Clean climbing

Clean climbing is a rock climbing term widely used in the 1970s to promote the exclusion of pitons in preference to Nuts and similar devices that avoid damage to rock (see citations below). In more recent years, some have applied the term more broadly to avoidance of any activity contrary to a "leave no trace" ethic, including chalk staining, vegetation cleaning, hold chipping/gluing and littering. .

History

The term emerged in about 1970 during the widespread and rapid adoption in the United States and Canada of Nuts (also called chocks), and the very similar but often larger "hexes," in preference to pitons, which damaged rock and were more difficult and time-consuming to install. Pitons were thus eliminated as a primary means of protection in a period of less than three years.

Rock scarring caused by pitons was an important impetus for the initial switch. Hence the term "clean climbing." When chrome molybdenum steel pitons replaced softer iron in the early 1960s, pitons became more easily removable, resulting in their more intensive use and alarming damage to increasingly popular climbing routes. In response, there was a "movement" among U.S. climbers around 1970 to eliminate their use.

Although bolts continue to be used for sport climbing, and aid climbers, rescuers and occasionally mountaineers may employ pitons, bolts and a variety of other hammered techniques, the average free climber today has no experience with hammering or drilling. Prior to the introduction of spring-loaded camming devices (in about 1980), clean climbing involved a safety trade-off in certain situations. Protection methods of today, however, are generally seen as faster, safer and easier than those of the piton era, and average run-outs between gear placements have probably become shorter on many routes.

Although English climbers had long used stones wedged into cracks and slung with cord for protection, this practice was rare in the U.S. In 1967, Royal Robbins returned from England with a sampling of artificially manufactured chock stones. He promptly made the first ascent of the Nutcracker in Yosemite Valley using exclusively these wedges. He subsequently wrote about this 6-pitch climb and others in Summit magazine and the American Alpine Journal but without much obvious immediate influence.

Within several years, another well-known Yosemite climber Yvon Chouinard began to commercially manufacture metal chocks, or nuts, in California. An important milestone occurred with the 1972 Chouinard Equipment Catalog, which included two articles on environmental concerns and climbing gear. One was written by Chouinard and Tom Frost; another was by Doug Robinson titled "The Art of Natural Protection". Around this time, Bill Forrest also produced a somewhat less successful range of passive chocks but more notably started experiments with camming which went onto the first Lowe Alpine System active camming devices (sometimes jokingly called "crack jumars").

Many other prominent climbers of the era, including John Stannard at the Shawangunks in New York. were influential participants in this early 1970s movement. As a result, climbers en masse rapidly adopted the technique, pitons quickly fell from favor, and the switch to "clean climbing" constituted a landmark change in the sport of rock climbing.

Conditions today

Piton scars from an earlier era are still widely visible. The permanent changes of past climbers have practical consequences for today's climbers.

Today, in some places these old scars form important features of established routes. Many routes "go clean" today largely because rock features which were too straight, smooth, thin (cracks) or featureless before the employment of hammered equipment now have sufficient irregularity today to enable the use of clean hardware such as chocks, offset or micro cams, hooks and others. Such hardware would not have been nearly so useful before the rock was altered. It's also true that certain routes which formerly were only ascendable on aid "go free" today for the same reason: there are in some places cracks smaller than fingertips which can now be climbed without aid because piton scars provide holds which didn't exist before.

Values and regulation

Most rock climbing, both long before and immediately after the development of "clean climbing", would now be classified as traditional climbing in which protection was installed and removed by each successive party on a given route. However, the term "trad climbing" only arose later, to describe that which is not sport climbing, a comparatively recent activity in which all protective gear is permanently and abundantly fixed on certain routes.

Fixed gear certainly existed in 1970 as it does currently. Some contemporary routes, like a number of long, limestone climbs in the Bow Valley, Alberta, are notable for fixed bolts at belay stances and for protection at relatively wide intervals, and thus a kind of hybrid of trad and sport is possible—if supplementary gear can be placed. Perhaps the most extreme example of currently acceptable non-"clean climbing" is the many via ferrata mountaineering routes, of primarily the Alps.

A relatively small number of climbers believe in varying degrees that fixed gear should never be placed on any route in order to preserve the rock and its inherent challenges. This long-standing cultural and sometimes obscurely personal question of doctrine is largely separate from issues that gave rise to the term "clean climbing."

Some climbing areas, notably some of the National Parks of the United States, have de jure regulations about whether, when and how hammer activity may be employed. For example, drilling is not banned in Yosemite, but power drills are. Other areas have de facto local ethics prohibiting certain activity. For example, bolting is not banned in Pinnacles, but the local climbing community doesn't tolerate rap-bolting — bottom-up route development is expected.

In the late 1990s, climbers very nearly lost the right to employ any equipment or technique whatsoever which would have left any trace at all in designated wilderness areas of the United States. The impact of certain legislation proposed at that time would have made it illegal to alter rock in those areas via hammering, but the proposed rules were so strict, they would have banned things like leaving a sling behind following a rappel, fixing a piece for future climbers to use, and leaving chalk on climbing holds. Climbers and other outdoors enthusiasts successfully lobbied to relax the regulations. To the extent that climbers self-regulate their impact on those areas, the "leave no trace" ethic remains a matter of personal responsibility rather than one of legislation and law enforcement.

References

• Peter Livesey Climber and Hillwalker magazine article