Matt Segal made climbing history with his first free ascent of Iron Monkey, Eldo’s hardest traditional route to date. Lately, Matt’s been climbing up a storm, bringing fresh ambition to the trad world, plus a little attitude. We met up for a morning interview at the Trident, Boulder’s favorite Buddhist-owned cafe/office. The next day he sent his project up at Independence Pass near Aspen. What’s next? Only at P&C, this Miami compkid turned stonemonkey tradster comes clean about ethics, the Czech and his love life.

Yesterday I went to the Gunks to climb. In a fit of gumby rage I decided to make a fool of myself.
We climbed a route called something wick I’m not really sure. It doesn’t even really matter I suppose.
It is rated 5.7G. For those of you that don’t know anything about climbing or climbing grades that means it’s easy, has big holds and an abundance of available crack placements. I thought that this would be a wonderful warm up. To some degree I was right. It was a great warm …

It seems that we always hear about the same big names of climbing sending V-impossible or 5.-ridiculous, and although that is very newsworthy it is also nice to hear about the local scene. In this crazy front range land hardmen and women seem to be abundant. The sport climbing and bouldering scene broods with sexy bodies climbing all kinds of hard bolt-clipping lines from Shelf Road to Boulder Canyon to Rifle. 

However, there are those few out there that seek hard traditional lines as well. One of these …