One of the great ironies I experience in climbing is hearing the word “ethics” fall from the lips of other climbers. Taken as a whole, there seems to be an inverse relationship between how well someone climbs rock and their knowledge of genuine ethics. Ethics as a discipline has to do with behavior, and more specifically how our behavior is to be understood in the light of moral theology. After all, if there’s no such thing as a standard of absolute right, there can be no such thing as absolute wrong. By any rational measure, ethics should begin with off-the-rock behavior, and only when those seminal issues have been dealt with should we talk about how we climb. But I digress. This magazine’s about climbing and not about campground behavior, thankfully, so I’ll limit my remarks to the “ethics” of the vertical world.
Before I talk about what ethics is, I need to point out what it is not. The iconic Yvon Chouinard once made an important distinction that we would do well to heed today. He pointed out that there are really two issues raised by climbing: one is indeed ethical, and the other merely stylistic. Ethics, to Chouinard, have to do with the impact we have on the rock medium itself: Do we leave the rock the way we found it? Is our climb destroying the rock or altering it in such as way as to deprive future generations of the experience we ourselves are having? The advent of nuts, cams and other forms of clean protection and aid has largely removed ethics as a problem in climbing, at least in terms of the rock itself. Ditto the poop tube. To those who would chip or glue I have one bit of advice: get better or go to an easier route. Or should I say that in French? At any rate, if you don’t wreck the rock and you leave your music, your drugs and your dumbass dogs at home, you’re pretty close to being an ethical climber.
Now Yvon wasn’t done there. He identified another issue evoked by our climbing, and that is the issue of style. When most climbers get pissed off and start bolting or chopping bolts, they’re really not concerned with ethics at all, but with style. Here’s the argument: The first ascensionist, who’s probably without a life, puts up a route. He does it without knowing what he’s going to find, and he probably puts in theminimum protection and anchors because he’s pretty good and no doubt in a hurry. To suggest he underbolts because he’s broke would be unkind and often untrue. When he’s done, he’s accomplished something that’s unique in alpinism; he’s gone somewhere nobody else has been before, and lived to tell the tale, at least to MountainProject.com. No matter how easy the route, there are special skills involved in the FA that will never beasked of any other. If he does it all with natural gear, great; there’s no problem. But if natural features are lacking, then he must decide, “How and where do I bolt?” The horror stories we’ve all heard about bolting on lead by hand, hanging from a skyhook on a crystal, etc. are enough to make us change our collective diapers. Such is the lot, but also the glory, of the first ascensionist.
If things stayed that way, all to the good. But sometimes these new routes are actually attractive and worth climbing, and that’s when the trouble starts. Another climber who might have a life reads about the route on the internet and decides to give it a try. Up he goes, cursing the whole time about the shitty beta offered by the FA’er. Many a route setter seems to take a perverse delight in offering minimal, if not downright misleading, instructions to “enrich” the climbing experience (epic potential) of those who follow. A good case in point is a climb here in Arizona at the Western Stronghold. The directions for the second pitch say you should go up and left “and belay when you get tired of the rope drag.” The correct spot was about 50 feet out. I, being expert at minimizing rope drag, went 120 feet out. Okay. The perils of this, shall we say, Spartan aesthetic are not limited to the realm of route-finding. Our second ascensionist goes up and finds that he’s not as confident as numero uno. He’d like a little help when the runout exceeds his sphincter factor, and he wants the belay and rappel anchors to be solid. If you’re not from Looking Glass Mountain, NC, you might want to attach to something besides some manky pine stub. So what happens? Out comes the bolt gun, and the route gets “fixed.” The FA’er may or may not be consulted, but it doesn’t really matter. The upgrades are made in the name of safety, and who can argue with that?
Well, most FA’ers will in fact argue. They perceive that the stud factor for the climb has just dropped like a 250 pound climber with an 8-year-old belayer, and with it, their personal machismo. They’re livid. This is their mark in the world. Instead of spraying bushes like a tiger or clawing trees like a grizzly, they leave their scent on the rock in terms of tough, run out, unsafe routes. The hypothalamus tells them there’s direct correlation between the length of their runouts and that of their sex organs, and they don’t want to lose street cred. The results of all this sandbox nonsense, of course, are the bolting wars we’ve had in Boulder and other spots where short approaches and an overactive outdoor recreation ethic allow good and not-so-good climbers to mingle. So far, there has not been a solution to this dilemma. Guys get into fist fights at Red Rocks, they have peace powwows in Boulder, and things may get calmed down, but the bitterness of competing interests remains. What’s to be done? I, for one, have an answer that should keep everybody happy. Here’s how it works.
First of all, the onus in not on the first ascensionist. The route author gets to make the climb as hairball as he wants. He can take tumbles from 30 feet out, rasp his skin to the bone, pull rap anchors, whatever his black heart desires. Free solo the damn thing for all we care: you’re not really contributing much to general social or economic welfare; you’re just having fun and calling it cosmic or meaningful. But just as the Indian learned that he didn’t own the great plains, you don’t own the rock either. Eventually, assuming your route isn’t a total choss pile five miles from the nearest road, somebody else is going to climb it. Now here’s the good part. The second ascensionist can only retrobolt if he promises to use bolts with pink hangers. Don’t worry about them being visible; I climb past bolts all the time and fail to see them even when they’re shiny and right next to me. Screw the BLM and the aesthetes; we’re talking about bringing peace to the pitches! Use bolts with pink hangers, and then the next guy coming along has a choice. Does he chicken out and clip pink, or does he go bold and savor the experience the first ascensionist had? The same goes for belay stances and rappel anchors. Don’t trust that twig that sways under your weight? Drill, but hang pink.
Think of the advance this represents! I’m one of those guys who never met a bolt he didn’t like. Well, almost. There’s a bolt just before the scary traverse on pitch three of Selaginella in the Valley that, if you clip it, will produce so much rope drag Hercules would start to whimper. But really, I’d rather climb, forget the drama, and simply enjoy the scenery. I know how long my member is, and it doesn’t shrink when I clip, even if it’s a retrobolt. The FA’er, who thinks he’s hung like Saddam, will have the privilege of asking, in a condescending tone of those who follow, “Well, (ahem) I know you did the route, but did you clip pink?”
So drop the ethics talk; you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Your concern is style, and this is one solution that keeps everybody happy. Abandon the notion that “one size fits all,” and realize we do the same thing for very different reasons. Some of us poor suckers actually have jobs, families and responsibilities that cannot absorb a broken ankle/leg/back/neck and keep on grooving. Some of us are okay climbers who are good enough to have fun, but who, compared to the luminaries of the sport, really suck now and always will. The secret to garnering our respect is not to make things so hard we can’t do them, but to allow us to do them on our terms, so we can then marvel at the conditions you did them under. My wife tell me style always involves color, and for many of us, that color is going to have to be pink.
This article is not blatantly sexist. It does not imply that all first ascensionists are male. It does, however, imply that all first ascensionists who whine about retrobolting are often male.
