Climbing’s popular. What did you think would happen?

Many people have benefited from the explosion of climbing’s popularity over the past 10 years, primarily and most importantly, all of the thousands if not millions who have gotten to experience firsthand what a wonderful sport, community, and lifestyle that climbing presents.

Many other people, who have been climbers for a long time, have also benefited from climbing’s recent explosion, myself included. If you’ve got a toe in some hot commodity, the temptation is to dive in. I’ve done it. Pro climbers have done it. Climbing media has done it. The climbing industry has done it. Climbing’s non-profits have done it. And now the pool is full.

Climbing has “exploded.” Climbing is the face of our next campaign. Climbing is how we get paid. Climbing is how we get some influence. Climbing is our opportunity. Let’s start by building a gym. Then let’s build another gym, only make it bigger, taller, and with better childcare. Let’s sell it to the one gym conglomerate so that they have the monopoly over the area. Now your pass works everywhere. Now you can train in DerpyDoo South on Wednesdays and DerpyDee North on Thursdays. Let’s do it responsibly. Let’s organize some gym-to-crag initiatives. Let’s get some donuts. Remember to check your knot and pack out your shit. Here’s your membership card and a sticker. Put it on your helmet and go straight to the Creek. The desert is where you create content for your feed. Now we’re on the AP. Now we’re on Good Morning America. This is professional content. We’re all engaged. Let’s start treating climbers as if they’re celebrities. Let’s get climbing in the Olympics. Let’s design next season’s line around an Olympic theme. Actually, we love speed climbing. Always have, too. Let’s get actual Hollywood celebrities climbing. Now they’re cool. Plus they only climb with the best climbers in the world. Hey, let’s do a collab. What about with Gucci? What about with Haliburton? Can we put some solar panels up somewhere? We’re good people now. Can we offset our carbon emissions? Gimme that $700 shell. Gimme that around-the-town downie. Gimme that designer hyperbaric oxygen tent. Let’s get the red blood cell count going. We’re all training now. We’re all fit. We’re all in performance mode. Let’s smash some climbing supplements down our throats and piss all over our projects with our vitamin-enriched urine. Let’s give climbing an Oscar. Maybe if we have time, we can squeeze in a mention of the climber who did the thing that made the whole film a film. Whatever. Who really cares about the actual climbing part? 5.15 five.shmifteen. Give us drama. Give us relationships. This is the Real World, bitch. Give us a relevant targeted message with good SEO. Get the president tweeting about it, as long as it’s the right president. Get climbing on billboards, buses, Times Square, Instagram squares. Actually, those are the most important squares. That’s where the money is. QVC for Gen Z. Get those metrics up. Influence the fuck out of everyone. Get your hashtags going. Everyone must know that #THISisClimbing and #YouCanClimbToo. We’re not elitist! Climbing is for everyone! Everyone can have fun! Everyone can be a climber! Everyone can be engaged! Are you engaged yet?

Several disconcerting and objectively-bad-for-climbing stories have emerged over the past few weeks. First, some fucking guy bolted a 5.3 up a wall of petroglyphs. When I saw that headline, I literally thought this story was a remnant of the lame and unimaginative April Fool’s posts that increasingly irrelevant media conglomerates, desperate for clicks, hire free interns to create ad infinitum in advance of April 1st. This is why I didn’t click on the click-bait-y headline of “climber bolts 5.3 up a wall of petroglyphs” until I was told by others that this thing actually happened. I couldn’t believe it—and yet, of course I could.

Next, I was on virtual stroll through my Instagram stories when I saw people sharing a video of a kid gouging out the start hold on a boulder problem with a rock. Chipping is back, although to be fair, perhaps it never left. But at least people were more discreet about it. Again, I couldn’t believe it—and yet …

And now, we are entering a cycle of stories about how land managers are cracking down on climbers’ access via permit systems. These permits are popping up everywhere from Rocky Mountain National Park to Yosemite. And there are talks of bringing this to other areas like Eldorado Canyon. And guess what, once they’re there, they’re not going away.

Climbing is popular. Climbing has exploded. What did we think was going to happen?

There are many productive and useful conversations to have about what we can do about each or any of these issues. That’s not the purpose of this morning’s rant. The point is to remember that each of these disparate stories have one thing in common: they are the externalities of climbing’s unbridled growth and popularity. This is the new world we live in—and it’s a world that we all had a hand in creating.

If you think some guy bolting a wall of petroglyphs—let alone a spate of 5.3s, which somehow adds yet another layer of offense and insult to the whole thing—is the result of not enough education about indigenous issues in climbing, not enough gym-to-crag initiatives, not enough outreach, you’re wrong. When your population size gets large enough, inevitably we will have lone wolves who go out into these public spaces and do things that ruin everything for everyone else. Most people are good and play by the rules, but there are always those at the margins. They are by nature unpredictable. What’s so discouraging is that they have the capacity to ruin it for everyone. One especially bad tragedy. One particularly egregious offense. One particularly unlucky mishap. It’s all it takes.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll be trying to spend some time over the next couple weeks addressing these issues more seriously. There are solutions to be imagined. Till then, hold the line.

About The Author

Andrew Bisharat

Andrew Bisharat is a writer and climber based in western Colorado. He is the publisher of Evening Sends and the co-host of The RunOut podcast.

Free Climb. Free Thought.

Join the climbing discourse.

Comments

4 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Andrew,

    It’s good to read a piece that is taking this issue seriously. This is the biggest story in climbing right now, and people seem to be addressing it with a shrug. With headlines coming out of Climbing that ask whether these permitting systems are “Really so Bad?” and near silence from the Access Fund and local organizations, posts like this are so important. If these reservation systems are quietly allowed to go into place in Yosemite, Eldo, and elsewhere, the genie will not go back in the bottle. Climbers need to speak out against these systems and propose real solutions, or climbing will change forever. Inaction here will mean that these barriers to climbing will spread to more and more locations, as it becomes a model for managing parks, forests, wilderness areas, etc. Looking forward to hearing more from you about this.

    A concerned climber,

    Weston Sandfort

    Reply
  2. Avatar

    Ask a friend who surfs how this will all play out. Hint: it can always get worse…

    Reply
  3. Avatar

    Just a quick response to Eric in regards to the surfing comment. Sure it can always get worse, which I guess you meant general growth of participants and therefore more people at crags and gyms. The beauty of climbing is that there won’t be 78 people in a peak fighting for one wave at a time….that’s positive at least!

    Reply
    • Avatar

      Wolf… Surely you saw the infamous conga-line photo from Everest a while back? Just like the surfing analogy. There is such a lot that’s fantastic about climbing in all its forms, and that breadth of activity and the impact it has will drive discussion, discord and lively debate forever.
      Just as a ‘for instance’… How do climbers to the greater ranges square their activity with their environmental impact? (Carbon miles flying, trash left on the mountain etc…) By climbing far from home and up high, these folks are slowly but surely destroying the wildness they claim to revere…
      One person’s bolted petroglyphs is another person’s bolt-studded sacred mountain.
      Lively debate…

      Reply

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