February 9, 2025

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Inside the Bizarre and Creative World of Big-Wall Climber Robbie Phillips

With each feet and hands jammed into a three-inch-huge crack, Robbie Phillips hangs like a spider on the underside of a bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland. Graffiti tags a nearby concrete wall. A canal flows below him, its floor peppered with smudges of ice. The green, brown drinking water flows from the center of the funds.

To obvious the crack, Robbie had eliminated layers of garbage and polystyrene, jammed up in the cavity above him. “This is the best factor I’ve ever found,” he suggests, releasing a toothy smile and seeking above to his close friend and cameraman Culann O Brien.

In the YouTube vlog, Culann replies, “So, as a specialist climber who has long gone to a lot of mad places putting up 1st ascents, and we’re under a bridge, this is the best factor you’ve ever found?”

Scotland and the British isles have couple very long cracks, so this is a prize obtain for Robbie who requires the observe to completely ready for his future goals, including Magic Mushroom on El Capitan in Yosemite, California, and Everlasting Flame on Trango Tower, Pakistan. Magic Mushroom is a 2,900-foot five.fourteen route that the ‘first ascensionist’ Tommy Caldwell told Phillips was just one of his best. For more than a ten years, Phillips had dreamed about Everlasting Flame, having had a poster in his area due to the fact he was eighteen. The golden granite cracks on “one of the world’s toughest totally free climbs above twenty,000 feet,” says Alpinist, is so higher and cold that cracks freeze above with verglas and snow fills gullies and chimneys.

Robbie Phillips
Euan Ryan / Finalcrux Films

Expanding up in Edinburgh, “I hadn’t found just about anything I was that psyched on,” Phillips suggests, incorporating that he dabbled in rugby and performed video games. “When I found climbing, that was the factor that transformed almost everything. It just grabs keep of men and women, and that is it.”

At 15 yrs old he began competing indoors and by eighteen he picked up his 1st sponsor, Edelrid, who would make ropes, harnesses and helmets.

The sport grew to become so encompassing in his lifestyle that he dropped out of college just after six weeks, picking in its place to work as a mentor at a wall the place he properly trained the subsequent generation of Scotland’s best climbers. He also set his sights on climbing the worlds’ toughest very long rock climbs.

Six yrs ago, he picked up other sizeable sponsors like Patagonia and SCARPA. To finance his excursions, Phillips operates as a climbing mentor, lecturer, writer, and, most not too long ago, as a YouTube vlogger.

Robbie Phillips
Drew Smith / @_drew_smith_

“I take into account myself a ‘professional climber,’” he suggests even though miming quotation marks with his fingers. “I’m paid to do points in the climbing framework that enable me to go climbing.” On his channel, Robbie and Culann host weekly videos with matters including Can Robbie Climb his 10 Yr Challenge?, The World’s Longest Indoor Climbing Route? and One of Europe’s Hardest Multi-Pitch Rock Climbs.

To keep his expenditures down and totally free up his time for travel, Phillips life out of his Citroën Relay, a cargo van he’s transformed into a house and keeps in Edinburgh. Rather of hire or house loan, his profits goes toward repeating the toughest significant partitions in the planet and putting up 1st ascents of his have. This contains the Alpine Trilogy, three 250- to 450-meter routes rated five.14a in the Alps—a crowning accomplishment for the world’s best climbers.

Robbie Phillips
Drew Smith / @_drew_smith_

One particular noteworthy 1st ascent consists of Blood Moon, a seven hundred-meter line rated five.13c in Tsaranoro, Madagascar. Listed here in 2018, he and his crew did a new route and movie undertaking, but however, even though higher on the wall, Alan fell, ensuing in a compound fracture in his leg.

“A keep broke, and he fell. He flipped above my head and strike the slab below,” Phillips suggests. “When he strike the wall, his body just broke. It was very severe. He could have died. Out here there is no mountain rescue we had to get him down off the wall and get him to the medical center.”

When trying Magic Mushroom past autumn, a very long drop resulted in a sprained ankle, forcing Phillips to cease his vacation and recover. This month he’s in Joshua Tree, California, the place he’s trying Dihedron, just one of the toughest routes in the park. Following month he is returning to Yosemite to give another crack at Magic Mushroom. “I enjoy climbing on El Cap,” he suggests.

“When I’m likely on a climbing vacation, it is just likely with my mates, not specialist climbers,” he suggests. “We don’t do it to make sponsors pleased. I just go climbing and enjoy it and don’t overthink it.

“Culann and I have the YouTube channel to convey to our have stories, and we make it enjoyable and watchable.”