“Thank you so much for responding. Unfortunately, I cannot find them online to order. Can you recommend any good shoes other than falcos? Actually, the shoes are for my boyfriend. Rather odd fact, but I wouldn’t be bothering you otherwise. We live in Seattle and have only tried indoor climbing and bouldering. If you could share any great carriers of beginner/intermediate shoes, I would be greatly indebted. Thanks so much.”

Sorry for the late reply, Veronica. I have stopped blogging on figur8.blogdrive.com so I don’t usually check for comments over there.

As a beginner, I used Rock Pillar. I didn’t really know much about climbing shoes back then so I can’t really comment intelligently about what I thought about them back then except that they were the cheapest climbing shoes I could find.

As I got better, I started to use Boreal and FiveTen. At that time Boreal rubber was on the decline and their shoes weren’t very good. Since then I’ve heard that they have improved their rubber, although I haven’t bought a pair since so I can’t comment whether I think it really has improved.

What I really liked was the FiveTen X-rays (though I don’t know if they still make them any more). I also liked the La Sportiva Katana. It’s been a while since I used that shoe as well, but last I checked, you could still buy them.

Seriously, though, I really think you should bring your boyfriend to a rock climbing shop and get him to try out all the shoes they have. Rock climbing shoes need to be a really good fit and the best way to check is to get your foot into it.

Ideally, lace-ups are the best because you can tighten them to fit your feet, I was always too lazy to bother with them. When you’re climbing outdoors, you don’t really want to wear your climbing shoes on the ground because dirt gets onto the rubber. Well, technically, you don’t really want to walk around in your climbing shoes any where because it wears down the rubber so that means having to take them off and put them on a lot, so if you get laces, it can get a bit tedious.

When I buy shoes, I usually prefer velcros or slippers. My only gripe with slippers is that when the shoe stretches, it can start to slip on your heel. Velcro is probably a nice compromise between the convenience of a slipper and the fit of laces.

One of the main reasons why you should bring your boyfriend to the shop to try on the shoe is because you need to make sure the fit is really good and different models of shoes and different brands will fit each person differently. As you get better at climbing, certain shoe styles will also be preferred by different people because the individual’s preferred climbing style.

There are all sorts of recommendations on how to find the right climbing shoe size. Here are some I have heard along the way:

- take your regular shoe size and take off two sizes. That will be the rock climbing shoe size you should be aiming for. Personally, I found this didn’t really work for me - I was wearing a UK 5 in normal shoes and my rock climbing shoe size would range between UK 2 and 3.

- take the smallest size you can squeeze your foot into. I thought this worked pretty well for me, except that when you’re new to the climbing scene, this can be an excruciating. Besides, when you’re new to climbing, you probably won’t notice the difference in your climbing ability so much based on the slight difference in fit of the shoe.

- when you wear your climbing shoe, your toes should be curled. The tighter fit of the shoe helps give your toes more support when you’re standing on really small edges.

The other thing is, when you get your boyfriend to try on shoes at the shop, see if they’ll let him climb a few moves with them. It’s always good if you can test it out on the wall first.

You can try this link:

http://www.rockclimbing.com/gear/Detailed/1910.html

Else you can try contacting Saltic again and ask them for a list of their retailers who stock in the US. I can’t imagine that they would not retail in the US being such a big market.

tel.: +420 577 210 639
e-mail: saltic@saltic.cz
http://www.saltic.cz

Hope that helps!

I’m wondering how I can order a pair of Saltic Falco shoes to the US. I went to their website, but it seems like I can’t order from them. Do you know of any stores, online or otherwise, where I can buy them?

Thanks so much,

Veronica