Review - Singing Rock Craggy Crack Gloves

Below you’ll find our review on the Singing Rock Craggy Crack Gloves. We tested every crack glove we could get our hands on and compare the pros and cons against all the other glove options out there. (Future reference, you can see every model of crack gloves on WeighMyRack.com/crackglove).

Brand Sizing – Runs really small. If you are at the bottom of your range, you may need to size up twice. Those with tiny hands have lots of options for fit, while bigger mitts may be left out. These are a tough glove to fit first try.

• The fit of the Craggy is the strangest we’ve tried. They are very small in surface area, which means most folks either find them pulling on the fingers or too narrow to close around the hand.
• My 21.5cm mitts are comically huge for the Medium they are supposed to fit according to Singing Rock, the Large fits decently but still feels very tight on the fingers and the XL wrist strap is almost too long to fit under the strap cover.

Note: We’ve had a couple conversations with wearers of the Craggy who have found themselves trimming the strap and sizing up, or always needing to add tape to keep it from catching and coming undone. 

Hand coverage – The least out of all gloves we’ve tested. If you size according to brand the knuckles are up to a full 2cm narrower than other gloves. There is also no wrist coverage by design. The glove is so thick it often helps keep the thumb away from rock, which is sort of like thumb coverage? Sizing up greatly increases hand coverage.

• Singing Rock has definitely come from a different direction than most brands when it comes to what parts of the hand to cover and how to cover them. When worn as recommended these gloves are often so small they do not even fit, or they fit in a very restricting and tight way that only covers the center of the back of the hand and sits above the wrist bone, not protecting the wrist.
• The extremely chunky build definitely makes these feel more like a plate that keeps you away from rock, rather than an additional layer of skin protection that moves with your hand bones. This isn’t the same thing as covering skin, but is worth noting that these gloves definitely feel and operate differently when it comes to protecting your skin.
• The Craggy has the largest and tallest strap loop which is completely covered in rubber, which means it actually offers a decent amount of lower palm and heel protection which we’ve found very helpful in offwidths.

Jamming Performance – The absolute thiccest. Tough to jam anything smaller than cupped hands.  Decent at jamming in flaring pods when sized on the lower end. Very good at adding volume to small hands and tons of structure for building fist stacks. Poor backward wrist mobility when oversized.

• Difficult to impossible for hand jams and thin hands unless you already have very thin mitts. Undersizing doesn’t always help because gloves can get impossible to fit at all on lower end. Skip these if thin or basic hands are your bag.
• Wider and rattly hands can be good to very good. The Craggy has some serious absorption capacity and can be especially good if the crack edges are sharp and jagged or if there are large crystals and irregularities inside the crack.
• Those seeking a glove for sheer volume and packing into narrow to medium fists stacks should look into the Craggy. Not great skin coverage for sliding around in deep fissures, so expect to add some tape in key places to keep the blood in.

Notable Features – Things that are only found on the Singing Rock Craggy Crack Glove

• The bright yellow leather of the Craggy is very thick and soft. Similar to a high end work glove, it bends and supports the hand well and provides a very durable base for the other glove components. It can get quite warm in sunny weather or after long jamming sessions and can take a while to dry out once it gets sweaty, but in colder climates the Craggy actually retains a bit of warmth for your winter crag bouldering sessions.
• The sewn elastic finger loops of the Singing Rock Craggy are a bit baffling and feel very different to the rest of the glove’s construction much less any other crack glove. If you have tactile issues with textures between your fingers you might want to try these on before you purchase. Some folks mind, some aren’t bothered, and some mind a lot.
• Due to the strange nature of fitting the craggy the wrist strap loop can function to add some really usable coverage to the base of the palm and inner wrist of the hand. An undersized glove won’t wrap around much usually, but an oversized one can be cranked down to nearly cover the entire wrist in thick chunky leather and rubber. Those seeking the beefy scaffold to build fat stacks in wide cracks might do well to take a look at this glove strictly for this reason.

The Craggy from Singing Rock is a tough glove to pin down when it comes to its performance. Like many gloves the jamming is best concentrated in one area, but strangely with the Craggy that area differs depending on the size of your hand and if you choose to size up or not.

In splitters and parallel cracks they do a pretty good (if not numb) job, but only if you can fit your hand in. We’ve had folks working the famous Indian Creek route Super Crack tell us they loved having the extra beef with a wide glove as the hands turn to fists up top, while climbers with baseball mitts for hands have often found them uncomfortably tight no matter the size and difficult to fit into even cupped hands. The friction of sandstone and granite can exacerbate both of these scenarios where a small-handed person now fits in bigger cracks more securely and the big handed person physically needs to do work to get into a jam.

When the rock gets slicker and the jams begin to flare, we’ve found those with smaller hands reporting feeling less secure and struggling to deform the glove and push into cracks. This extra effort has also been reported to cause fatigue and premature pump in these situations and by more than just those on the smaller side. Ham-handed climbers reported feeling quite secure on flaring, slick jams, provided they could get them in there, and overall seemed less fatigued by the glove.

Where they really start to shine is in the world of filling space and setting big, full body yarding, wide-pony style fist stacks. Because they are so stiff and padded, building wide, beefy, stacks blindly in the depths of a boulder felt very easy for the uninitiated among our testers and those with more wide prowess found them performing surprisingly like an overbuilt tape glove, if not a bit numb. Fitting oversized seemed to be the preferred method here, and taping of the wrist and thumb is mandatory to avoid springing leaks.

Overall the Singing Rock Craggy may seem like a wide aficionado’s dream glove, and something to avoid for anyone with dreams of perfect hands, but that is only part of the story. This glove fits so strangely and feels so different from the rest of the gloves we’ve tried that it can be difficult to recommend without knowing more about a person’s experience and measurements. While traveling around crags and giving folks opportunities to choose any brand they like, it was rare to see people reaching back for them when they had other options in our bag of tricks to try.

If you have the opportunity to try them on and get some jams in they are definitely worth checking out and can be great to add to your quiver for certain rock types and jams, but those differ from person to person and crack to crack. These aren’t a one trick pony, unless they happen to line up with the one trick you need them to perform.