10 Things You Didn't Know about Sport Climbing's Early Days

You know those shiny gadgets, techy techniques, and bizzled training facilities we use to hone our sport climbing? Well, guess what: they weren’t invented in a vacuum. A few eureka moments, plus years of refinement, led to the tricks, tools, and techniques we take for granted when we’re out bolt-wrasslin’ today.

1 You can’t sport climb without bolts. Bolts for climbing first appeared in Europe in the 1920s, though in North America, the Scotsman George Anderson had drilled eyebolts for progress and to fix hand lines on his 1875 Half Dome first ascent. In 1939, Raffi Bedayn, David Brower, John Dyer, and Bestor Robinson placed two protection and two anchor bolts on their FA of Shiprock, New Mexico—they used construction eyebolts they’d tested at Pinnacles National Monument, California. And during an August 1946 attempt on Yosemite’s Lost Arrow Spire, John Salathé drilled a bolt for upward progress (direct aid), perhaps becoming the first climber to “dog” on a bolt.

2 Before climbers used cordless hammer drills, hand drilling was the (tedious) game, which partially explains why the first rap-bolted sport routes from the 1980s have minimalist bolting. Things changed in 1987 when Chris Grover, Sean Olmstead, and Doug Phillips used a Bosch Bulldog to equip Smith Rock’s classic 5.13a Churning in the Wake. Grover and Alan Watts, while at a Munich trade show in the mid-1980s, had seen a Hilti poster featuring a power-drill-toting climber in the Verdon Gorge. Back home, they searched for the right tool, eventually talking Phillips, their boss at Metolius Climbing, into buying a company Bosch. “We all hiked down [to the wall] with the drill,” says Grover, “and since Doug paid for it, he drilled the first hole, and Sean drilled the second standing on his shoulders.”

3 Before rope bags, we sportos dragged our cords through the dirt, although some used blue plastic tarps. The first proper rope bag was Scott Frye’s Dirtbag, first sold in 1989, developed after he saw Japanese climbers using a sheet to protect their rope at Smith Rock. Frye had seamstresses sew up 500 units; Dirtbags folded burrito-style, with a webbing-and-buckle closure. Frye sold his bags for two seasons and tried to get REI to carry them, though they told him, “This is too specialized, and no one wants to keep their rope out of the dirt.” Rope bags didn’t go big until the early 1990s, when Metolius Climbing picked up and tweaked the idea, successfully selling units to REI.

4 Beta is key to any well-oiled redpoint, and its origin story can’t be retold enough. Thank the late Shawangunks and Texas climber/wordsmith Jack Mileski, who coined the term around 1981, when films were offered for home viewing in both VHS and Betamax formats. “Let me run the ‘Betamax’ tape for you,” Mileski told fellow Gunkie Mike Freeman metaphorically, describing the 5.12 Kansas City, and then added, “So, Mike, here’s the beta!”

5 A key refinement, the beta map, made its first American print appearance in February 1988 with Christian Griffith’s blow-by-blow topo of the Buoux 5.13c Chouca in his article “Learning to Crawl” (Climbing No. 106). Griffith and Dale Goddard would draw the maps, Griffith recalls, “to deal with the boredom of impoverished rest days... and to compare notes.” When “Learning to Crawl” appeared, says Griffith, “Climbing… in this country was still at a place where you weren’t supposed to hang and work moves.” Thus, the idea of a beta topo “would have been really unique, because Americans would have been embarrassed to admit that they had to try something so much that they’d remember that fine of detail.”