How Ethan Salvo Went From V1 to V15 in Five Years

This article originally appeared on Climbing

Winter in Squamish is cold and wet and dark. It's a grim time to call yourself a climber, with fog and rain far outnumbering the rare bluebird days. Indeed, most climbers barreling up the Sea-to-Sky highway don't bother stopping in Squamish during the winter, preferring instead to log endless powder turns at the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort 35 miles to the north. But if, last winter, one of those climbers--perhaps nostalgic for spring--drove through Squamish at dusk and glanced over at the Chief, their gaze might have been dragged downward by a wandering anomaly in the foreground: a lonely headlamp swinging its mist-flecked beam toward the Grand Wall boulders. And what they would have seen, though they could hardly have known it, was Ethan Salvo putting yet another dreary session into what would soon become his first V15.

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In general, the biographical details of high-level athletes, though occasionally interesting, only rarely feel related to what makes those athletes so good at what they do. But Ethan Salvo is, I think, something of an exception. Because to get a sense of how he developed the strength, habits, and values that propelled his breakneck journey from V1 to V15, I think it helps to look at who he was before he found climbing.

Ethan Salvo was born and raised in Markham, Ontario, a small city about 45 minutes northeast of Toronto, and he's been a serious athlete for almost as long as he can remember. His parents believed deeply in the educational value of athletics (his father was a devoted road cyclist; his mother did triathlons and ironmans), and they introduced him to a wide range of sports; but soon after joining his first swim team, at age 7, Salvo found himself deeply obsessed with competitive swimming. He'd always been a quiet kid, a self-described "black sheep," who enjoyed breaking down Rubix cubes and solving math problems; so he liked the fact that swimming was so individualistic, that his performance was up to him, and that he and his teammates spent most of each practice alone, their heads underwater. "It really spoke to this competitive nature that I have within me," Salvo says. "I got really ambitious with it. I was like: this is my sport, and I want to do it at a high level. I want to go to the Olympics."

By high school, he was spending 22 hours per week in the pool, getting up at 4:30 a.m. to swim laps before class, then returning to the pool each evening. But then one spring day near the end of his sophomore season, he experienced the sort of existential 360 that sometimes happens to youth athletes.

"I realized that I didn't have any balance," he said. "I had no time to do anything else." And he was lonely. "Even though I knew people at school, I didn't know anyone really well. I was between all the friend groups." And his teammates? They were friends, but he didn't even know them that well, since they spent the majority of each practice staring at their own shadows moving across the pool's floor.

"I can't take it anymore," he told his mom (who was also his swim coach). He said he was quitting.

She deflected, suggesting that he take the summer off and rejoin the team in September. So he did. "I remember going back after that summer and jumping in the pool and staring at that black line," he says. "After 20 minutes, I got out of the pool and said, 'I'm sorry, but I can't do this. I'm done.'"

It was a hard moment. While his father supported his decision, his mother, having put a lot of her own time and effort into supporting her son's swimming ambitions, still saw a lot of value in competitive athletics generally and swimming in particular--something that Salvo, with a bit of distance, agrees with. "Swimming added a lot to my life, both positive and negative," he says. "You learn a lot from discipline, and what it means to work hard for marginal returns."

Yet burnout is burnout, and Salvo was stubborn, and eventually their disagreement morphed into a conversation about how he was going to fill the time he was no longer spending at the pool. "You've been spending 22 hours a week doing this sport," she said. "You can't just quit and do nothing."

So Salvo cast around for some new athletic pursuit, and eventually, remembering how much fun he'd had at a climbing-gym birthday party years earlier, decided to give his school's climbing club a try.

On November 2, 2017, Salvo took the bus to the gym after school, yanked on a pair of big, flat Five Ten shoes, and began doing what he now describes as "glorified campusing."

"It was just total fun," he says.

But he immediately noticed something else: Compared to the other beginners on the team, he had--thanks to a mixture of swim strength and genetics--far more physical leeway to work around his bad technique. "I could get on the V3s despite being a total gumby," he says, "because my body was just strong enough."

Over the next few months, Salvo poured himself into climbing, and within a year he was sending V10s in the gym. Within two years, he was competing in national competitions. In August 2020, after less than three years in the sport, he visited Squamish and, in a single short session, polished off Shelter, a popular, crimpy climb that is generally considered V13 (he now thinks it's easier). By spring 2022, having retired from comps and sent most of the open projects at his local crag, Niagara Glen, Salvo decided to relocate to Squamish. Since then he's sent three V14s and made the first post-break accent of Zazen, the V15 low start to a popular V8 called Gibbs Cave, which lay unrepeated since it was first climbed in 2003.

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Wanting to know a bit more about Salvo--and about what it's like to progress so rapidly toward the elite levels of our sport--I spoke with him twice, first in February, shortly after his send of Zazen, and again in mid June, shortly after Lucas Uchida repeated the climb and (tentatively) confirmed its grade. In addition to talking about Zazen itself, especially the mystery that collected around the boulder after Harry Robertson established it in 2003, Salvo and I talked about how his burnout from swimming has informed his approach to climbing; how his rapid progress through the grades helped dictate his all-in approach to personal-limit boulders; and how his overall athletic career has been, in some ways, a steady progression from a competitive understanding of the value of sport, to something that more closely resembles art.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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