Field Tested: SCARPA’s Arpia V Is a Comfortable Performance All-Arounder

Our Thoughts

I spent much of last March and April testing an Ocun shoe called the Sigma, which was possibly the single best high-end, low-angle sport climbing shoe I’ve ever worn. (Yeah, I know, it surprised me, too.)  Compared to gym shoes like La Sportiva’s Ondra Comp and SCARPA’s Veloce L, both of which I liked, the Sigmas were heavy, stiff, almost clunky, forcing your feet to conform to their fang-like shape and not the other way around. But I’ve never stood more comfortably on minuscule feet. So it was with a bit of sadness that—my Sigma review finished—I pulled SCARPA’s Arpia V out of the box, sighed at the old-school double velcro system, and started breaking them in.

But I was immediately won over by the Arpia V’s blend of comfort and support. And I ended up wearing them (i.e. procrastinating on this review) for the better part of six months. In April and May, I wore them on basalt, limestone, rhyolite, and granite sport climbs up to 5.13c in Northern New Mexico. This summer, I wore them in the gym; on a few granitic gneiss boulders in the Adirondacks, New York; and on some sweaty gneiss boulders in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And this fall, I’ve again worn them on the basalt and volcanic tuff sport routes near my home. But even though their comfort—which is the product of minimal asymmetry and moderate downturn—is part of what I really like about the Arpia V, that comfort comes with performance tradeoffs, which I began to notice as the shoe broke in.

In order to explain this, I need to first explain the two main ways that shoe designers achieve edging support.

Most sporty shoes like the Sigma, the Miura VS, the Solution, the Instinct, the Quantix SF, and the Boostic achieve a blend of supportiveness and sensitivity through downturn and asymmetry. These shoes torque your feet into a weird and sometimes painful claw shape, which channels your weight into your big toe and almost magically provides both edging support and some degree of sensitivity in the toe box. It’s this combination of features that allows you to grab with your toes but doesn’t allow your toes to bend upwards when you’re applying full bodyweight on little edges. Meanwhile, most impressive all-day edging shoes like the Generator, the TC Pro, the Vapor Lace, the Katana Lace, and the old Miura achieve their support not through downturn and asymmetry (though they may have a bit of both) but through their thicker, stiffer, full-length midsoles and outsoles. With these shoes, you can stand on dime edges without utterly crippling your feet, which is why they’re favored by big wall climbers. But they can feel inflexible when you’re trying to grab with your toes and clunky when you’re trying feel what you’re standing on, which is why you only rarely see people wearing them in the gym, on boulders, or screaming their way up steep, single-pitch sport routes.

The Arpia V is sitting at the intersection between these competing philosophies. It’s got a full-length midsole and outsole, but it also has a moderate asymmetry and subtle downturn. The result is an unusual level of comfort given the shoe’s high level of functional overlap with the beak-shaped sport climbing shoes I listed above. But that comfort comes with consequences.

A shoe’s asymmetry and downturn help support your foot even after the shoe breaks in: The rubber under your toes may get thinner, the upper may get softer, but thanks to the asymmetry your foot is going to stay in that curled, aggressive shape. Yet the Arpia doesn’t have much asymmetry. So while it was highly functional out of the box, the shoe’s high-end edging and toe-pointing performance diminished as the toe rubber thinned and its upper softened. After months of intermittent wear, my Arpia Vs still feels pretty great on mildly steep climbs in my onsight range; but when I tried a vertical 5.13 with an edging-intensive V6 crux last weekend, I found myself wishing I had brought the Sigma out of retirement.

That sounds like an indictment, but I’m not sure it is.

SCARPA has made a tactical tradeoff with the Arpia, giving up a small degree of high-end performance for a shoe that can be sized down without hurting and still performs at a moderately high level across a wide range of rock types and movement styles.

It is, as SCARPA intended, an excellent intermediate shoe, comfortable enough for gym laps and long days at the crag, but performant enough to feel solid edging and front-pointing on most climbs in the 5-30 degree overhanging range. I sent three 5.13s and boulders up to V9/10 in them. Sure, it’s not a great smearing shoe (parkour boulderers ought to go elsewhere), and it’s not great at grabbing incuts on steeper walls. But if I was heading to the Red River Gorge tomorrow, I’d bring them.

Who’s the Arpia V for?

The Arpia V will appeal to a relatively wide range of climbers, but I could see it being especially attractive to sport climbers focusing in the 5.10-5.13- grade range. The stiffness makes it especially nice for heavier climbers for whom soft intermediate shoes like the Veloce and Veloce L aren’t supportive enough. The wide toe box—another major source of the shoe’s comfort— is good for those of us with wide feet, though a low-volume model is also available.

The velcro system

I drag my feet a lot, so I tend to dislike double and triple velcro shoes (the velcro often catches and ultimately tears), but SCARPA’s velcro design allows for a pretty clever mix of customizable snugness and fast on-off access, and mind have held up nicely. The velcro closures are offset, meaning that the upper velcro cinches laterally (toward the outside of your foot) and the lower cinches medially (toward the inside), and this allows the closure system to really grab the foot. The closure system makes the Arpia V a reasonable gym shoe—very easy to take on and off between burns on boulders or toprope laps in the gym.

Full sole provides real support on powerful moves

I’m not a particularly light climber, so sometimes, even when bouldering, I feel like I need a stiff shoe that’s not going to bend under the arch. And while the Arpia V’s toe hooking capabilities leave much to be desired (they’re just not meant for it), the shoe has nonetheless played an important role in my indoor board climbing quiver. Every time an indoor boulder requires something stiff, I’ll grab the Arpia rather than waste a half minute finagling my foot into and then lacing up the Sigma. On a steep but very foot-intensive boulder in Great Barrington, for instance, I found my no-edge La Sportiva Futuras far too soft to press powerfully into a small foothold on a required kneebar—but the Arpia was perfect.

I’ll often even wear the Arpia on one foot and a softer shoe on the other. For instance, on this problem on my home wall, I needed a stiff shoe on my right foot to toe into a very small edge for the second move, but I needed a soft shoe (the Veloce L) on my left foot to curl into a foothold for the fourth.

Check out the Arpia V on Backcountry.

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