Danny Parker Says He’s Made the First ‘Real’ Crack Climbing Shoe

In late March, in Salt Lake City, in the same garage where he spent two years training for the hardest offwidth in the world, 34-year-old Danny Parker turns away from his work bench and holds up a hot pink shoe.

I’ve been here before. In fact, Parker and Ashley Cracroft’s garage is something between a tourist attraction and a refuge for crack climbers passing through the Utah capital. After Parker made the first repeat of Century Crack (5.14b) in 2018, his and Cracroft’s “Crack Fortress” became a pilgrimage site for many Century Crack hopefuls, including Japanese offwidth climber Fumiya Nakamura. For months before his send, Nakamura trained in and slept below the crack trainer,  just feet from where Parker now stands.

The garage still has the hum of raw potential. Behind me, fluorescent lights smear over a wall of posters autographed by British wide climbing duo Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker. Coiled ropes bloom from the eye-level rafters. Three calendars featuring Cracroft, who invited me to train here for six weeks last year, are pinned permanently to November, April, and December.

But gone are the stack of crashpads that sat near the front entrance in 2024. This year, they’ve been replaced by a workbench, a band saw, an industrial sewing machine, and other accessories to Parker’s latest obsession: shoemaking.

For the past six months, Parker has dedicated himself to building his dream shoe for crack climbing. Among studying YouTube tutorials, taking apart his friends’ old shoes, and talking with professional shoemakers, he’s been steadily churning out handmade iterations of what he brazenly calls the “first real crack shoe.” He claims it’s optimized for all crack sizes from fingers to offwidth. And he’s calling it the Pronk.

I have to ask Parker three times what a pronk is.

“It’s this move, like a prance, that a goat does when it’s trying to show off to a predator,” he says. “It’s just adorable. It’s these animals that are preyed upon, and they intentionally flaunt their strength…” He trails off, handing me the magenta shoe with a shrug. “I just love that it’s a fun word.”

Up close, Parker’s design looks like a high-top Moroccan slipper that stepped into a pool of black liquid, with only the laces staying dry. Free from textured adornments, such as an extra rand looping the heel, the shoe looks oddly unfinished and deflated.

But when I pinch the toe flat between my fingers, I immediately understand what makes the Pronk so valuable to Parker. It’s got the lowest-volume toe box that I’ve ever seen—clearly built to fit into the thinnest cracks.

Then I notice the offwidth details: the high rubber coverage along the top of the shoe, the ankle protection, and the boardlike stiffness along the sole. He’s even sewn the shoe with oversized eyelets and added hockey laces, the most durable laces for roof cracks.

Trying to climb a world-class trad route, even with perfect technique, often depends on matching the right shoe to one’s style—or even going barefoot. Hanging upside-down from offwidth roofs, for example, feels best on shoes with heavy padding and rigidity. But it’s the thin cracks where tiny size differences can be absolutely critical. There’s a reason why the world’s hardest finger cracks—like Magic Line (5.14c), Cobra Crack (5.14a), and Meltdown (5.14c)—are too thin to foot jam. Even the slightest bit of shoe that can fit inside constitutes a massive advantage.

“I’ve been pitching my shoe to whoever will listen for years,” says Parker. “I’ve pitched this to Black Diamond, I’ve pitched it to Butora, and I pitched to Evolv back in the day. Nobody, I feel, has actually made a crack shoe.”

Inspired by Mason Earle

In 2014, when Parker was 21 and had been climbing for just three years, he went over to his friend Mason Earle’s house and saw him taking his shoes out of the oven.

“He had this idea way before I did,” says Parker. Earle showed Parker how he was delaminating the glue from his shoes, taking them apart, and attempting to build his own shoe.

Earle’s goal, Parker recalls, was to try and bring back the 2011 Five Ten SuperMocc, the one shoe that Parker admits was “probably built for crack climbing.” The SuperMocc’s best quality was its lack of a midsole—the stiff, flat layer inside the shoe that gives it structure. Without a midsole, the SuperMocc could jam thinner cracks than its cousin, the Five Ten Moccasym. Over time, however, its superpower turned into its fatal flaw.

“The shoe was so soft and moldable that you could twist and twist and twist on your feet,” says Parker, “and the shoe would continue to go til you had no ankle support. The whole thing would blow out.” The SuperMocc, he says, discontinued so quickly that it never had an opportunity to win over the market. Earle’s plan, says Parker, was to recreate his own, high-top version of the SuperMocc with more structure.

Parker hadn’t ever tried to take apart his climbing shoes. But after watching Earle do it, he went home and promptly put his own Alturas in the oven. Soon this became a  regular practice. “I’d rip the soles off,” he recalls. Then he would shave down the shoe’s midsole.

Over the next few years, as Parker made his way through the climbing grades, he also perfected his Altura modifications. On his pinky toe side, he’d reduce the midsole so that the rubber could squish flat, which would let him fit into thinner splitters. But on the big toe side, he mostly left the midsole intact, keeping the edge rigid. He’d end up with an edging profile on the inside, a jamming profile on the outside, and the original, stiff heel. When he glued it all back together, he was ready for any type of crack.

By the end of 2018, Parker had sent his dream route, Century Crack, and was in the best shape of his life. Earle, however, was in a very different place. In May, he developed debilitating ME/CFS symptoms, and his climbing career came to a complete halt. Earle and his wife moved to Reno in July 2019. Before they left, Earle gave Parker his extra rubber and glue.

The Sponsor Steps In … and Out

One day, in summer 2024, Parker got a life-changing email. Butora wasn’t selling enough of the Alturas. They were going to completely redesign the shoe.

And they wanted Parker’s help.

“I had a lot to say,” he admits. After a decade of modifying the original Alturas, Parker knew exactly what he wanted from a crack shoe. “The market has just always made big wall shoes, and people try to adapt them for crack climbing,” he explains. “And big wall shoes have slowly become more and more geared toward sport climbing.”

The La Sportiva TC Pro, according to Parker, is the standard-bearer of this effect. He calls it a face-climbing shoe with ankle protection, with a “super soft heel, super soft shoe, a little bit of downturned aggression in the toe box, and not really a profile that would jam a crack except for like a number one crack.” A true crack shoe, he insists, would still have structural stiffness, but with a much flatter toe box that is actually designed to fit into narrow spaces.

“If you can get inside the crack, then you want [to make the shoe] essentially as stiff as you can,” he says. “If you’re not getting inside the crack, obviously you need something extra soft.”  So essentially, for finger cracks, you need a shoe with a flat, soft pinky toe side for tight jams, plus enough stiffness to hold your body weight. But if you extend the leather above the heel to add ankle protection, and wrap the front rubber up toward the instep, you’ve got a shoe that also performs in any style of offwidth.

He pitched Butora his ultimate crack shoe, but after weeks of discussions, they decided to go in a different direction.

“[Butora] ended up saying, ‘No, we’re making a TC Pro,’” says Parker. He’d known, by then, that it was a long shot to convince any brand to sharply diverge from the dominant trad shoe on the market. Butora confirmed that they invited Parker to help redesign the Altura and that ultimately, they decided to go more in the direction of the TC Pro.

The Power of ADHD

Two months later, in the wake of the Altura fiasco, Parker caught up with his friend Noah Kane, whom he’d met tree climbing in Costa Rica.

Both Cracroft and Parker, as well as Kane, loved the adventure element of tree climbing, even if it was often painful. “In tree climbing, there’s this ethic of, you do not wear shoes. You protect the trees,” says Parker. “[Noah and I] were talking about how to find the loophole … because what happens is, your feet get destroyed.”

Kane was preparing for another Costa Rica trip in the fall. “You know what?” Parker said. “I’m going to build you some foot jammies out of leather.”

Parker had plenty of extra suede from a previous side project: making his own crack gloves so he could avoid buying new ones. With his leftover pink suede, he stenciled out toe covers with two slots each: one big toe slot and one slot for all the other toes. “It was essentially a leather version of exactly how I would tape my toes in hard cracks,” says Parker. Just before he gave away the foot jammies to Kane, Parker tried them on and climbed some of the thin cracks in his garage.

That’s when something clicked. “It worked,” he says. In his wooden cracks, the foot jammies felt even better than taped toes. So he set out to “rubberize” them.

Parker pulled out Earle’s old shoemaking materials and got to work. Drawing on his experience with taking apart his Alturas, he slowly recreated the design elements of a high-top. It took him more than a week, but by the end, he was staring at his first handmade climbing shoe: a bright pink, heavily protected monstrosity, with two horrifying lobster claws for toe boxes.

“It was absolute dog shit,” says Parker, deadpan. “Awful. You could not make a worse shoe. So then I built another, ‘cause I was kind of annoyed at how poor it came out.”

For his second attempt, he axed the lobster claw, going back to a traditional slipper shape. Parker didn’t have any shoe molds, or lasts, so he just sewed his pieces together in the air. After another week of work, the front of the shoe came out looking like a duck bill. “It was just flat and terrible,” he says.

But it turned out to be pretty good at jamming. Parker was satisfied with how the second version of the Pronk, compared to his leather toe cutouts, performed in the finger cracks around his garage. He felt that the rubber was way too soft, so he sought out rubber experts at The Gear Room in Salt Lake City.

“I kinda did the ADHD thing where I failed and failed and then I just hyperfocused,” he says. “I just went down a rabbit hole, and people just started coming out of the woodwork to help me.”

The Gear Room resoler, Mark Evans, took Parker under his wing, teaching him basic cobbling techniques and handing him a spare, size-12 cowboy boot last, which he carved down into the shape of his own foot.

A few weeks later, one of Parker’s friends, Cody Mayo, a former Black Diamond employee who now makes dog products for Carhartt, brought him to the basement of Black Diamond’s headquarters. There, he introduced him to “the shoe guys.” Parker walked out of that basement with not only advice on his design, but also free rubber and leather samples. He also acquired a massive prize: a $3,000 industrial sewing machine that Cody sold him for just $100. “That changed my production from one shoe in a week to three shoes in a day,” he says.

After three months of sewing, cutting, and gluing, in late December 2024, Parker went to his local climbing gym, Momentum Sandy, to test out the Pronks.

He hopped on an old challenge: a steep, 5.12+ finger crack that fluctuated between .4s and .5s. Even with his modified Alturas, Parker hadn’t been able to stick his shoes inside the 15-degree overhang and get a solid enough foot jam to avoid campusing the route. “I’ve only successfully climbed it once before, with taped toes, back in 2016,” he says.

That day, on his very first lap with the Pronks, he sent.

Parker remembers being lowered in a daze. His growing doubts about his shoe’s potential were washed out in a heart-thumping sense of awe.

“It literally changed the grade of the route,” he says.

Show Me the Numbers

Watch this video to see Parker explain his shoe design:

Next to his workbench, Parker holds up a digital caliper and puts the toe end of a Butora Altura, size 9.5, between its teeth. The toe’s exact height measures 34.4mm. “This is just a normal shoe,” he says. “Obviously, that just doesn’t jam a crack.”

What Parker means is that it’s too big to jam any crack smaller than .75s. These are the camming ranges, in millimeters, for three Black Diamond Z4 cams, from smallest (fully cammed) to largest (fully open):

• Green .75 cam: 23.1-44.1mm
• Purple .5 cam: 18.8-33.9mm
• Silver .4 cam: 15.3-27.7mm

(To compare to other types of cams, see UK Climbing’s 2020 microcams sizing test.)

Parker’s favorite trad shoe, with a 34.4mm toe box, still fits well within the range of a green .75 Z4. But the shoe can’t jam a .5 crack.

Parker grabs a different Altura, one he’s modified. “What I would do is take this shoe, open it up, and cut the midsole out so that it would reduce the inside,” he explains, tracing his hand over the bottom of the sole. “Since 2014, this is what I’ve been climbing with. That would get you down to 30 millimeters or so.”

The toe box for the modified Altura is 29.1mm, right in the range of a .5 cam.

Finally, Parker picks up his own invention. “I tried to wrap the rubber around the edge of the toe instead of stacking it underneath, so there’s no stacking of rubber,” he says, pointing to the one-piece rand. “And I’m jamming .4s. I’m standing on my feet and getting purchase inside the crack.”

I’m almost skeptical, but when Parker measures the Pronk’s toe, it clocks in at the thinnest yet: 23.8mm, squarely within the range of a silver .4 Z4 cam. It’s 36% flatter than the normal Altura.

As a crack climber, watching these toe boxes get thinner is like witnessing a gravitational anomaly. It’s far from trivial. Even partially jamming a .4s crack, instead of having to edge or smear, is the difference between a sort-of rest position and a crux—between sending and not sending hundreds of classic routes. For climbers who already have smaller feet, the difference will likely be slimmer, as there’s already less material to remove. But the effect is still significant.

Can I Send 5.14 Cracks Yet?

A big question that may be on many climber’s minds is whether the Pronks are aid.

When I examined the Pronk, I expected to see an extra-hard piece of rubber sticking out its toe like a crampon front point—or some alien tool. Then Parker explained exactly what he was doing: reducing down the bulky layers between his bare toes and the crack. He was removing material, not adding it.

In 2015, before the onset of ME/CFS, Earle put up one of his best-known Moab testpieces: the 110-foot Stranger Than Fiction (5.14b). The route has since become a legendary testpiece for finger crack climbers. Part of its magnetic allure originates from the fact that Earle opted to tape his right toes instead of wearing a second shoe. When Lor Sabourin made the second ascent in 2023, they used the same one-shoe tactic.

Pete Whittaker was also projecting Stranger Than Fiction in 2023. However, instead of removing a full shoe, he had Parker modify his Unparallel Up Lace—a slipper similar to the Five Ten Moccasym—to enable it to jam better. “[Parker’s] modifications were removing part of the midsole and sanding down the thickness of the base of the shoe,” Whittaker told Climbing. To date, he’s the only person to send the route with two shoes.

Parker insists that the Pronk represents the most natural anatomy-focused shoe. “If people want to think it’s aid,” he says, “I think I would welcome that conversation.”

He believes that both his modifications and his original Pronk design fall in the middle ground between existing shoes and barefoot climbing. In particular, he predicts that “all the .5 cracks are going to have something coming for them.”

Let’s be clear: a thinner-toed shoe certainly won’t give someone the strength of a 5.13 or 5.14 climber. Even bare toes can’t squeeze into a tips layback—and for such climbs, especially on granite, edging shoes may be preferable.

Ultimately, the Pronk’s greatest impact, if it makes it to market, will likely be on finger crack climbers in the 5.11-5.12 range. Parker guesses that it could open up 30% more climbs by virtue of foot jamming ability alone. To a global corporation, that’s a very small segment of climbers. But to Parker, it’s the average climber in his sandstone-wrangling community.

At the moment, Parker is in talks with shoe manufacturers abroad—and, like many climbing shoe producers, is waiting for the recent U.S. tariffs to settle before he places any orders. In the meantime, he’ll be hard at work in the Crack Fortress, kicking out customs by hand.

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