The following is an excerpt from a chapter of my book, Pumping Concrete: A Guide to Seattle-Area Climbing Walls. Although the project started as a guidebook to boulder problems and routes on the various climbing walls located in and around Seattle, it evolved into something more—a study of the history, literature, and anthropology of climbing walls and those who climb them. In the chapter "Climbing Wall History and Culture," I posed a question: Why do we climb on artificial walls? It's a complex question with no easy answer, but perhaps when it comes right down to it, it may just be because it’s fun.
Every climber has been asked “Why do you climb?" countless times, in one form or another. Their answers are rarely revealing. Some will say that they climb because they love to challenge themselves against nature. Others will say they climb for the adrenaline rush they get when putting themselves to their limit or the dopamine high that follows. Or they will say they climb because of the Zen-like quality of pure focus experienced during the act of climbing, of being in the “flow,” in the “zone,” or “one with the rock,” completely alive in the moment, part of a great cosmic unity, grooving on the experience gained in the moment between life and death, that interstitial insight into the fundamental “truth of life,” or some such bullshit. Some less transcendent climbers will even say there is no “why,” no reason at all why they climb, there is just climb; it is simply what they do, what they believe in with their whole being, the only thing that makes them happy, their very purpose in living an otherwise mundane life. Usually, climbers will say something curt such as “Why not?” or “If I have to explain it to you, you wouldn’t understand.” Or they will offer some cliché, such as George Leigh Mallory’s brilliant answer to a reporter’s dimwitted query as to why Mallory wanted to climb Mount Everest, the most famous words in the history of mountaineering: “Because it is there.” Or they will say they climb because climbing is a real sport that really matters because you can really die doing it, à la the famous quote popularly but incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports … all others are games.” Whole books have been written on this subject, and more certainly will be. Why we climb is complicated. Let’s just say we have our reasons.
But we’re not talking about real climbing; we’re talking about climbing on artificial climbing walls. Why do we do that? The usual reasons given are reasons of practicality: we climb on fake rocks to learn how to climb; to train for real climbing; to develop confidence in our ability; to get strong, fit, and honed; and for the social aspect of doing something we enjoy with other like-minded people. For many, relationships formed and tempered among and between climbers are paramount. We make friends at the climbing walls; we find potential climbing partners there, sometimes even life partners. The sense of community among regular visitors at a given climbing wall can be strong. “The Rock bound so many of us together and forged lifelong bonds,” wrote one UW Rock rat, August Welch, in memoriam to another, Chad Kellogg. But there are psychological and even spiritual reasons to climb on artificial walls. Some head to the rock to get a mental break from the problems of work or life; others view climbing—even on artificial walls—as a form of walking meditation, an alternative to sitting zazen, or the practice of a form of yoga or martial art.
If you explore the reasons why people climb on artificial walls, you will find that they are the same reasons people climb on real rocks; one can, in a more limited way, under the right circumstances, even commune with nature during a bouldering session on an outdoor climbing wall, more so perhaps at Schurman Rock than at the Mountaineers Wall. So, the notion that climbing on climbing walls is synonymous with real climbing is not so far-fetched. The art of climbing is, like any art, what you do, not only where you do it, and definitely in the eye of the beholder.
To some, climbing on artificial walls is a pointless exercise akin to a dog chasing its own tail. It seems inferior to real climbing because it is, well, not real. To these types, it is for practice: for training, and nothing more. They don’t change the holds and set new problems as they do in the gym; once you’ve done a problem a hundred times, what’s the point? But to the true devotee of artificial climbing walls, it makes no difference whether the “rock” is real if you can climb on it, and going around again is part of the attraction. According to former UW Rock rat Dan Lepeska, as quoted in a 1983 article, “There is a special thrill of spending an entire day climbing 30 or 40 feet of rock.” A special thrill, indeed. The iconic free-soloist, John Bachar, used to climb the same routes day after day as part of his solo circuit, always working to perfect his technique and climb each route more perfectly than the last time, a sort of Zen-like meditation on economy and fluidity of movement, until the climbing just happened. John Gill approached his bouldering in the same manner, repeating problems until he nearly flowed up them.
That climber you see at the UW Rock late at night or on Schurman Rock early in the morning, alone, working on a problem until he or she has it wired, then doing it again, and again, until it is perfected, without a key hold, then another, until all but one rock has been eliminated, or all of them, has the same spirit, a form of prayer of repetition and reduction. It is, one might say, a spiritual practice, or something like it. Repetition and routine permeate all forms of spiritual practice, especially bouldering—climbing reduced to its simplest form, something tied irrevocably to place that is lost without a sense of permanence. Gym climbers like the variety of new problems being set on a regular basis. But if you keep changing the holds, you lose the spirit of repetition; climbing becomes a mere activity, a mere series of movements, not a rite of devotion.
David Roberts captured the essence—and frustration—of climbing wall climbing in his article, “Bad Day at Practice Rock,” first published in Ultrasport magazine in 1985, later in Roberts’ book, Moments of Doubt. “It was a lovely, brisk afternoon in Seattle, and I was feeling miserable,” Roberts wrote. “As desperate as even the more obvious boulder problems seemed to me, they were beneath the attention of the regulars.” Roberts complained in his haughty-yet-self-deprecating way that the young hotshots at the Rock that day—who happened to include me, Mark Twight, and several other of the “coterie of regulars” at work on all of the hard problems that Roberts couldn’t fathom—were showing him up too casually, exposing his shortcomings as if it was just another day at the office. “For a climber of my generation, who grew up believing that bouldering was mere casual training for the real thing—big range mountaineering, of course—a visit to the University of Washington Practice Rock is like one of those nightmares in which you have gone back to your first-grade classroom but forgotten to put on any pants.”
Although Roberts took a mildly pejorative tone with us, I must confess that his article did raise the status of the UW Rock and its “politely punk” looking regulars immensely. He had, in his brief article, elevated us from mere climbing wall rats to “hard core” boulderers who dangerously eschewed ropes, wore chalk bags like six-shooters, sat down to start problems, and didn’t bother to use the biggest holds (if we used any holds at all) just to make things more difficult for ourselves. We had, Roberts’s article confirmed, elevated the art of bouldering to a higher level, turning a concrete structure designed for climbing practice into a crucible of hard bouldering like nothing the climbing world had ever seen. We considered it high praise that we had, with our perfunctory expertise and indifferent attitude while climbing boulder problems that even his friend just down from the Eiger North Face could not touch, made Roberts feel miserable. That was exactly what we were going for.
Roberts ended his article with a short scene involving a young girl running away from her parents to try to climb the Rock, only to be admonished and forced to reluctantly leave. “The hard young men gazed on in approbation,” Roberts wrote. “My whole day brightened; I had seen bouldering innocence, and could almost remember what it felt like.”
I have always felt the same way whenever a child or even a newcomer visits for the first time, especially one who is not intimidated in the least by the difficulties or dangers presented, who squeals with delight at how absolutely fun it is to play on the rock, even if it is not a real rock, who tries one way, then another, and remains resolute in his or her determination to climb the damn rock, even if only up the easy slab to the big ledge. This happens often at the UW Rock, but more often at Schurman Rock, Spire Rock, and the Kent Pinnacle, where loosely supervised children are more frequent visitors than actual climbers.
Kids see Schurman Rock for the first time and almost always come running toward it, yelling excitedly, then clamber up the easy side to the top, often followed by a hyperventilating parent insisting that he or she “be careful” or “get down from there.” The more adventuresome among the kids will gleefully ignore such admonitions and circle the rock eagerly, probing for a line of weakness up one of the steeper walls—a crack on one side, a buttress on the other—where the holds aren’t as small and the wall isn’t as steep perhaps, climbing up a few feet here before climbing down and trying another way, or perhaps even succeeding, suddenly filled with the spirit of adventure and exploration and the inexplicable compulsion to climb the rock, not just to the top via the easy route, but accepting the challenge to find a more difficult way, then another, and another, fiercely determined, grinning wildly.
If you ask these kids why they climb, they’ll tell you: “It’s fun.” That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose. It has to be fun, doesn’t it? Otherwise, why would anybody do it?
Alan Hankinson, in his book, The First Tigers (1972), described the motivations of the earliest rock climbers in England as follows: “They climbed, quite simply, because they enjoyed it, and they climbed hard because it was in their nature to pursue excellence.” This, I think, is the true spirit of climbing, whether on real rock or fake. You do it because you enjoy it, because it is in your nature to pursue excellence, even if you are only climbing a set of concrete holds on a man-made wall.
If you enjoy it, you see, it doesn’t matter if you’re only pumping concrete.
