The Data Has Spoken. This Is the Most Popular Gear of 2025.

Climbing tested dozens of new pieces of gear over the last 12 months. We abused them relentlessly at the crags, boulderfields, and in the alpine, then decided—without any doubt—which helmets, ropes, packs, and shoes were “the best.”

But the gear that left the biggest impression wasn’t necessarily the number one pick of a gear guide list. Maybe you already have your perfect projecting shoes, but you need a pair for cracks. Perhaps your ridiculously large head (like mine) can only fit the one helmet model you happen to own, but you recently sprained your wrist on the approach and want to know which gear could have prevented it.

So, behold: the eight pieces of gear that we loved and won over Climbing readers in 2025.

Hardshell pants that don’t suck

Climbers who need the weather-proof security of a hardshell pant typically had to sacrifice both comfort and mobility, since run-of-the-mill pairs stem and lunge about as well as dress pants. Such a sacrifice is no longer necessary thanks to the Patagonia M10 Storm Pant, which fuses the mobility-first design of jujitsu pants with the nerdy, alpine insights of alpinist Colin Haley, who started testing prototypes in 2019. Read how they fared against a season in El Chaltén, Patagonia, here.

A transformative stick clip (in more ways than one)

Of all the many forms of climbing, sport climbing is by far our safest genre. So why do some adrenaline-starved climbers insist on making it sketchy? Isn’t the whole point to have a safe, athletically challenging experience, where everyone walks home at the end of the day? (Yes I’m talking about stick clips.) Read how the new Magic Wand Stick Clip transformed how one field-tester sport climbs.

Climbing rope meets real safety innovation

After a climber took a 70-foot ground fall when their rope cut earlier this year, I immediately thought of how Mammut’s Alpine Core Protect model would have coped. It’s impossible to know if their dual-sheathed cord would have saved the climber, but the event—paired with my reporting in a post-accident analysis—reaffirmed just how easily ropes can sever in the right (or very, very wrong) circumstances. Read why Mammut’s is the most cut-resistant rope on the market.

The world’s best crack climbing shoe is made in some guy’s garage

Maybe it’s not fair to reduce Danny Parker to “some guy.” But he’s hardly a household name, despite having climbed some of the world’s hardest offwidths. He is a world-class tinkerer, however, having developed the least sexy shoe name of all time: the Pronk. When we heard Parker’s design was making cutting-edge splitters notably more secure, we descended to his lair to learn more. Read what’s so special about the Pronk, which we sincerely hope will hit markets soon.

Get your climbing partner’s crotch out of your face with this device

I learned the term “yeet” not too long ago, which is “to throw something forcefully in a specified direction,” according to the Oxford Dictionary. Yeet can also describe the violent vertical motion a belayer experiences when they catch a lead fall by a climber much heavier than them. If that leader is at the second or third bolt, you’d better hope they wore clean underwear that day. Luckily, Edelrid’s new belay assistant, the Ohmega, is specifically designed to keep some things among partners a secret. Thank. Goodness.

The weird danger of approaching climbs with poles

When weekend warriors, professional ski guides, and one of the greatest alpinists of all time stumble into the same mechanism of injury, it’s worth taking note. The unexpected culprit? Poles. (No, not Poles, as our exceedingly clever Facebook audience pointed out—poles.) We love people from Poland. Read the beef, and the Leki Crosstrail that solved it, here.

An ice climbing boot—one of the best ever

Three testers used La Sportiva’s G-Summit boot for well over a year before publishing a review. They climbed some of the most classic long ice routes in Canada and Norway, logging a staggering 20,000 vertical feet of technical mountain terrain. Interestingly, all three had very differently shaped feet, and yet all found the G-Summit to provide a Goldilocks-level fit. How is that possible?

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