My friend beamed. He had just returned from pulling Excalibur from the stone, by which I mean he had just chopped a couple of anchor bolts. They weren’t just any bolts; they were “convenience bolts,” surreptitiously added to a historic moderate multi-pitch. Some local climbing guides, who drag big-city gumbies up this route 400 times each summer, had added these bolts for the rather pragmatic reasons of wanting to clean up anchor congestion and make rapping quicker.

To our crew, however, the retro-bolts were a travesty on par with adding a soul patch to the Mona Lisa. This was a historic area steeped in tradition!, we told ourselves. We may have been young but we considered ourselves guardians of climbing history. We were enamored with the romance of those who came before us, who did more with less and established the benchmark of style and ethics that stood, in our estimation, as a high watermark to meet. Thus, the evil bolts must go, and so my friend removed them. To our minds, climbing ethics lived to see another day, and we got to feel good about ourselves for being the guardians of style and tradition.

Of course, chopping these bolts changed virtually nothing. It didn’t stop hordes of people from climbing the route. The ghosts of the first ascent never appeared to haunt the guides who placed them. If anything, it might be fair to say that without a convenient, permanent anchor in place that kept traffic and therefore impact contained, the route was relatively worse. Twenty years on, it’s fair to ask, did our vision of climbing ethics deliver a better experience for the community? Or did they, in fact, make the climbing experience worse?

I think many of us go through a period in our formative climbing years in which we act like little Don Quixotes rampaging across La Mancha in a shriek of idealistic zeal, all without a hint of irony. It seems rather quaint to look back upon a time when climbing ethics were still up for debate and an anchor bolt could be the sport’s gravest concern, at least compared to the social-media-deranged conversations of the past few years.

People need meaning in their lives and they will find it in the weirdest places. We genuinely need opportunities to be virtuous, to show our fellow community members that we are worthy of our place in the tribe.

Arguing about climbing ethics has satisfied that itch for some of us over the years. Young climbers today, curiously, generally seem far less interested in thinking about climbing ethics. Many have lost interest in this conversation, perhaps because much progress has been made. I can’t recall the last time I heard someone seriously making an argument about ground-up trad being superior to top-down sport, for example. This is good. It means we’re not so divided as a community along these increasingly unimportant taxonomies of climbing discipline (trad vs sport is as stupid as arguing that pizza is better than burritos; there are times, places, and appetites for both).

But look at what has replaced the old trope of the trad climber disparaging sport climbing as his way of signaling his virtue to his nut-placing group of crooked-helmet-wearing gumbies. Many climbers today seem more interested in the project of injecting postmodern claims about identity-based power structures into every bit of climbing discourse, rather than thinking about boring old climbing ethics. Rather than think about whether bolts are good or not, they’re more interested in advancing lots of fretful rhetoric about what kinds of harms and exclusions may be theoretically perpetuated lest everyone adopt one view of the world as the Truth. This isn’t good, in my opinion.

But that’s not what I want to write about today. I want to write about bolts in particular, and climbing ethics more broadly. I’ve been wanting to write about these questions in light of how the National Park Service managers at Joshua Tree called into question climbers’ rights to place bolts in the park, as well as the new Protect America’s Rock Climbing Act, which is on deck for a vote in Congress this term. There’s a false ground truth about bolts and bolting that both anti-climbing land managers in the government and climbing advocates and advocacy groups seem to share, which is that bolts are, at best, a necessary evil. An old-school mentality about bolts treats these little inert and inconspicuous hunks of metal as something that should be added only as a last resort, because they’re in conflict with all the things we’re supposed to care about and protect: tradition, wilderness, adventure, sustainability and so on.

I have come to believe that this view is mostly incorrect, and that we need to update our ethical priors so that we can make a more robust, open, and honest defense about our bolting habits—not just to land managers, but also to other members of our own community. This isn’t an argument that everything should have more bolts. Not at all. It’s an argument that asserts that bolts, in general, are a legitimate and useful part of the climbing experience; that bolts have no moral valence beyond what serves the best climbing experience; and that bolts are often far less impactful and more sustainable than other kinds of climbing anchors.

It’s not surprising to me that land managers are anti bolting, but it has struck me as bad that climbers are so reluctant to make a full-throated defense of something that we place and clip and use every single day. Bolts are like a dirty little open secret that we try not to talk about. But this view is outdated and unhelpful, especially as conversations about bolting in Wilderness come to the forefront. I don’t even think we climbers are aware of the degree to which many of us are chagrined into taking an anti-bolt stance.

For example, this piece on Climbing.com ironically argues that old climbers need to change their attitudes to be more current—which is true, of course, but it completely misses which attitude is the one in need of updating. The article chastises an old dude who is still using the same dead tree as an anchor in the Gunks after all these years. What the article doesn’t criticize, however, is the mindset that views adding anchor bolts to popular routes in the Gunks as being somehow unethical.

The real problem, in my opinion, isn’t that some old guy doesn’t realize his tree anchor may be no longer safe. (Who cares?) The attitude that needs updating is the one that views bolts as being somehow unethical.

In general, we climbers hold too many false notions about bolts. So many in our community believe that bolting should always be “limited” so as to prevent the threat of (scare quotes) “grid bolting.” We think bolts, or using power drills to place them, is somehow antithetical to “Wilderness.” We have a tendency to believe that it’s ethically superior to leave a bunch of tat, which will be chewed by critters and faded by the sun, rather than just drilling a hole and screwing a small piece of metal into the rock.

These views are not helpful, not to mention not true, and it’s time we have a conversation that reconsiders how we think about climbing ethics so our sport can flourish.

Consider the Climbing Experience: A New Approach to Ethics

My opinion about bolts, style, and ethics, has evolved over time. I’ve moved away from holding more deontological views about these topics, the ones I once held in my Don Quixote days, such as “all retro-bolting is bad if it’s done without the permission of the first ascentionist.” We gravitate toward these kinds of cold and fast rules because they make tough ethical questions easy, but as we saw with the conversation around Half Dome last year, these principles tend to fall apart and become inadequate when they come into contact with real-world circumstances and this modern climbing sport in which so many diverse kinds of climbing are ones we all value.