climbing shoes

Welcome to Climb Naked Shoes - When good climbing shoes are all you need!

For the love (by Climb Naked Shoes’ Web Content Editor, Mira Copeland):

Mountain Climbing Shoes I am fortunate enough to live in a place surrounded by mountains. I’m talking real, rugged, shoved from the surface by pure platonic power, inspiringly beautiful mountains. Every day I wake up, grab my coffee and catch the bus to work, gazing out the window in that ambiguous state between wakefulness and weariness, dreaming about my next trip to visit the crags of the Cascades or the majestic Olympics.

I was born a mountain lover: my mother was an emigrant escaping flatter regions to the east, my father an avid skier since before the days of Warren Miller. My first substantial trip to the mountains was a backpacking trip to Molby Basin in British Columbia while I was barely old enough to walk. The family photo albums are filled with pictures of me and my brother perched on top of boulders, or sitting with our legs dangling over precipitous drops.

When I got big enough to go to school, I came to the unfortunate realization that not every single person in the world likes to go outside and climb things, get dirty, and taste the salt of their own sweat. I think I was the only person in my seventh grade class who enjoyed learning about geology. At college, a friend who hailed from Maryland actually asked me, “huckleberries are real? I always thought they were the brainchild of some MIT chemist, like blue raspberries!”

No, no, my friend, no, no. I’ve seen mountains in the New Zealand, Canada, the Himalaya, the Alps, and all over the United States, and I never get weary of exploring new ones. Alpenglow makes my heart melt. I could peacefully pass away if I could just live for one year in a picturesque ranch house sheltered by Grand Teton.
And while not everyone loves the mountains, a whole heck of a lot of people do. The mountains never cease to amaze us with their beauty and their quiet invitations for endless exploring. Climbing is one of the ways I’ve found to answer that call, and I plan on answering it as much as possible until my legs will no longer support me.

Mountain Climbing The smell of rain on rock, a breeze through the soaring pine trees during an approach, and the feeling of my absolute connection with the world beneath my feet. Those are the things I love about climbing. The glory of climbing is great; the sense of achievement I feel when I top out never ceases to amaze me, and yet the greatest glory is not the cresting of crags, but the discovery of the new peaks on the horizon.

Why do I climb? Because of my irrepressible compulsion to climb the next peak over, and the next one after that. Because mountains make me smile. Because nothing cures my ailments like a day’s excursion into a crisp fall day in the woods. I will never stop exploring, never stop asking myself how much higher I can go, or what’s on the other side of the next mountain. It’s who I am; it’s what I do.