Little Cottonwood Canyon

Little Cottonwood Canyon is a glacial trough in the Wasatch Range near Salt Lake City, and its granite walls attract climbers looking for technical crack and roof climbing on solid stone. The canyon’s character—steep granite, polished sections and a concentration of technical trad lines—shows through clearly in the short film on this site.

The clip 100 feet of Kneebars: Slayer 5.13c records Brent Barghahn’s line and reads like a focused field note on a very specific type of climbing: roughly a hundred feet of kneebar shuffling under a roof with a narrowing crack at the back. Camera work by Andy Earl follows the sequences along most of the route, deliberately omitting the decisive crux moves; that restraint highlights the problem’s sustained and unusual movement rather than producing a conventional ascent highlight reel. The piece also functions as a tactile study—viewers can see body positions, protection spacing and sequence flow for an extended roof crack, which is useful for anyone curious about the particulars of long kneebar climbing.

Because the film is short and specific, it’s best treated as a precise record of one modern first ascent and of the rock type and movement you can expect in the canyon, rather than as a broader introduction to the Wasatch climbing scene.