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The first time I met the Colorado climber Chris Deuto, he was falling—a lot.
Maybe it was because he was only 1 year old, toddling and then face-planting, without fear, across a wooden dance stage at Colorado ski town, where his parents, Michelle and Josh (an old high-school friend from New Mexico), had come to a mutual friend’s outdoor wedding. Chris Deuto, now 20 and living in Boulder, Colorado, where he coaches the kids’ elite competition team at The Spot, has a wisdom that belies his years, the sort of “take things as they come” perspective many of us only get later—if ever.
Perhaps it’s because Deuto has climbed since age 7, when his parents began teaching him the ropes at the Boulder Rock Club. Or perhaps it’s because he, on the typical talented team kid’s trajectory, trained hard and blazed brightly (finals in Nationals, 5.14c, V14), but then realized the results-chasing, number-chasing mentality he’d fallen into was nuking his love of climbing.
So, that is the one thing he’d tell his younger self: “Get into climbing to enjoy it,” he says. “Don’t worry too much about the ego, because there’s a lot of that in climbing. And don’t measure your self-worth through what grade you climb. There’s always going to be someone who climbs harder than you—that’s just the nature of a sport that’s so vast.
“So just take it easy.”
When I spoke to Deuto in March 2024, he was just back from South America, where he and his friend Ben Sotero had climbed Aconcagua (22,837 feet), and Cerro Fitz Roy (11,171 feet) via the Afanasieff route (1,550 meters 30˚ 6a+). The trip marked a branching-out into trad and alpine climbing, away from the pressure Deuto had felt in the comp, bouldering, and sport scenes to always climb harder and better. Nonetheless, in his teens, he ticked Front Range testpieces like Mission Impossible, a Daniel Woods 5.14c in Clear Creek Canyon; established Eternal Now (5.14b), out a massive roof just up the road; and has bouldered V14, with Shadow Walker, at SwissCo, up in the alpine. Deuto is someone who could take the sport to the next level, and with his newfound, chill approach, just might.
Today, he tries to use grades merely to see where his climbing stands. And, if, say, he wanted to advance to the next grade—5.14d—he would pick a route that inspired him, rather than whatever soft 14d everyone is chasing for the green checkbox. “The grade is simply a marker,” he says. “Not the measurement.”
This was a hard-won realization. On road trips—which, after all, are supposed to be fun—Deuto used to compile a to-do list of V10-plus problems on his phone, then go solely after those, ignoring high-quality problems at lower grades, like that four-star V9 off to the side. “I wasted a lot of trips being in that check-the-box mindset,” he says. “It would get weird. I’d go try a V11, and if I didn’t do well, I didn’t have any interest in going back, because I just wanted to find another V11 that was easier at the grade.” Losing sight of our sport’s experiential nature as well as just how difficult performance climbing can be, he’d given up putting the effort in and diluted his precious try-hard—the thing that had gotten him so far in the first place.
Says Deuto, “Now I’m just trying to have climbing flow more.”