Ever Wonder How Many Climbs You Have Left?
The last time our budgerigar, Buggie, sat on my finger, I was passing her to the friend who’d volunteered to pet-sit while my wife, children, and I went to see family in New Mexico. Buggie was a slight creature, barely an ounce, baby blue with black-and-white wings and electric-blue slashes on her cheeks. We’d brought her home six months earlier, in February 2023, my wife tucking Buggie into her shirt as we drove so that she felt warm and safe. As I took Buggie out of her cage at my friend Will’s apartment, I could feel the dry curl of her talons on my index finger. She flew to Will and landed on his shoulder, giving a happy cheep.
“Wow, cool bird!” Will said. “She just flies right onto you.”
“Yeah, the only way to get her off is to walk into the bathroom,” I said. “Then she’ll hop off and stare at herself in the mirror—she’s either a narcissist or she thinks her reflection is another bird.”
After our family vacation, we planned to get another bird to keep Buggie company, since too much “mirror time”—hours of watching her cruel doppelganger mimic her every action, without ever chirping back—made her manic, a wild sheen glazing her black bird eyes.
We’d worked hard to tame Buggie. First we’d put her in our shirts, to be close to our skin and get used to our smells; then we habituated her to our hands inside in her cage, even as she squawked at us or shuffled away; then, slowly, we trained her to stay on our fingers, first in her cage, then out, each time moving farther into the room until we could walk around the house with her perched comfortably on our heads or shoulders. Though she was theoretically my middle child’s bird, we all loved Buggie, and she and I formed a particular bond for a few weeks over the summer while the rest of the family was away.
I’ve been reviewing rock shoes since 2002, when I first took a job as associate editor at Climbing Magazine. Before that, I was semi-sponsored by the Italian shoemaker La Sportiva: a few free pairs a year, with Sportiva picking up the tab for resoles. Before that, I bought my own shoes. And before that, when I was 15 and first began climbing, I wore hand-me-downs.
I started climbing in Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars, a holdover from my early-teen skateboarding days on Albuquerque’s hot asphalt gridwork. I’d lace the Chucks tight until the canvas uppers cinched over the tongue, and then smear the floppy rubber toe on the rock until it caught on a foothold. My first rock shoes were Firé Cats, a blown-out pair of hand-me-down hightops (all climbing shoes in the mid-1980s were hightops) with the unmistakable swirly red-and-black label. The Firés were two sizes too big, so I wore wool socks. Later, my high-school climbing buddies and I gravitated toward the blue-and-yellow Scarpa hightops and the purple-and-yellow La Sportiva Mariachers, sizing them tightly so we could floss our toes into the tiny pockets at Cochiti Mesa, a historic welded-tuff sport-climbing area in the Jemez Mountains that a wildfire later burned to unclimbable choss. The shoes were so confining that our pressure-numb feet would randomly slip, shock-loading our fingers in the pockets, sometimes injuring our tendons. We just thought this was what rock climbing was.
As of this writing, I have 37 pairs of rock shoes, most of which came to me by way of testing. Thirty of the pairs are in three hanging shoe organizers in my gear closet; another pair sits on the shelf above next to the ropes; the few pairs I’m currently testing live in my crag and gym packs; another two pairs are stashed behind the frame of the Grasshopper Wall/ MoonBoard in my garage; and one old pair—La Sportiva Super Xs, a Velcro precursor to the Katana—lives deep in a Tupperware bin. Though they’re white with residual sweat and bent upward like clown shoes, their leather sere and crinkly, I’ve kept the Super Xs because they have sentimental value: In 2000, I used them to climb Primate, a 5.13 X in the Flatirons that I led only after toproping it twelve times without falling and which—with my consent—is now a popular bolted sport climb.
The oldest shoes in my actual climbing rotation date back to 2007: the original Scarpa Booster, beige and brown and curled like a pterodactyl claw, one of the best grabbing shoes ever made. The newest shoes are from 2025: a pair of the Ocun Diamond S bouldering slippers, red and black and with a futuristic-looking asymmetrical toe box. The many rock shoes come in tans and yellows and oranges and blues, blacks and reds and whites and turquoises. Some of the shoes slip on, some close with Velcro, and some lace up. Some have a swooping downturn and a hooked toe for overhanging rock, some are slightly down-cambered for thin, technical terrain, some are board-lasted for ameliorating calf fatigue on long traditional leads, and some are soft and squishy and curled asymmetrically like bananas for board training or running along volumes. At one point, before I started selling old shoes or giving them away, I had something like 70 pairs: bins and bins in various closets, so many that I’d get analysis paralysis trying to figure out which pair to climb in.
I’m 53 years old and I have been climbing for almost 38 years. My footwork is passable, but I climb four days a week, so I wear out a sole every three months. Most modern rock shoes can take about three resoles before the midsole turns to mush or the last goes slack or the upper has too many abrasion holes or they just smell criminally awful. So 37 pairs x 4 soles each (the original plus three resoles) = 148 fresh soles. That means I currently have in my possession some 444 months, or 37 years, worth of climbing shoes.
If I’m still alive in 37 years, I’ll be 90, 15 years past the average male life expectancy in America. Will I need a radically downturned shoe for grabbing on steeps when I’m 90? Not likely. With age, our tendons, muscles, and ligaments slowly slacken, so by then I’ll probably lean toward something roomy and comfortable to accommodate my fallen arches and flattening feet.
If we do the same math with the 70 pairs of shoes I owned a decade or so ago, you get 70 years of climbing, which means that I’d have been 110 by the time I burned through all those soles. Have you ever seen a centenarian out climbing or doing much more than sitting dazed in a chair and wondering why they’re being wished a happy birthday by Al Roker on the Today show?
Yeah, me neither. Nobody needs 70 pairs of rock shoes.
The weekend before I wrote the first draft of this story, I went with my friend Dave to a new route he’d bolted on the Matron in the Flatirons, a long, isolated sandstone peninsula rising like a tilted sidewalk into the sky. Years ago, on a clear, crisp autumn day, I’d free-soloed the Matron’s easiest route, a 5.6 up a steep crack low on the north face that accesses the sinuous east ridge. Being young, cocky, and perpetually in a hurry, I’d done no research and didn’t have a rope. I figured that, as with the other Flatirons, you could just downclimb off the back—the west side, where they abut the slope of the Boulder Mountains
Midway down the Matron’s slabby, angular west facet, I realized my error. I’d already brachiated off the summit through a rotten overhang covered in lichen, 150 feet above the talus. Now, 80 feet off the ground, I clung to a knife edge forming the left margin of the glassy slab, trying to find a good foothold to step down onto. I was, I’d later learn, either on or near the 5.8 West Face, a climb much more difficult than the one I’d come up, the rock littered with random chopped bolts—relics from one of Boulder’s earliest bolt wars.
I started and stuttered and dithered and sputtered down then up again for so long that my fingers glistened with sweat and my calves cramped. I could see that if I just reversed this one move, the route got easier below, but I couldn’t make myself do it. My terror mounted, rising in hot coils from my gut, legs trembling and sweat stinging my eyes. Nobody even knows I’m here, I remember thinking. And: How long till they find my body? And: Can you die of fear?
The only way out was back up.
I couldn’t tell you which rock shoes I was wearing that day—probably a comfy pair, blown-out, delaminating, and favored for Flatirons moderates but not ideal for downclimbing sandbagged old 5.8 slabs But I do remember that, having reversed my way back up to the summit in a half-panicked frenzy, I took those shoes off, looking out over Boulder’s red-and-yellow arboreal patchwork, letting my feet breathe. Would my shoes have stayed on if I’d fallen? I mused. Or would the impact into the talus have blown them right off my feet—“evidence” collected by mountain rescue when they found my body and bagged the shoes separately?
I don’t free-solo as much now that I’m older and have a family. And I’ve learned to let go of the things of youth—strongly held viewpoints, old resentments, grand plans, and, of course, rock shoes. Will I ever free El Capitan? No, probably not; I’m anxious by nature and have trouble regulating a nervous system that remains sensitized by iatrogenic damage, so I don’t move well high off the ground. So those all-day, high-end trad shoes in the closet can go. I’ll give them to a friend or sell them. Will I ever compete in the World Cup—or, more accurately, do I even like new-school comp-style problems? The answers are “Fuck no” and “Hell fucking no,” so those super-flexible indoor-bouldering shoes can go. And how about those celebrated edging shoes gathering dust in the lowest cubby of the shoe organizer? I love granite face climbing, but I need to feel the holds or I overgrip. My climbing partners rave about them and still routinely scour the web for original-model pairs, but I don’t need those edging beasts in my arsenal.
At age 53, I don’t have time to do all the climbs I once dreamed of doing or visit all the areas I once dreamed of visiting. But I’m OK with that. I won’t have time to wear all the shoes on all the climbs; my aging body and the reality of providing for a family have seen to that. I just want to do the routes that bring the right balance of challenge and pleasure in the time that remains.
That day on the Matron with Dave, I took a massive fall. I’d been shaky all morning, from poor sleep and summer-heat anxiety. Dave’s route, as befits his intellectually somber outlook (he’s a physicist), is called Memento Mori—Latin for “Remember that you must die.” The route has a certain presence, climbing an arching arête to an exposed headwall. I’d climbed through the crux from the ground for the first time, matching my left foot just below my hand on a pinch on the arête, rocking over, and yarding up an armload of slack to clip the sixth bolt. Then my foot popped. I fell 25 feet, down to the second bolt, windmilling my arms and howling.
“Whoa, dude, what the fuck?!” Dave said, laughing in the way we climbers do after a big, unexpected whipper.
“My…foot…popped,” I gasped. “I sorta knew I shouldn’t have pulled up rope.” Fortunately, I’d stepped under the rope while hand-foot matching; had I miscalculated, the rope could have flipped me upside-down into the knife-blade arête.
These days, it’s rare that I make errors like this, but they can happen to any of us: a hold breaks or a foot slips or you simply miscalculate how fatigued you are as you start into a runout. I was off my game that day because I hadn’t slept well in two nights, the first night because it was so hot down in our Albuquerque Airbnb, and the second night, back home in Boulder, because I was consumed with grief.
Yes, grief.
- Watch the author testing shoes on a 5.14 project in the Flatirons:
While I was tossing and turning in our Albuquerque Airbnb, Buggie had died in her cage 400 miles away, only eight months old, this beautiful, loving little creature. The very day we came back, we were going to pick up a parakeet friend for Buggie. A woman was giving one away on Nextdoor. But now there was no need, and the irony and the loss were soul crushing. My daughter, only two years old, covered her eyes and buried her head in her car seat as my wife delivered the news while we drove to the Albuquerque airport.
Will told me that Buggie had been eating, chirping, sitting on his shoulder, pooping, doing all her Buggie things that night before he went to bed. But then, when he’d woken up, she was dead in the bottom of the cage. That’s what happens when birds die—they fall.
“Well, there was one thing,” he told me. “Right after I went to bed, Cody”—our dog, who Will was also pet-sitting—“woke up right next to me. So maybe he heard a noise.”
As we sat at our gate in the Albuquerque Sunport, the kids chattering and munching on apples and plums, all giddy with travel energy, I Googled the causes of sudden parakeet death. The birds are susceptible to airborne toxins, things like paint fumes, cleaning products, and the coating on nonstick pans. But none of that was the case here. Budgies can also choke on birdseed, which could have happened. Or there is a phenomenon called “night fright,” in which a noise startles a sleeping bird, who then panics and flies into the walls of their cage, sustaining a fatal injury—which is only one or two shades away from dying of fear. This seemed mostly likely. Whatever noise had woken Cody—a car door slamming, an engine backfiring, some simpleton’s late-summer fireworks—had also startled Buggie. And that was that.
I’d brought two pairs of Mad Rock shoes with me to New Mexico to test, using them in the climbing gym on a sweaty afternoon. I still have the shoes at home, looking almost new with their sparkling-white uppers. But we no longer have Buggie, and the grief—at least for me—has been a shock. Overwhelming. Tangible. How many more flights around the house was Buggie looking forward to, how many more moments perched on our shoulders, cheeping brightly in our ears? How many more pecks of birdseed or attacks on her cuttlebone? How much more time, in her bird way of thinking, did Buggie think she had? I ponder all this as I look at the rock shoes in my gear closet and think about the time I have left, the climbs I want to do versus those I will do, the shoes I’ll wear while trying them.
I have a new pair of bright-turquoise Tenaya Indalos on the closet’s top shelf, my second pair of a model that I reviewed in 2023 and have fallen in love with. They have just the right amount of feedback, and the perfect amount of toe-box heft to lock in on tiny holds. Chris Sharma and Alex Megos used them to climb Sleeping Lion, a stunning 5.15b in Siurana, Spain, that I will never try. I need to break this pair in and get them into rotation, but right now I’m testing other shoes. There’s only so much time—to break in shoes, to climb, to live, to love, to do the things that make a life. How much time we get is unknown, right up until the moment when, suddenly, it is. At which point it’s too late to count the time that remains, whether we do so in hours, minutes, wingbeats, or climbing shoes.
Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of the Climbing Dictionary and the memoir Death Grip.
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