INDEX CLUB

1982 — Terminal Preppie, 5.11c; Greg Olsen and Jon Nelson
Greg Olsen and Jon Nelson are the two UW college students who one night in 1982 rap-bolted Terminal Preppie. “We were just kids, so psyched about new routes and possibilities… we started a little bonfire on what’s now the approach trail waiting for it to get light. Eventually we gave up on trying to sleep, got up, and started drilling,” says Olsen. The two followed up in 1983 by rap-bolting Sonic Reducer (5.12a) with its seven clippers. 

Viewed from the outside, Olsen and Nelson’s pre-Smith Rock rap-bolting was anarchy. The two men operated in a vacuum, however, unhindered by the controversy embroiling the rest of the country. Explains Olsen: “I was a devotee of the Jim Erickson 'no-tainting' ethic, yet ground-up FA's at Index were out of the question, so it didn't seem like any contradiction at all to prep routes on rappel. Not even a question.” Olsen later explained, “At some point…I began to feel that bolting was simply another cleaning task. Much less difference between brushing and bolting once ground-up [ethics aren’t] applicable. …It all just starts to feel like route prep after eight hours of scrubbing. Putting in the bolts is just another of the chores you had to do before you got to climb. Honestly, had we been in some place like Yosemite or Tuolumne where you can just walk up, tie your shoes and try something, I doubt I'd ever have considered placing rap bolts. I think we just did what seemed appropriate for the area. [N]obody noticed so we just kept having fun, doing new stuff.” Reflecting on the current popularity of Index, Olsen says, “Nobody would be climbing at Index today had it been developed as a collection of one-time moss epics.” 

In backwards fashion, establishing a face route at Index can be easier than establishing a crack route because of moss’s tendency to thrive in a damp crack. “Cracks take a lot of prep work,” says Olsen. “Much less labor to clean a face pitch.” Soon the pair gave up hand drilling in favor of a Bosch Rotohammer. 

When asked if route development at Smith Rock influenced them, Olsen replies, “Back then Smith had a terrible rep as choss…so we just didn’t go, and thus had no idea what it was like or how nice the new stuff was.” 

By rap-bolting Terminal Preppie, Olsen and Nelson opened the door wide for route development. During the next decade over 200 free routes were established, both crack and face climbs. The locals most active during this period were Greg Collum, Child, Darryl Cramer, Max Dufford, Terry Lien, Nelson, and Olsen. Although ground-up tactics were applied to a few select routes, including Model Worker (5.11c) and Clay (5.11d), there was little controversy as to which philosophy applied to which route. “We considered ourselves climbers using the techniques appropriate to the route,” says Cramer. 

1990 — Sisu, 11c/d, multi-pitch sport; Karl Kaiyala
In 1989 the UW graduate student Karl Kaiyala had a hunch. He’d peered through binoculars at the blank sections high on the Upper Town Wall during his 1970s aid-climbing days and had noticed a number of interesting features. He filed the intel away until, in the summer of 1990, he spent 27 days unearthing the fine knobs and tiny edges on a 600-foot expanse, pulling off clump after clump of moss tightly bound with wiry stems to the granite. Kaiyala named the route “Sisu,” a Finnish word for a stubborn refusal to capitulate. “Sisu is pretty much the Finnish national motto,” says Kaiyala proudly. 

Sisu opened people’s eyes to the potential for multi-pitch sport routes on the Upper Town Wall. Soon after, locals undertook vertical yard work on the Upper Town Wall to reveal numerous high quality multi-pitch sport routes: Rise and Fall (5.12a/b), Technicians of the Sacred (5.12b), and Good Girls Like Bad Boys (5.12a).