The Perfection of an Ever Better Form

In climbing, style counts

Art Gran, in his 1964 guidebook to the Gunks, makes the case against bolting.

“Climbing takes skill,” he says, “whether free or with aid. The art of nailing takes many years to master. However, there is no art to pure bolting. One can learn to place a bolt in a few minutes and, with enough endurance, ascend any wall in the world.”

There’s a lot to disagree with in this short statement.

To be sure, climbing takes skill, whether free or with aid. There is, though, an art to bolting, and that’s even true using a power drill, which was not something available to bolters in Gran’s day. There is, nonetheless, an art to deciding where to bolt, to minimizing the number of bolts, to sussing out a line even if it requires a few bolts.

Or even if it requires many bolts. There is, for example, the famous case of Royal Robbins, Warren Harding, and the Wall of Early Morning Light. Here, the leading Yosemite climber of the era went to repeat the most bolted line of the era, determined to not only climb the route without the bolts but to chop them as well. But, as one account puts it, after a few pitches “it became apparent that Harding had taken greater risks and done the route in a more adventurous style than Robbins had imagined.”

In other words, three hundred bolts in three thousand feet is a lot, but not enough to keep the route from being “dangerous and challenging.” Robbins completed the route without further chopping and would subsequently compliment the line and the achievement of it.

Even nowadays, when a route might have a bolt every eight or ten feet, placing bolts on rappel and with a power drill, creating a new climb takes an eye for a beautiful line and skill in deciding where to place the bolts.

There’s an irony to Gran’s position here. Climbers nowadays would take greater issue with the aid climbing and the pitons than with the bolts. Indeed, in just a few years, climbers in the Gunks, and soon elsewhere would start eliminating pitons from their racks. Leading Gunks climbers of the late 1960s, soon to be followed by the leading lights of Yosemite and Eldorado Canyon, in part inspired by the first Earth Day and the nascent environmental movement, began to look at nailing in a new, unflattering way — as a technique that damaged the rock, altered rock climbs, and denied to future climbers the same experience that earlier ascensionists enjoyed.

In short, pitons violated the maxim, quoted by Gran himself, to “leave nothing but tracks and take nothing but memories.”

The case against aid is even easier to make, as it was inherent in Gunks climbing right from its earliest days. Both Fritz Wiessner, who never aided in his 60 years of rock climbing, and Hans Kraus, who aided only rarely, were exemplars of free climbing. And it shows. The first route in the Gunks was climbed in 1935. The first aid route wasn’t until 1946, Hardware Route at Skytop. The first aid route in the Trapps, Something Interesting, was also done in 1946. There were already at least 22 other climbs in the Trapps, and 15 others at Skytop.

Aid, where it existed, was eliminated as quickly as possible. Retribution, for example, was freed just three years after it was first climbed in 1958. (We don’t know the aid rating, as it was freed before the first guidebook. We do know there was only one point of aid, and so a reasonable guess would be 5.8 A1.)

P38 took only two years. These were not exceptions. Nosedive took five years and Doug’s Roof took 18, but Squiggles Direct and Cilley Dickin' were both freed the same year they were first climbed (1963 and 1981, respectively).

Moreover, in their desire to avoid aid, the Gunks has routes where the FA is a toprope, rather than aid. Cilley Dickin' in fact is one. Kevin Bein freed his own Creature Features (5.11b/c) a year after toproping it in 1975. And even long-standing problems have recently been freed. To name but two, Into Thin Hair, first toproped by Peter Darmi in 1988, was freed in 2004 by Eric Weigeshoff at 5.11c. Alan Kline climbed Russ Clune’s 1993 Girly Man (5.11d R) in 2017.

There’s an even greater irony here. Gran himself wrote:

“The climbing history of the Shawangunks has developed around one major point, the perfection of an ever better climbing form. Climbing has reached a very high standard through the clashing and cementing together of many strong personalities.”

Whether changes in form have always been in the direction of perfection is another question. Hangdogging, rap bolting, and toprope rehearsing have all been, at least in the Gunks, matters of controversy at one time or another. But that’s a subject for another day.