Best Climbing Films on YouTube

Patagonia's portrait of Alex Megos is here because it is the best made climbing film that is free to watch anywhere, and because it is about failing rather than winning. It shows the first person to onsight 9a learning to project a route that will not go fast, cut with the history of the redpoint itself. Watch it if you have never seen a climbing film and want one that is about a person. It opens the list because nothing after it needs less explanation.

Five portraits of people keeping the soul of climbing alive as the sport moved into gyms and the Olympics, and seventy-two minutes with none of them wasted. It shows a van couple in Yosemite, a route developer, and community builders, with almost no grades in it. Watch it when you are burned out on crushing and need to remember why you started. Rotpunkt is about one climber; this is about the culture around all of them, and the two belong side by side.

Adam Ondra's own film about the world's first 9c, from the training built around the bat hang rest to the send in the Hanshelleren cave on September 3, 2017. It shows the route section by section, three boulder problems and their rests, so the grade becomes legible. Watch it if you want to know what the hardest climb in the world looks like. After two films about people, this is the first about a number, and it is the number everyone else is measured against.

Two British climbers train in a Sheffield cellar for two years to attempt Century Crack, a 40-meter 5.14b roof offwidth in Utah. It shows the homemade crack, the suffering, and the pair stacked upside down a hundred feet off the desert floor. Watch it if you want to laugh at a climbing film, which almost never happens. It follows Silence as the other extreme of hard climbing: not power and precision but pain and stubbornness.

Mellow's feature on Shawn Raboutou and one of the world's few V17 boulders, and the rare bouldering film that earns a 47-minute runtime. It shows roughly 25 sessions on Alphane in Chironico, a V14 opening into a V15 finish, coming together over months. Watch it if you want to see the top of modern bouldering with a subject who lets the climbing talk. Wide Boyz is loud; this is quiet, and it is the film I would use to show someone what V17 means.

Six minutes of Alex Honnold soloing a 1,500-foot limestone wall in Mexico in January 2014, shot by Renan Ozturk with no narration and no music cues telling you what to feel. It shows fifteen pitches, eleven of them 5.12 or harder, climbed without a rope before dawn. Watch it if you want the film that made Honnold's name outside climbing, in the shortest possible form. After Alphane's forty-seven minutes this is the opposite bet, and it wins it.

Nalle Hukkataival returning to one granite boulder in a Finnish forest for four years, until it became Burden of Dreams, the first V17, on October 23, 2016. It shows the repetition of projecting at the limit, falling off the same move for years, with Jimmy Webb and Daniel Woods arriving, trying and leaving humbled. Watch it if you want to see what obsession actually looks like. It is the patient answer to Sendero's six minutes, and I think it is the more honest film about what hard climbing costs.

Reel Rock's account of Adam Ondra and Chris Sharma sharing La Dura Dura in Oliana in 2013, the first 9b+ and the film that made the grade race personal. It shows mentor and successor on the same route, Ondra sending first and Sharma watching him top out his own project. Watch it if you want the moment the sport's center moved from one person to another. It belongs after Lappnor because both are about one route, but this one has two people in it and a handover.

Thirty days in Yosemite in October 2014 working toward a free ascent of The Nose, with the Great Roof and Changing Corners doing most of the damage. It shows the two cruxes as separate problems to be solved in one day, with Lynn Hill and Tommy Caldwell on the history. Watch it if you want the most complete film about the most famous route on El Capitan. After the sport climbing films it is the first big wall here, and the best introduction to what a free ascent of El Cap involves.

Katie Lamb climbing the hardest boulders of any woman in history while holding down a full-time engineering job, and Patagonia refusing to treat that as a contradiction. It shows the craft behind Box Therapy, a V16 at 10,500 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park, rehearsed like choreography. Watch it if you want a film about process rather than a send. It follows The Nose as another film about method, but the method here is fitted around a normal life.

Chris Sharma's first ascent of the Mallorca sea arch in 2006, in Reel Rock's 2007 cut, seven minutes long and still the deep water solo film everything else is measured against. It shows the dyno over the Mediterranean that reportedly took dozens of attempts, and the swim back after every fall. Watch it if you have seen the photograph of Sharma airborne and want the moving version. It is the shortest film on the list and, with In Sequence before it, the pair show two ways to make a film about a single line.

Cédric Lachat across five Swiss areas, including the Eiger and the Rätikon, cut with interviews from the people who put the routes up: Beat Kammerlander, Claude Remy, Roger Schaeli and Stephan Siegrist. It shows hard multi-pitch at 8a and up set against the generation that opened the walls. Watch it if you want to understand how Swiss climbing got from mountaineering to hard rock. From here the list turns to the big walls and expeditions, and this is the bridge.

The film that introduced the Belgian sailing and big wall formula in 2011: a ten-meter boat, a captain in his seventies, and unclimbed granite in Greenland. It shows Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, the Favresse brothers and Ben Ditto living on the boat, playing instruments when the weather is bad, and climbing when it is not. Watch it if you like expedition films that are honest and funny at the same time. Swissway is about tradition; this is about improvisation, and the crew has been improvising ever since.

National Geographic's three-part Greenland expedition cut into one 94-minute run, ending on the 4,000-foot sea wall Ingmikortilaq, which Honnold and Hazel Findlay climbed on August 16, 2022. It shows the ice cap traverse, the glaciology work, and the loose lower third of a wall nobody had climbed. Watch it if you want the whole approach and not just the summit. It closes the list because it is the longest film here and the one that most rewards watching in one sitting.