Margo Hayes Found Herself In Rifle: Home Crag Ep. 2
2023 · 9 min · Sport Climbing
The second episode of Petzl's Home Crag series follows Margo Hayes back to Rifle Mountain Park, the Colorado limestone canyon she credits with making her the climber she is. She calls it four-dimensional climbing: not just pulling, but pushing and squeezing into strange positions until a sequence finally gives. Ben Neilson shot and cut it, with additional footage from Matty Hong. At nine minutes this is a portrait, not an ascent story. Margo talks less about routes than about the people she climbed with there, and the film follows her lead, treating a home crag as a community rather than a tick list. Worth watching if you want to hear one of the best sport climbers of her generation explain where the movement came from.
Review
Nine minutes well spent, as long as you know it is a portrait and not a send video. Margo Hayes goes back to Rifle Mountain Park and talks about the Colorado limestone canyon that made her, and Petzl's Home Crag series lets her set the terms.
This is for people who want to hear how a top sport climber thinks about movement. Hayes calls Rifle four-dimensional climbing, all pushing and squeezing into odd positions until a sequence gives, and that one phrase explains more about her style than a dozen send clips would. Skip it if you want a project, a grade, and a chain clip. There is none of that here.
What works is the framing. Hayes talks about the people she climbed with more than the routes she did, and Ben Neilson's edit follows her instead of forcing an arc onto a home crag. Matty Hong's extra footage fills in the canyon. What it leaves out is the climbing itself. I wanted one full route, bottom to top, to see the four-dimensional idea in practice, and the film never gives me one.
Pair it with Margo Hayes Makes History, the Reel Rock film about her Biographie ascent at Céüse. That one is all outcome. This one is all origin. Watch them in that order and the calm she brings to Biographie makes more sense.
