Clean climbing
Clean climbing is a rock climbing term. It describes techniques and equipment which climbers use in order to avoid damage to the rock.
Rock Preservation
Drilled and hammered equipment such as bolts, pitons, copperheads, bathooks and others scar rock permanently. A variety of passive and active protection devices are available which are far less likely to damage rock, when used sensibly. Such "clean" gear includes spring-loaded camming devices, nuts and chocks, and even good old fashioned items like plain nylon slings, for hitching natural features.
Even clean gear can damage rock, if the rock is very soft or if the hardware is impacted with substantial force. A falling climber's energy can drive a camming device's lobes outward with great force. This can carve grooves into the rock's surface, or, if the cam is in a crack behind a flake, the expansion can loosen the flake and eventually (or suddenly) split it off. Wedges (nuts) can also be forced into a crack much harder than the leader intended, or can "walk" themselves into deeper, more awkward and constricted spaces, and cracks have been damaged as cleaners try to chisel or power-yank stuck nuts out of their constrictions. In very soft rock, nuts and cams both can blow right through the rock and out of their placements, even with forces as small as those generated by tugging to "set" the piece.
Clean techniques and equipment are excellent tools, especially compared to the alternatives, but they are not a guarantee. Climbers make choices and are responsible for their impacts. A stuck nut can be left behind as a "fixed" piece for future parties - this choice trades off an almost-certainly temporary "littering" type of impact (sooner or later, somebody will retrieve it), contrasted against a possibly permanent impact which could come from insisting on forcing the nut out. An inexperienced party who want to attempt a difficult route on a soft rock like sandstone can postpone it, until such time as when the party can confidently judge their likelihood of passing lightly - this choice trades off the climbers' ambitions with their values of preserving the rock for future parties to enjoy un-altered.
History
The term "clean climbing" 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.[1] 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 today 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.[2]
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.[3]
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".[4] Around this time, Bill Forrest also produced a somewhat less successful range of passive chocks, but more notably started experiments with camming which went on to become 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.[5][6]
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, on some long-established climbing routes, these old scars form important features. Some of these particular routes "go clean" today in part 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 have been less useful on these particular routes 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[7].
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,[8] 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.[9][10] 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.
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