When it comes to crimes against climbs, chipping is at the top. Chipping is actually two crimes in one: it’s a crime of stealing as well as a crime of lying. By chipping, you’re stealing something from every future climber—and even stealing something away from those who came before. The lie is to convince yourself, or others, that you’ve actually done the route—but, of course, you haven’t. If you have to chip something to climb it, you get no points. You lose and so does everyone else.

In fact, maybe that’s the real reason people chip. No one can be better than you if you take away the opportunity for them to prove that they already are.

I have a hard time deciding which of those two crimes I loathe and resent more. But I have an even harder time believing that climbers don’t already know not to chip holds. Of course they know it’s wrong. They just don’t care.

“Chipping” typically refers to using tools, like a hammer and chisel, to alter/damage the holds on established routes such that they’re easier to grab and therefore the route is easier to climb. Again, everyone understands that this is wrong. It’s so obviously wrong, in fact, that it boggles the mind as to why it even happens.

And yet it does. In the past week, people have posted photos of the aftermath of a spate of chipped boulder problems around Utah: in Joe’s Valley and Little Cottonwood Canyon. Most of the problems are around the V7-V9 grade, which leads one to suspect that these crimes are being committed by a single person.

Let me digress a moment to address this individual, on the off-chance they’re reading this: Fuck you. V7 isn’t even impressive. It’s the beginner’s idea of a hard climb, and literally no one cares if you climb it. I climbed V7 within my first year as a complete gumby while wearing Tenayas. Why are you chipping V7s? Idiot. Seriously, fuck you, you entitled little scrotum-licking chud.

There may be interesting debates to have around whether holds should be altered by first ascentionists when preparing virgin rock to be climbed enjoyably and relatively safely by the masses, but there are virtually no interesting debates worth having around the renegade act of altering holds on pre-established climbs in order to cut the route down to your own size. It’s wrong—and obviously so.

Chipping is a kind of crime so self-evidently unacceptable, and pointlessly absurd, as to boggle one’s mind as to why it ever happens. I mean, if a problem is too hard you could just, you know, find an easier one. You could walk around to the top. You could take up bowling instead. Or you could also just lie! Seriously, we would all rather that you just lie about having climbed a problem instead of permanently ruining it for everyone else.

And yet … there is a some pathetic little incel out there chipping V7s because he thinks he can get away with it, and because he has deluded himself into believing that it’s OK if he does it. Again, this is just an absolute fucking loser.

When shit like this happens, based on what I see on social media, people want to turn it into a referendum on things they already hate. Some of the things I’ve seen blamed for this chipping spree include:

• climbing gyms
• soft grades
• a spoiled generation raised by snowplow parents
• Instagram culture
• the 1980s
• inadequate gym-to-crag education
• too many people / crowds
• lack of mentorship
• 8a.nu

While I share everyone’s critiques of most of these things, I am not persuaded that any of them are to blame here. Again, it’s self-evident that chipping is both ethically wrong and utterly self-defeating. More education isn’t what’s needed because the person who is doing the chipping almost certainly already knows that what they’re doing isn’t cool. That’s why they’re doing it in secret, when no one is watching, and then lying to themselves to justify their vandalism. Again, so long as they aren’t caught, they don’t care.

People want gym culture or lack of mentorship to be the source of the problem because that means that we can fix this and ensure it doesn’t happen again. But some things, like human nature, can’t be fixed—they can only be imperfectly managed. For example, let’s say you could wave a wand and create a culture in which art is the most sacred thing in the world. Even if 99.99% of people in the world now love art, there will still be that random anti-social lunatic who tries to draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa with a Sharpie. This is one of the reasons why that painting is behind an indestructible glass case. Because human beings have dark, weird, brutal impulses that can’t be eliminated; they can only be, at best, managed or contained via authoritarian measures.

This latest spate of chipping falls under a broad problem I identified last year called “Climbing’s Popular: What did you think would happen?” The gist of this trend is the idea that as more people enter the sport, there will be less homogeneity in terms of personality types and greater probabilities of personality defects in our midst.

It’s happening: petroglyphs have been bolted; boulders have been vandalized with axle grease; boulders are currently being chipped … there’s so much more, including stuff that’s so bad it deserves its own article, such as coaches having inappropriate relationships with their teenage athletes, and horrible incidents of sexual assault.

And while these are terrible things that have happened (and will continue to happen) in the climbing world, they are not of the climbing world. This is also important to remember. Thankfully, all of these terrible things are quite rare. Every day, around the world, thousands of people get together at crags, boulders, and gyms and enjoy this sport together in a great, if normal and mundane way.

It’s a depressing asymmetry of society that one bad person can ruin things for everyone. It happens. People will surprise you by just how weird, lonely, insecure, and desperate they can be. It’s frankly scary to consider the amount of delusion that’s required to chip a boulder problem, climb it, and subsequently tell yourself you have done something worth celebrating.

But these delusions won’t be eliminated by having more gym-to-crag clinics, giving the Access Fund more money, or having more mentors. They can’t be solved because we can’t put our boulder problems behind a glass class in the Louvre, and it’s not reasonable to expect that our growing climbing community is only going have good people in it. Bad people climb too.

But no one wants to admit that, because it means that nothing can really be done.