Quick Take
- Narration: Danny Campbell reads with the dry, knowing tone the material demands, he finds the comedy in the old guard’s sabotage tactics without undercutting Smoot’s genuine affection for the era.
- Themes: Style wars and generational conflict in sport, the ethics of innovation, subculture identity and belonging
- Mood: Lively and contentious, like being in camp with people who feel very strongly about things that are also kind of absurd
- Verdict: The essential chronicle of how sport climbing was born from warfare disguised as ethics, essential for climbers and genuinely entertaining for everyone else.
I listened to Hangdog Days mostly on a road trip through the desert Southwest, which felt appropriate given how much of the book is set in places like Smith Rock and the Gunks and Joshua Tree. Jeff Smoot was there when the fights happened, when old-guard climbers started greasing holds to prevent ascents, when the arguments about bolt placement reached the level of actual sabotage, and the firsthand perspective gives Hangdog Days something that a purely historical treatment could not: the feeling of a community that was simultaneously thriving and tearing itself apart over questions that seem both trivial and completely serious at the same time.
Danny Campbell narrates with the right kind of bemused affection. The bolt wars of the 1980s can easily tip into absurdity, bags of excrement thrown at climbers, holds deliberately chipped to change a route’s difficulty, grown adults engaging in what amounts to turf warfare on rock faces, and Campbell finds the comedy in these incidents without losing sight of the fact that, for the people involved, this was genuinely felt. The stakes were cultural identity, not just routes.
Our Take on Hangdog Days
The book’s central argument is that the transition from traditional climbing to sport climbing was not simply a change in tactics but a generational and ideological rupture. The old guard had built a value system around ground-up first ascents, the refusal to pre-inspect routes by hanging on gear, and a certain romance about risk that was inseparable from their idea of what climbing was supposed to mean. When young climbers like Todd Skinner and Alan Watts began hanging on protection to rehearse moves, hangdogging, and placing bolts on rappel to protect hard routes, they were not just climbing differently. They were rejecting a whole ethic, and the response from the old guard was proportionally extreme.
Smoot focuses significantly on three figures: John Bachar, the traditionalist who became the face of the anti-sport-climbing position; Todd Skinner, the charismatic innovator who pursued first ascents with a specific kind of hunger; and Alan Watts, who developed Smith Rock, Oregon into the proving ground where much of the era’s hardest climbing happened. Jean-Baptiste Tribout’s 1986 ascent of To Bolt or Not to Be, 5.14a, at Smith Rock is the book’s climactic moment, a French climber demonstrating that American ethical objections were costing American climbers the ability to climb at the front of the sport.
Why Listen to Hangdog Days
For climbers, this is irreplaceable context. Almost everything about how sport climbing is practiced today, gym training, redpointing, the bolt spacing conventions that have been normalized, comes directly out of the fights this book describes. Listeners who have never thought much about why certain climbing ethics exist will finish this book with a genuine understanding of the cultural archaeology beneath their local crag. Campbell’s pacing helps here: he moves through the historical material quickly enough to maintain momentum but slowly enough to let the personalities breathe. The Lynn Hill material is especially strong, she occupies a fascinating position in the era, present at multiple historic moments and consistently underestimated.
What to Watch For in Hangdog Days
Reviewers note that the book occasionally drifts from its main thesis to follow tangents involving people and climbs close to Smoot personally. These detours are not uninteresting, Smoot is a good writer and his own experience gives the book its texture, but listeners following the central sport-climbing history may want to be patient through stretches that feel more like personal memoir than cultural chronicle. The book also ends where sport climbing began, not where it is now: this is a history of the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not try to trace the development of the sport into the Olympic era.
Who Should Listen to Hangdog Days
Climbers at any level who have ever wondered where the culture of their sport comes from will find this essential. The technical climbing content is accessible enough for non-climbers who are genuinely curious about subculture history and the sociology of innovation. Listeners drawn to stories about generational conflict within specialized communities, parallels exist in surfing, skateboarding, and other outdoor sports that underwent similar evolutions, will recognize the patterns and enjoy the specificity. At twelve and a half hours, this earns its runtime through the density of incident and personality rather than through any single narrative arc.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to be a climber to enjoy Hangdog Days?
No. The book functions as a subculture history and a generational conflict story that any interested reader can follow. Smoot explains the technical concepts accessibly, and the ethical arguments at the center of the bolt wars translate to any domain where a new generation’s tactics are threatening an established community’s values.
Is Todd Skinner’s death addressed in the book?
The book covers the era of Skinner’s major first ascents, not his later life. His death in a rappelling accident in 2006 is outside the chronological scope of Hangdog Days, which focuses on the 1970s and 1980s sport climbing revolution.
How does Danny Campbell handle the technical climbing terminology for listeners who are not familiar with the sport?
Campbell reads the technical terms without over-explaining them, which works well because Smoot’s prose contextualizes terms like hangdogging, redpointing, and bolt-on-rappel through narrative rather than glossary entries. Non-climber listeners may need to look a few things up, but the essential story remains fully accessible.
Is Hangdog Days primarily about American climbing, or does it cover the European sport climbing scene?
The book is primarily American in focus, but the European influence is central to the story, particularly French climbers like Jean-Baptiste Tribout, whose ascent of To Bolt or Not to Be at Smith Rock represents one of the era’s landmark moments. The book argues implicitly that American ethical objections to sport climbing tactics were giving European climbers a competitive advantage.
