Black Diamond Equipment

You can’t tell the history of climbing and mountain sports without telling the history of Black Diamond.

      Black Diamond was born from Chouinard Equipment and was a natural continuation of the passion and ethos that Yvon Chouinard and his friends started in 1965. Peter Metcalf and the employees of Chouinard Equipment took over in 1989, changed the name to Black Diamond and moved to Salt Lake City, to be at the base of the Wasatch mountains.

     We can be bold in our assertion that we have created and continue to create mountain sports. As a quintessential example of this claim, in 1972 Yvon and Tom Frost released the now famous Clean Climbing Manifesto in the Chouinard Equipment catalog. At the time, climbing had moved toward fixed bolts and pitons. Crags around the world were becoming littered with fixed protection and pitons, which permanently scarred and altered the rock. As the popularity of climbing increased, this method started to pose a threat for the natural beauty and state of climbing areas all over the world.

    Chouinard and Frost declared a new ethic—Clean Climbing. Any climbing protection should be removable and not damage the rock. At the time, pitons were 70% of Chouinard’s sales and yet they were telling the climbing world to stop using them. This ethos has given birth to many innovative pieces of equipment throughout our history, reaching a crescendo with Ultralight Camalots and Z4 Camalots.

     Clean Climbing is an archetypal example of an ethos that not only spawns innovative equipment but creates and curates the sport itself. This ethos lives today across all mountain sports at Black Diamond.

     The Outdoor Warehouse is an Authorized Dealer for Black Diamond Equipment Climbing, Hiking, and Climbing Gear.  We lok forward to hearing about all your adventures.