Hayden Jamieson Reveals His “Secret Weapon” for Slab Climbing, as Seen in His New Film on ‘Picaflor’

This year’s feature film premiering at the International Climbers’ Festival is For the Love, a 23-minute documentary about Hayden Jamieson, Will Sharp, and Jacob Cook’s first free ascent of Picaflor (5.13+; 3,000 ft) on Cerro Capicua in Cochamó Valley, Chile.

The film centers Jamieson, who calls Picaflor a “guiding light” back from his traumatic 2016 mountain rescue in the Karakorum. It ultimately took Jamieson two expeditions. He first set out to send all 24 pitches in 2022 with Bronwyn Hodgins and Jacob Cook. The team sent all but one slab move. Then in 2024, he headed to Chile with Cook and Sharp to rehearse and send the route.

We caught up with Jamieson to discuss why he didn’t want to be the main character of the movie, how exactly he got past the slabby crux that shut him down in 2022, and what exactly that white stuff that he painted on his fingers was.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Climbing: After you returned from Picaflor, how involved were you in making the film? Did you have a certain vision of what needed to be included in the story?

Jamieson: I was pretty involved. Ian [Dzilenski] is a really good friend of mine … during the time when he was coming up with the initial cuts of [the film], he and I were collaborating a lot. We would have these super long sessions. I don’t know the first thing about editing, but I would go to his house and hang out in the editing room and go through all the footage. We’d talk about what we liked and didn’t like and what music paired well with what and what scenes we wanted to show and how we wanted to organize all of the footage.

Fortunately and unfortunately, it got to a point where neither of us felt like it was going in the direction we wanted, but also, neither of us was willing to say that because we knew we had to come up with some sort of product. People had paid for this trip and given us funding.

It was actually Jacob’s idea to essentially scrap what Ian had drafted initially and bring this whole Pakistan backstory into it to give a little bit of context as to why the route is so important to me. Otherwise, the plot felt a little empty and there didn’t seem to be any reason for the emotion behind this whole thing. I think [Jacob] said that in listening to my Enormocast interview, he was like, “Man, I forgot this whole thing had happened to you,” and “Of course this should be the center of the storyline.”

Initially, we weren’t trying to make this film about me. I wasn’t trying to take the center stage on this thing. But Jacob ended up doing this super haphazard audio cut of pieces of my Enormocast interview over the footage that Ian had shot, and it worked super well. We were like, “Man, this is what this film should turn into.”

Climbing: What was the original direction that you wanted it to go in?

Jamieson: We didn’t want to make your standard climbing film, which is about this group of privileged white dudes who go on an expedition and make their lives way harder than they need to be and try to seek some acclaim for that. That is just a blown-out story that kind of sucks, and I don’t think many people want to hear that.

Our original vision for the film was to make more of a lifestyle piece and talk about what brought us to the point in our lives where we could do this kind of thing and what inspired us to do it. Jacob, Will, and I all come from really different backgrounds, but we all arrived in the same place where we have a similar lifestyle that draws us toward these big goals.

Climbing: What’s the meaning behind the title, For the Love?

Jamieson: Right after we sent the route, when we were still in Cochamó, Ian shot this scene of me reading a passage from my journal. On trips like this, I write every day. I wrote this passage about how I’d spent all this time and money and effort and how it’s this totally outrageous thing to have tried to apply myself toward, and if nothing else, then it was all for the love of it.

Climbing: During your 2022 attempt on Picaflor with Bronwyn Hodgins and Jacob Cook, you were able to free every part of the 3,000-foot wall except for one slab move around pitch 21. When you got back from that trip, what was your approach to training? Did you always plan to return in two years?

Jamieson: Initially, I planned on going back the following year, but it didn’t work out with partners. It felt like [2023] came around really quickly, and I wasn’t totally ready for it. I really wanted to wait until I had the right team and the moment felt right.

To answer your question, I came back [to Salt Lake City] and realized that it wasn’t a matter of strength. This is just slab climbing. Just standing on your feet. So I chose a handful of routes close to home that I thought would help me become a better climber. I looked at it as a skill-building process that could take as much time as I needed.

Climbing: Which routes did you choose to focus on to prepare for another attempt on Picaflor?

Jamieson: Before 2022, the one that stood out as the biggest milestone was this route up at Lone Peak, right outside of Salt Lake City. It’s called Interrobang, and it’s this route Nik Berry put up in 2015. It stood as this test piece, face climbing, slab route that’s 5.14.

I can’t remember exactly when I tried it for the first time, but it felt overwhelmingly difficult. I knew that it was something that maybe I would have a small chance of doing—something I could really throw myself at and hopefully come out a better climber. I felt super inspired by it, so it felt pretty easy to want to commit myself to it, and I ended up doing it.

Climbing: Did you seek out any particular training in the lead-up to your 2024 trip?

Jamieson: Not really. I split my climbing training between physical and technical training, “physical” being climbing conditioning and also mountain conditioning—hiking, skiing, and that sort of thing. These trips require such a high workload that you could show up as a really fit climber and still get shut down by the whole experience. The jugging, the cleaning, the hiking through the jungle with a machete and a heavy backpack just destroys you. I knew that I wanted to show up really fit in those ways.

I would often have a training day where I would go hike up one of the local mountains here in Salt Lake City with a backpack full of water, dump it out on the summit, and then come down and go for a weightlifting session. Another training day would be a fully climbing-focused session in the gym. But at the same time, there isn’t a whole lot you can do physically to train yourself for a 5.14 slab pitch other than just going out and trying to do hard slab climbing on granite.

Climbing: In the movie, you are painting a white substance on your finger pads. Is that glue?

Jamieson: It’s Antihydral [cream], the absolute secret weapon for all of my rock climbing. Rhino Skin Solutions Dry Spray has the same active ingredient, but it’s super diluted. (Editor’s note: Climbing confirmed that the skincare products Antihydral and Rhino Skin Solutions Dry Spray both have methenamine as their active ingredient. The Dry Spray contains 8% methenamine and Antihydral contains 13%.)

[Antihydral] is a super extreme antiperspirant, which has historically been really hard to find in the U.S. Weirdly, you had to either get it in Europe or order it from a Canadian foosball website. Apparently, foosball players really don’t like to have sweaty hands. But now you can get it in the U.S. It’s a completely game-changing tool for this type of climbing especially. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and we were both saying that we probably would have done 25% fewer routes over the last five years without Antihydral because it’s crucial for being able to climb longer because your skin lasts longer.

Climbing: On the wall, did you have to put the Antihydral on once per day?

Jamieson: No. I put it on maybe once a week and slept with it on. But [on Picaflor], we were using all the tactics like putting it on our palms. There’s a hard stemming pitch on the route where you’re literally not grabbing any holds and having friction on your palms is super important.

Climbing: I saw that in the film on pitch two. It looked like Book of Hate (5.13d).

Jamieson: It’s a lot easier than the Book. But it’s probably 80 feet of continuous 5.12- stemming. You can really stand there with no hands at any point, but your legs get so blasted. We would come off that pitch and our calves were just completely destroyed.

Climbing: One of the earliest cruxes in the film occurs when you struggle to send pitch eight (5.13b) after you break a key foothold. Since the film doesn’t explain it, how did you get past that sequence?

Jamieson: I ended up doing it about the same with a much worse foothold. It was kind of a funny situation because we had spent maybe 15 days that season on the wall, leading up to the push, so the route was really well rehearsed. We had all these sequences super planned out and knew exactly what we were going to do the whole way through the route.

Both Will and Jacob sent that pitch on their first try. It was at the end of a long day. We had climbed a couple other hard pitches that morning, so I was feeling pretty tired already and I didn’t really have the shoes I needed. Whatever, they’re excuses, but I felt a lot of pressure and I was really motivated to try it. As soon as they both sent the pitch, I pulled on and broke the biggest foothold off it. I was just like, “Oh, no.”

It was right between two boulder problems. You could kind of rest on this foot. It basically turned these two boulder problems into one really long one. I had to sit there and invent a sequence.

For me, that pitch was really, really hard. The whole pitch is only 10 meters long, but it’s really only about two or three body lengths of hard climbing. Early on in the trip, my foot slipped on that pitch and held onto a crimp for too long. It sliced all the way across my finger. Blood blistered up underneath my finger and it was horrible. It looked like I had taken a knife to my hand.

Climbing: Before you solved pitch eight, Jacob was clear that you were all going to send together. If you hadn’t sent that pitch, did you have any deadline for when you were going to abandon your free ascent and proceed up to support Will and Jacob?

Jamieson: We didn’t have a deadline, but obviously there would be some point at which they would continue on, and I definitely would have supported them doing that.

Climbing: Viewers of the film may notice that you don’t encounter the crux around pitch 20 or 21 that had shut you down in 2022. Later, in your American Alpine Journal entry, you mention that you rebolted that section in 2024. When and why did you make the decision to deviate from your original line?

Jamieson: It’s a bit confusing without looking at the topo. Essentially, the first ascensionists put up the route as an aid route. They got to this portion of the wall where they took the path of least resistance, which is a small corner system. From that corner system, it just ends, so where the corner system ends, they drilled the bolt ladder across regularly featured portions of rock.

When we went up there the first time [in 2022], we climbed through the bolt ladder and I was like, “Oh, man, it’s really blank.” It’s quite steep. It’s just below vertical, so you need reasonable sized features to be able to grab, and it didn’t seem like they were there. So on that first trip, I ended up swinging around and found this [other] little corner system. Just as it ended, a few face holds appeared, so I ended up putting bolts into that. That turned into this pitch that I wasn’t able to do.

Fast forward to the second trip [in 2024]. The one move I never did, I ended up doing it pretty quickly. But shortly after that, I broke a foothold on it, so all of us were stuck. We were like, “Man, this is so crazy. We’re not really sure if this is going to go, and it’s basically coming down to one meter of climbing that we’re not able to do.”

Will was swinging around on the same pitch, and he found this chossy looking roof that was plumbline straight down from the slab that I’d been trying to climb where I broke this foothold. It was all choss and a bit overgrown, so I had never even thought to look at it on the first trip. [Will] ended up finding a way through this roof and in the way he did that section, it avoided this really hard little bit of slab climbing. For a bunch of different reasons, we decided to split this pitch that had previously been a really long one in half because there’s a pretty natural stance in the middle of it.

[In 2022], I found a way to climb the first half of this pitch and then do a traverse and then go up to the anchor. What we ended up doing [in 2024] was the most direct line that just goes straight up to the anchor. So we eliminated the entirety of the loop around the original pitch. Essentially, the original [aid] line climbed this.

Climbing: Last year, at the International Climber’ Festival, you told me that sending Picaflor had left you in a slump that you wanted to write about.

Jamieson: Yeah. I was really excited to be done with this thing, but when you have something that’s been a guiding light for you for several years, and then all of a sudden, that thing is gone, it’s hard to know what to do with yourself.

Climbing: Do you still feel like you’re in that slump, or have you found something else that inspires you like Picaflor?

Jamieson: I’m not necessarily looking for something to inspire me on the same level. That could be an unhealthy mindset to carry toward climbing of, “I’m always on the lookout for some huge thing,” because it’s nice when those things spontaneously happen. And I think it’s hard to force that kind of motivation, especially for big wall climbing, because it takes so much effort. If your heart really isn’t in it, it just sucks. I can find it to be this thing that burns me out pretty quickly.

This year, my motivation for big wall climbing is coming back a bit in going to Madagascar. In the fall, I have a bigger multi-pitch project in Sardinia that I want to do. And in January, we’re going back to put up another route right next to Picaflor. But ultimately, I think I enjoy rock climbing too much to just throw myself into these big adventures all the time.

Climbing: What’s one thing you hope the audience at the International Climbers’ Festival takes away from your film premiere?

Jamieson: I hope that the audience at the ICF feels inspired to go chase some big goal for themselves. At the end of the day, we did a route that was hard for us, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that hard on the global rock climbing scale. It pushed us to give our best effort toward this huge thing that seemed totally overwhelming at first but became a reality. I know it took me a ton of time, and that’s something I feel really proud of—sticking through that whole process. So if people get one thing from the whole film, my hope is that they’re inspired to give their best effort toward something regardless of what that looks like for them.

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