-holdless paddle up granite glass, and was nearing the end of a 50-foot runout above the route’s only lead bolt when he slipped.

Sammy and I hunkered into the shade beneath the Weeping Wall, Suicide Rock, panting between pulls on a gallon jug of water. The sun had just crawled over Tahquitz Rock, a mile across the Sunshine Valley, and heat waves welled off the Suicide slabs. No big.

Remote, unknown and protected by a scarcity of information, Maine's Mount Katahdin, with 4,000 feet of elevation gain, arctic weather and big, bold alpine and rock routes, may be the Northeast's best-kept secret.

Francesca Metcalf sits on her bedroom floor for over an hour, fixated, clicking and forming the top layer of a Rubik’s Cube. A few days later she wakes up and finds the Rubik’s Cube in her bed. “It’s a little sad,” the Boston-area climber, who turned 18 in March, says, “how much time I’ve put into it.”

The scorched desert expanse surrounding Las Vegas smears together into one terrible brown color as Chris Sharma, Dalia Ojeda, Miguel and I whiz along at 90 miles per hour in an old Jeep Grand Cherokee. The American West, this celebrated frontier, as tame as it has become with commercialism and super highways, is still the last good place I know of for real adventure.

This season, Black Diamond has introduced swami belts with compression-molded foam to their new harnesses.The design provides incredible support and comfort from the sacrum to the lower lumbar.