I Didn't Enjoy Scrambling (Easy Rock Climbing) Until I Started Using These Types of Shoes
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Rock climbers will sometimes talk about “insecure climbing.” That insecurity can come from a number of potential factors. It could come from the rock quality, itself; crumbly rock makes for unreliable holds. It could come from lack of good hand holds; we have a harder time centering our weight over our feet when we can’t pull into the face. It could come from bad foot holds; our big, weight-bearing muscles don’t fatigue under our weight the way our hands and arms do, so having good foot holds is a key to saying on a route for a long time.
Of the times I have heard climbers talk about “insecurity,” by far the most frequent cause has been lack of good foot holds. We tend to avoid routes on bad rock, and we tend to get good enough to overcome marginal hand holds. But no one can train their way past not being able to reliably push up from their feet and legs.
Think about walking across a sheet of ice, that shuffling step we make in order to keep our feet under our weight and reduce the likelihood of taking a fall.
No imagine feeling like that on something that is closer to vertical.
That wouldn’t be a fun route to climb, would it?
Now, instead of a climbing route, that goes for thirty to fifty meters, imagine it is a long ridge working its way up to the summit of a mountain. It’s maybe two kilometers long. Not every step is going to be exposed to a fall that would send you all the way down to the basin, below, but plenty of them are, maybe half of them. So, you are up there for an hour or more. Take that “walking across a sheet of ice” and add that feeling to this hour-long ridge scramble.
Does that sound like a good time?
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far from how I felt when I did my first ridge scramble in my hiking shoes that just didn’t have the grip to stick to the rock. Every airy step felt like a potential disaster. By the time I made the summit (oh, and headed back down over the same terrain), I was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
The next day, I bought my first approach shoes.
The video goes into why the design, material choices, and features that are common across most approach shoes make scrambling over rock feel so much more secure and, therefore, so much more enjoyable. And at the end of the video, I go just a little bit deeper into why I keep a stable of a few different approach shoes, which you can find by following the links, here:
The TX Guide - very stiff platform and stiff in the toe for excellent edging; with La Sportiva’s stickiest approach shoe rubber (there are climbing shoe rubbers that are more sticky).
The TX2 EVO - very soft shoe good for smearing and climbing slab; stickiest approach shoe rubber; very light for easy carrying while climbing but not exceptionally cushioned.
The Boulder X - the Clydesdale of the group, same stickiest rubber but a more heavy and burly shoe for supporting heavier packs.