There used to be so few climbers that it didn’t matter where one drove a piton, there wasn’t a worry about demolishing the rock. Now things are different. There are so many of us, and there will be more. A simple equation exists between freedom and numbers: The more people, the less freedom. If we are to retain the beauties of the sport, the fine edge, the challenge, we must consider our style of climbing; and if we are not to mutilate and destroy the routes, we must eliminate the heavy-handed use of pitons and bolts.
ROYAL ROBBINS, BASIC ROCKCRAFT
YOU MAY NEVER want to go near the mad sport of rock climbing. That would be very sensible. There are easy ways up every mountain in the East but one (the south summit of Seneca Rock in West Virginia), so why bother with the technical difficulties, muscle strain, and abject terror that are involved in rock climbing?
The story that follows is not intended to alter one iota your very rational decision. The reason we relate it is because we’re talking here in this series of chapters about something called stewardship. And we know of no more inspiring example than what happened in the sport of rock climbing roughly 20 to 25 years before the publication of the second edition of this book. At that time, especially at the cliffs of New York’s Shawangunks, a strange and unlikely collection of outdoor recreationists (a) perceived the impact they were having on the fragile environment around them; (b) set about to change their ways so as to protect that environment; and (c) very largely succeeded through group consensus, peer pressure, and pure volunteerism, with no regulations, restrictions, or government action of any kind.
First, a word about what technical rock climbing involves, because an understanding of one or two points is essential to appreciating this story.
The rock climber, contrary to what a lot of people think, doesn’t climb the rope. (Rock climbers climb rock, rope climbers climb rope.) He or she ascends the cliff by using whatever cracks, tiny ledges, nubbins, or other protrusions in the rock may afford handholds or footholds. The fewer or less well defined these protrusions, the more difficult the climb.
So what’s the rope there for? One reason: in case the climber falls. The rope and all of that jangling collection of things that climbers carry over their shoulders or otherwise attach—variously referred to as “hardware,” “gear,” “the rack,” and so forth—are used solely to protect the climber in case of a fall, or at least most of the time these days that’s their sole function.
How does this protection system work? The fundamental point is that only one climber moves at a time, and another climber holds the rope in such a way that he can catch and control a fall if it occurs.
For the second person on the rope it’s all extremely simple. The leader is up there somewhere, anchored to a ledge (by means that we’ll presently describe) and holding the rope. As the second climbs, the leader takes up the slack. If the second falls, he is instantly caught by the leader.
The leader is considerably more exposed. To protect himself, the leader either picks a solid tree growing on a ledge, finds a chockstone drives in a piton, or places an artificial chockstone (from “the rack”) in a crack, then attaches a snaplink (or carabiner) to this “protection,” through which the climber runs the rope. From then on, should he fall, the second person can control the fall through that point of protection. “Leader falls” obviously are longer, more scary, and more risky, because the leader will fall twice the distance he has climbed above his last protection—from his high point down to the protection point and then an equal distance below that—before the rope comes tight.
We trouble you, gentle reader, with all this detail only to point out one fact: the critical importance to the rock climber of this “protection.” Without protection the leader would be literally risking his life on every lead and would be strongly inclined to avoid any difficulty that he wasn’t absolutely sure he could handle with complete confidence. But with good protection, new worlds open up of difficult and spectacular routes up incredibly steep and exposed cliffs. If a fall occurs it should have no serious consequences.
Now to the first point of our story: Up until the early 1970s, rock climbers almost universally employed that well-known symbol of their sport: the piton. (Pronounced like “feet-on,” not “bite-on.”) Pitons were variously shaped pieces of metal that were hammered into cracks in the rock. At the outside end of the piton was a hole through which a carabiner could be attached for securing the rope. Pitons were in universal use by climbers as late as 1969. Every climber carried a hammer and a rack of assorted pitons, varying in size to fit the various cracks that the climber might encounter on the cliff.
Where the leader runs into a blank section of rock, or one in which there are no cracks or any other way of driving in a piton or fixing natural protection, he has a new problem. In most such situations, the leader either gulps and climbs carefully until he can get to some place higher where protection is possible; or, if it looks too difficult to risk that, he simply won’t climb there—he “backs off,” as they say. However, another possibility is to go up to some reasonable stance on that face and laboriously drill a bolt hole right into the rock, using a kind of star drill, then place a bolt with a hanger in it, and affix the carbiner and rope. Placing bolts was a rare occurrence for most climbers, however. Many leaders climbed for years without ever placing a bolt. The piton was the standard protection used until 1969.
Slowly, in the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s, an environmental conscience began to hit the rock-climbing community, an outwash from the environmentalist awakening of these years.
The climbers looked around the areas in which they were climbing. They saw that the paths they trod to get to the base of popular climbs were becoming beaten down, and erosion was starting to take place. They saw that the places they camped were too often littered and unsightly. But most of all they saw that where they were repeatedly driving pitons into the rock and removing them, the cracks were becoming scarred and disfigured. On some popular routes, places that had once taken a 1/2-inch-wide piton now required a 3/4-inch or 1-inch piton due to the widening of the crack as a result of repeated placements and removals.
The climbers also watched uneasily the growing popularity of their sport. They realized that all of these adverse effects were made much worse by the increasing numbers of climbers at the better cliffs. They sensed that if the sport became a popular fad, the environmental destruction could become a tragedy.
Along about this time, a few climbers came back from England with some gadgets already in use over there, called artificial chockstones, or simply “nuts.” Instead of banging them into horizontal cracks, you quietly slotted them into vertical cracks. The ideal nut placement is a crack of varying width (as most are)—you slide a nut in where the opening is large enough to take it in, then slide it down inside to a point where the opening is too narrow to let it out. If a fall is exerted on such a nut, it simply drives it farther into the narrow part of the crack, and it may (in the ideal case) be actually more secure than a hammered-in piton. Placing a secure nut, though, especially for those relatively new to the game, was often a bit more difficult than simply banging in a piton, and required a careful eye to the possibilities.
It should not be supposed that the first climbers to use nuts were motivated primarily by environmental concerns. Not at all. The British climbers started to use them to save money, pure and simple. The first nuts were actual machine nuts pocketed by down-at-the-heels Brits who couldn’t afford to (or didn’t choose to) buy pitons. Then they began to fabricate nuts especially for climbing.
The two men whom we first encountered using nuts in the northeastern United States, Willy Crowther and Chuck Loucks, did so primarily because they were intrigued with the more interesting art of placing nuts, the subtlety of the game as well as its novelty. The rest of us began to imitate them at first because Willy and Chuck were immensely popular climbers whose style we admired and wished to emulate.
As we began to use nuts more often, we began to enjoy a new dimension to our climbing. Because some nut placements were tricky or tenuous, we found ourselves constantly on the lookout for possibilities. This brought us to a more continuous observation of the rock around us, a greater awareness of its qualities and configurations, and a closer association with that vertical world of granite or conglomerate.
But in the climate of environmentalist concern that pervaded the years around 1970, it wasn’t long before we noticed something else besides the economics and the engineering aesthetics of nuts. When you slotted a nut and your second removed it, the rock was undefiled. No ugly scar. No hammer damage. No obtrusive banging noise. In a very short time, a number of leading climbers perceived in nuts the key to ending the environmental havoc being wreaked by pitons.
By 1971 a full-scale campaign was underway among the more environmentally concerned climbers, both in the popular northeastern climbing areas and throughout the country, to preach the nut ethic. “Clean climbing” was proclaimed as the new order. Pitons were condemned as virtually immoral. Influential climbers began ostentatiously leaving their hammers at the base of the cliff, committing themselves to either finding natural protection or using nuts. Great prestige was accorded to climbers who succeeded in climbing the classic routes “all-nuts”—that is, without using a single piton, either of their own or of those left by preceding parties. If you can’t find a way to protect a difficult move cleanly, said the new ethic, don’t place a piton—back off and try again another day.
If pitons were frowned upon, bolts became even more scorned. Drilling bolt holes was viewed as an offense several times more heinous than driving pitons.
Understand, now, that all of this was a matter of voluntary action and education. There were no enforceable rules in climbing areas, no public regulations affecting the sport (except at a few highly resented parks). Climbers are as individualistic and unregimented a group as you’ll find anywhere. They will not be told what to do by anyone.
And yet, within the space of roughly three years, 1969–72, the nut revolution swept most climbing areas. In 1969 you could walk along the base of any northeastern cliff on a good weekend and hear the ring of hammers on pitons from one end to the other. By late 1972 the sound of hammered steel was so rare that it attracted considerable attention—and outrage. The British had a contemptuous expression: “A man who would drive a piton into British rock would shoot a fox!” Nuts reigned supreme.
The speed of this revolution, accomplished solely by moral suasion and consensus in a group that would not take orders from anyone, was and remains a miracle. It can only be explained by the intensity and sincerity of the feeling most climbers had for the environment in which they climbed.
In any reaching of consensus, there are bound to be individuals who take a more prominent role than others in articulating the impulse toward the new way of thinking. Within the eastern climbing community the leading force in getting the new ideas across was a most unusual climber named John Stannard. Well known to every climber because of his extraordinary skill at the most difficult climbs, Stannard used his prestige to advance what he most earnestly believed in: the salvation of climbing areas by the transition to “clean climbing” and by climbers accepting the responsibility to be sensitive stewards of the land on which they enjoyed their climbing. Stannard ceaselessly evangelized for the abandonment of pitons, conducted and publicized tests to prove the safety of nuts, started a newsletter to spread the good word, made an effort to climb with as many climbers as possible to show them how it could be done and earn their goodwill, and otherwise set an example of dedication to environmental consciousness that others might sometimes think weird, but that they could not fail to respect—and ultimately follow.
In the western climbing scene, another influential and astonishing figure was Yvon Chouinard. One of the earliest of the “big wall” climbers at Yosemite Valley, Chouinard started designing pitons back in the old days and built a business that dominated the market. Everyone used Chouinard pitons (as well as Chouinard carabiners, Chouinard hammers, and so on). Then, when the Great Nut Awakening came, Chouinard voluntarily took a leading position in scuttling his own piton business to get everyone to switch to nuts. Chouinard makes nuts too, of course, but he has never achieved the ascendancy over the nut market that he enjoyed when everyone used pitons. Like Stannard, Chouinard put his money where his heart lay: in fighting for a better climbing environment.
Others, such as Royal Robbins and Galen Rowell, were influential in advancing the new ethic, but the main point is not to single out individuals. The main point is that the overwhelming majority of the heterogeneous and zealously individualistic climbing community embraced the nut revolution and made it work. In the particular climbing area that we were closest to at the time, the Shawangunks, we would think it fair to say that the transition from pitons to nuts would have happened in a remarkably short time anyway, but that without any question the driving pressure of Stannard’s enthusiasm and example was what made it happen so quickly.
There were several other ways in which climbers’ environmental concern showed up.
1. Absence of litter. Rock-climbing areas came to contain less litter per number of people than any other outdoor recreation area. Climbers tended to pick up not only their own trash but that of thoughtless nonclimbers. Some climbers, Stannard among them, even prowled the edge of the highway near climbing areas on Sunday mornings, picking up every shred of litter from passing motorists.
2. Erosion control. In the early 1970s climbers began to work out arrangements with owners and managers of the lands on which they climbed to provide for stabilizing the paths to and from the cliffs. Climbers volunteered their own labor to work on moving large rocks into eroded trail beds, digging water bars, rerouting access trails where erosion seemed unstoppable, and brushing in the abandoned routes to give vegetation a chance to grow in. On one weekend at the East’s most crowded climbing center, a bunch of climbers decided to stabilize a path to an area known as “Beginner’s Slab.” The volunteer crew included four of the country’s top dozen climbers, men who could have no personal interest in a cliff as easy as the Beginner’s Slab, but who gave up their own climbing for an afternoon in order to help preserve that particular area.
3. Discouragement of publicity. With awakening concern about damage to the rock and access slopes, climbers began to realize that the fundamental problem was their own growing numbers. There was an expression heard often those days: We don’t want to have happen to climbing what happened to downhill skiing. (Once an adventurous sport for only the most hardy, the boom in popularity brought crowded slopes, lift line queues, great expense in both equipment and weekend costs, standardization of techniques and style, an army of fashionable hangers-on, along with such abominable concepts as “après-ski” and the “ski bunny.”) Rock climbers began actively to discourage publicity. Reporters and photographers were treated to the unusual spectacle of people who did not thrill at the prospect of seeing their names and faces in print. The occasional climber who did a beer commercial for television was mildly ostracized by his climbing associates. Inevitably, some outsiders (and even some climbers) criticized this movement as elitist—climbers trying to keep their sport to themselves and shut off outsiders. Their criticism sadly missed the point: Climbers deeply felt that the integrity of the sport and the beauty of climbing areas would be ruined for everyone if the scene were transformed into a popular fad.
4. Rescues. Whatever the growing cost to the public of searches and rescues for lost or disabled hikers, the rock climbers tried to take care of their own. If a climber did get hurt, as they occasionally did for very obvious reasons, it was the climbers themselves who got him off the cliff, out to a road, and to a hospital. When an accident occurred in a popular climbing area, other climbers would stop the climb they were on and take on the difficult and delicate work of littering an injured person off the cliff face and over the rough terrain of the approach. Very often they didn’t even call for a public ambulance at that point. In any crowd of climbers, someone usually had a van (because climbers like to be able to sleep in their cars at trailheads) and would drive the injured to the nearest hospital. In the early 1990s, the self-help effort has been formalized in the popular climbing areas of New Hampshire with the formation of the Mountain Rescue Service, an entirely volunteer group of climbers who are available for all kinds of technical rescues, summer and winter. In many western climbing areas similar groups are on call. At other places the process may not be institutionalized, but it is still remarkably effective. Some climbing clubs schedule weekends devoted to practicing rescue techniques.
5. Cooperation with related land objectives. Land managers of 1970 began to find that, where climbing impinged on other outdoor programs, climbers could be most cooperative. For example, researchers decided that the habitat on one popular climbing cliff was perfect to attempt the restoration of that most marvelous of endangered bird species, the peregrine falcon. Discreet signs posted at the base of climbing routes that led up by the release site were all it took for climbers to cooperate. During the crucial period for the young birds, climbers stayed off those routes.
In no other field of outdoor activity that we can think of did a group of recreationists so swiftly and so completely live up to the responsibility to safeguard the environment from the adverse effects of its own actions.
In describing these trends, we have seriously erred if we’ve given you a picture of climbers as stuffy do-gooders, pompously standing up for law and order, motherhood, and the American way. Good grief, no! Climbers of that day were scruffy, bearded, sloppy, dirty, and foul-mouthed, and their devotion to most of society’s laws fell somewhere between that of highway robbers and bank embezzlers.
Highly individualistic, they regarded themselves as alienated from society’s strictures, sometimes even conceiving of climbing as a way of achieving a freedom that was denied them elsewhere. Some of them were tolerably well behaved, but others violated social mores at every turn. They changed clothes on the highway, swore in public places, and wound up most Saturday nights drunk or stoned. Furthermore, they smelled.
You wouldn’t want them in your living room, but that 1970 generation would take good care of the most fragile of mountain environments. You couldn’t trust them with your daughter, but you could trust them with the outdoors more than any other single group.
We wish the story ended here. Alas, there is an unhappy sequel, which we’ll get to later in the book. We wish we could shut our eyes to the sequel and focus only on the story we’ve described in this chapter.
Why have we told you this story? Because this book is about the new backwoods ethic of concern for protecting the remaining wild places of this country. It is about stewardship for the land. We think hikers and backpackers have made a good beginning toward changing their attitudes and practices in the outdoors, so as to walk more softly over the fragile land. But the hiking trails and camping sites of the backwoods still reveal that we have a long, long way to go. Too much of the time it takes official regulations to save a backwoods environment from destruction, and then we’re all the losers anyway for having our freedoms curtailed and for having to confess that we couldn’t exercise enough self-discipline to exist without regulations.
But look at what the climbers of 1970 accomplished and gain hope. In three years—just three years!—this band of unreconstructed individualist reached a consensus and changed their ways. Surely we hikers and backpackers can do the same. The goal is worth the try. It is nothing less than the integrity of the backwoods environment, which we all love so well.