What Is Rock Climbing?

Rock climbing is the sport of scaling cliff faces. Our ancestors needed the skills of climbing to escape danger, to obtain food, and, later, as a means of spiritual fufillment. Pioneers, explorers, and military men all used climbing to attain their ends.

Originally, the objective of climbing as a sport was to reach the summit of a specific mountain peak. Climbers, like explorers, sought the easiest possible way of reaching this goal, and used any means available. They literally stood on each others' shoulders when necessary, they pulled on ropes, they hammered in wooden wedges and used ladders. This era, the beginning of the subsport of mountaineering, led to the conquest of many European peaks by tough individuals with little more than short lengths of hemp rope, heavy boots, and a large helping of courage.

As the obvious lines were exhausted, intrepid mountaineers began to seek more difficult technical challenges. British mountaineers began to train on their local crags for these more difficult journeys. But it was not too long before they noticed that these smaller walls offered challenges of their own. Challenges which required techniques that they had never needed before.

The idea of exploiting crags as well as mountains for sport and enjoyment quickly spread around the world. German expatriate Fritz Weissner discovered the Shawangunks in New York state, and climbed in Connecticut, even as he made important expeditions to the Himalaya.

Because their only safety equipment consisted of hemp rope knotted around the waist, and metal wedges - pitons - hammered into cracks, climbers made it part of their ethic to never fall. After all, falling could mean death in the mountains. And the rope around the waist was not elastic, and even if it caught the fall, the climber could suffer injury to the back and waist.

The development of kernmantle nylon rope, which could smoothly absorb the energy of a fall, meant that falling was not nearly as dangerous. Crag climbers used this advance to allow them to work out the more complex and difficult moves on their smaller cliffs. At the same time, British climbers began to innovate in the types of protection they placed in cracks. They developed "nuts" - hexagonal machine nuts threaded with cord - which could be wedged into cracks. This prevented the damage done to the cracks by the repeated use of pitons, and made the climber more thoughtful and craftsmanlike in arranging protection during the climb.

The development of nuts was the advent of the doctrine of "clean climbing" - that the climber should minimize damage or change to the rock. As in Connecticut, British crags are in densely populated areas and would quickly have been destroyed without the clean climbing ethic.

Climbers took the clean climbing ethic to great lengths. Some went so far as to engage in solo climbing - without ropes or protection. Others climbed risky routes like "Masters Edge", where there was only one insecure placement for protection on the entire climb. Climbers like New Englander Henry Barber pushed the frontiers of climbing in Connecticut, the United States, and around the world by using clean climbing styles with long runouts between protection, combined with incredibly difficult moves.

However, as rock climbing standards advanced, protection for the highest graded climbs was so negligible as to make those climbs deadly challenges. While East German climbers developed climbs of a standard of danger known almost nowhere else (their idea of protection was to thrust knotted slings into cracks, and to untie from the rope so they could thread it through sparsely placed metal rings in the rock - this on climbs today rated 5.12 and above), other climbers adopted permanently-placed bolts which were drilled into the rock, which offered greater safety at the price of damage to the rock. With this began a great controversy that still rages in climbing today. (Note that bolts are not accepted anywhere in Connecticut or in the Shawangunks of New York).

Leading is the normal form of climbing - a leader climbs first, placing protection, belayed by the second. The leader clips the rope into protection as it is placed, and after reaching the top, belays the second, who cleans the protection from the cliff. Lead routes in rock gyms are typically styled after bolted climbs.

In places like Connecticut, where almost all of the cliffs are less than one hundred feet tall, the use of top-roping is common. This style of climbing is also used in the gym. With this style of climbing, the climber does not need to place protection at all. The rope is run through an anchor at the top of the climb, back down to where a belayer stands at the bottom, constantly prepared to catch a fall using a special belay device.

One other style of climbing has recently become more popular. Bouldering is the act of scaling small rock faces, and rarely involves climbing higher than ten to fifteen feet. Because of the small size of the rocks involved, bouldering problems are among the most difficult and challenging in the world. Some areas, like Fontainbleau in France, or Camp 4 in Yosemite, have become famous because of their excellent bouldering. Naturally, to be safe, anyone bouldering must have a safe landing zone, and it is a good idea to have someone standing by as a spotter, in case the boulderer falls and must be kept from stumbling into danger after the fall.