Gear innovation reflections from the Smith Rock Climbing Festival
This past weekend, I joined a speaker panel at the Smith Rock Climbing Festival alongside legends like Alan Watts, Jeff Thompson, and Chris Kalous. Amid our discussion, Chris asked the three of us to identify the most significant gear innovation introduced during our climbing careers.
Having started climbing in 2013, I was sitting next to pioneers who’s decades’ defined major industry milestones: modern sit harnesses, dynamic ropes, and assisted-braking belay devices like the Petzl Grigri. Today, hardware development has largely shifted toward incremental gains in "ultralight" weight savings or refined user interfaces rather than revolutionary design leaps.
My answer was the Mussy hook (and its open-hook cragging anchor relatives). As a self-proclaimed gadget geek, pointing to a heavy-duty industrial hook as a major innovation felt slightly ironic. Yet, my off-the-cuff answer might represent one of the more impactful shifts in climbing systems over the last decade.
One Innovation Metric: Time on Rock
The Mussy hook is a humble design. Yet open hardware crag anchors solved one of the most dangerous bottlenecks at sport crags: the awkward dance of cleaning an anchor, untying, threading the chains, and retying (or setting up a rappel). It was an honorable zoom-out moment for the ASCA to realize that more accidents happen at the untying step than accidents from fixed anchors themselves failing. They’ve been the largest supplier of these open hook anchors to modernize crags.
But it wasn't just a safety leap, it was a serious efficiency gain. It greatly reduced route cleaning times at anchor stations, letting climbers with life commitments fit more pitches into the limited hours of a session. And, for the limited resources of classic routes to support a few more attempts each day, too.
The real breakthroughs in modern climbing aren’t always about reinventing the carabiner. Often, they come out of left field from a fundamental shift in system outlook.
Top Rope Soloing: The Ultimate Efficiency Multiplier
That exact premise is why I find myself obsessed with modern solo systems.
TRS often gets pigeonholed as a reclusive pursuit for partners who can’t find a belayer. But viewed through the lens of movement efficiency, it is one of the most powerful practice methods available outside of a climbing gym. There is simply so much more “uptime” - the amount of time actual climbing. I could keep my TRS session to about 90% time on rock, if my fitness allowed! A partnered session is 50% as a theoretical uptime maximum, but is often more like 30-40% of the crag time spent on route.
One of our favorite ways to get a ton of climbing mileage in, yet still socialize, is to go top rope soloing with friends at a top-access crag. We can each fix a rope, but then swap routes without having to re-rig. Everyone gets an absurd volume of climbing in a crag session.
A group TRS session during the Smith Rock Clinic
The golden rule, of course, is that crag etiquette always comes first. Hanging fixed lines across classic routes on a crowded Saturday is a quick way to burn community goodwill. We treat TRS lines with strict awareness: leave the ropes hanging only while in active use, maintain communication with everyone at the cliff, and Affect Minimal Parties.
