Approach Crocs: on the transmutation of soles and souls
2024
What happens when sneakers and climbing shoes break anti-miscegenation laws and have a baby? The chimera that results, an approach shoe, is a hybrid of a sneaker and a climbing shoe. It has the sole of a climbing shoe and the superstructure of a sneaker, but the soul of both. Like a sneaker, it’s comfortable; like a climbing shoe, it has gecko-sticky rubber. Climbers often wear them while hiking to cliffs (which can involve scrambling around on boulders or dicey rock slabs), or on easy climbs (since full-on climbing shoes tend to be tight and uncomfortable when worn for extended periods).
What’s better than sneakers? Crocs! Can you play on rocks in Crocs? Kinda! When they’re new, they have decent traction (comparable to sneakers); as their soles wear down, they become more and more slippery (to the point of being downright dangerous even on wet sidewalks, let alone granite).
What’d be better than Crocs? Crocs with the souls of climbing shoes! Crocs resoled with approach shoe rubber! (Crocs with a transmuted soul, if you will.)
Thus was what I Frankenstein’d over the course of 2023-2024. Their first excursion was on granite in Squamish. Squamish, outside Vancouver, is the Yosemite of Canada, but I wore them in service of rainbow trout rather than trad climbs. A. and I spent a rest day morning on the Checkamus, drinking coffee, reading, and fly-fishing:
Lots of curvy wet discontinuous granite talus—but no slipping! I wore the Crocs in active mode for pedestrial catch-and-release.
It took a year to make them—a few hours of research and work interspersed with months of higher priorities. The process was:
- buy a pair of Crocs
- buy a 12"x12" sheet of approach shoe dot rubber
- grind down the sole of the Crocs with a belt sander
- cut out the approach shoe rubber to match the Crocs
- glue the approach rubber to the Crocs with shoe cement
- clamp and let cure
- clean up the edges with a Dremel
Resoling climbing shoes (and approach shoes) is common practice; these days one usually outsources it, but you can still buy resoling kits retail, with your favorite climbing shoe rubber. Usually these only have enough rubber to resole the front half of two shoes (that’s the part that wears), not the whole sole, and I wanted specifically approach shoe rubber (textured rather than flat, for water dispersion). This was a bit tricky to source. Eventually I found 30x30cm sheets for sale from UnParalell (a new-ish climbing shoe company in Southern California) (their “dotty pressed sheet” rubber).
The Crocs were $28 (on mega-sale from Amazon); the shoe cement $13; the rubber was $32 (… plus $23 for normal-speed shipping)(which took about six weeks)(colleague D., an ex-climbing industry pro, joked about how everyone in rubber shoes is high on fumes all the time). That makes them cheaper than even the cheapest approach shoes on the market, if you value my labor at $0! It was… a brilliant idea, executed about as well as I could have executed it (i.e., not especially well).
