Are Bolt-On Holds on Rock “Better” Than Chipping?
Are bolt-on holds ugly? Yes. But they can be easily hammered off, whereas chipped holds may be harder to fix. (Of course, it’s best to do neither!)
The post Are Bolt-On Holds on Rock “Better” Than Chipping? appeared first on Climbing.
In 2009, my wife, Kristin, and I were on our honeymoon on the Spanish island of Ibiza. We’d come for the limestone cragging, not the dance music and clubbing, but it was still “party season” that September, and packs of raucous Euros stumbled about the Western Mediterranean island’s club-lined boulevards into the wee hours, shouting, puking, and generally carrying on. We’d come randomly, after the Spanish photographer David Munilla had sent his new Ibiza guidebook to Climbing Magazine, where we worked then. In the book, the sea looked blue-green, the climbing looked steep, and the crags were close together.
So we went.
Ibiza’s climbing was super fun, though many routes still had their original steel bolts, sketchy and rotting in the salty air. Then it began to rain—and rain and rain. One day, looking for somewhere dry, we went to an inland crag called Jolibud (the Spanish pronunciation for “Hollywood”) that looked wicked overhanging in the photos. But it was soaked, with black streaks running down the wall. As we walked along the base, I spotted a series of curious blobs that looked different from the other tufa features. Then I realized: These were bolt-on holds!
Per the guidebook, to maximize the real estate at Jolibud, the locals had experimented with these “resin holds” as well as “a hammer and chisel and sika (how well this was done is a matter of taste) [….]” I didn’t think much of it at the time. I’d lived in Italy, where around Torino drilled, sika-lined pockets and glued-on rocks were commonplace on the blank gneiss, with similar tactics in nearby France, where I sometimes went to climb around Briançon. And I’d seen “outdoor artificial routes” before, during a trip to Smith Rock in October 1990. There, on a chossy roof high up a side gully, the locals had built training routes using gym holds. One—Bend Over and Receive—even got a mention in Climbing when a local fired it, for one of America’s first 5.13 onsights. (The editors likely had no idea it was an artificial climb. The routes were later removed when—as I heard through the grapevine—Smith Rock State Park expressed their dismay.)
More recently, Magnus Midtbø, in a reaction video to viral climbing clips on his More Magnus YouTube channel, talks about a multi-pitch climb with bolt-on holds. The route, Seenot, on the Falkensteinwand outside Salzburg, Austria, climbs smooth limestone above the picturesque Wolfgangsee Lake. On a cruxy-looking corner, someone has installed a bolt-on hold on the face, to facilitate passage where the crack pinches down. “There’s a climbing hold on the route,” says Midtbø. “[….On] a lot of routes in the middle of Europe and even in southern France, there [are] a lot of routes with artificial holds on them—[and] it’s really ugly. But sometimes it’s better than chipping because these artificial holds, you can actually just hammer off if you don’t want to use them.
“So, future generations, they could just knock them off and not use them. But if you drill into the rock, it’s harder to hide. So that’s the argument for placing artificial climbing holds on outdoor routes.”
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Far from endorsing the practice, which he repeatedly labels “ugly,” Midtbø is instead saying this could be one reason for bolt-ons: to avoid chipping, so that a route could go free at some future standard. But Seenot looked far from cutting edge; more holds had been added higher, all, it seems, to give the route a more-consistent difficulty, a very European, plaisir-type approach to rock climbing.
As I watched Midtbø’s video and pondered all this, as well as the artificial routes I’d seen in Ibiza and at Smith, I recalled a similar climb from the early 1990s in my own backyard of the Front Range, Colorado. The route, Public Enemy, in Clear Creek Canyon west of Golden, had sparked a minor controversy, eventually going through a few iterations to reach its present-day form, a 5.13c with “one old drilled pocket” that goes partway up the River Wall but stops at an anchor 30 feet shy of the top. The climb tackles a steep, leaning black-and-gray panel, imposing from US 6 and capped by a massive, two-tiered roof/headwall with ghostly white streaks.
“We were probably out at Sonic Youth one day, and I’m always looking at new stuff,” says Kurt Smith, 60, a climbing legend originally from California who was part of Public Enemy’s FA. With his friend Mike Pont, Smith had in 1990 bolted and freed the classic, double-overhanging corner of Sonic Youth (5.13a) just left of Public Enemy, part of the first wave of sport routes on the gneiss of Clear Creek, at the time a chossy backwater. Smith, who’d moved to Colorado from the California proving grounds of Yosemite Valley, Tuolumne, and Joshua Tree—where he’d established dozens of bold, difficult, ground-up FAs up to 5.13—was working with Pont as a setter and employee at Paradise Rock Gym in Denver. The two, says Smith, were “joined at the hip.”
Continues Smith, “That whole face caught my eye. I remember thinking, ‘There’s probably a route here—this should go.’” When Smith rapped in, however, he realized that the upper headwall looked unclimbable. He, Pont, and the Boulder local Pete Zoller got a rope on the face but could only climb the first two-thirds before it “seemed to really blank out.”
“We really didn’t want to chip it,” recalls Smith. “A lot of that was going in Europe, Idaho [City of Rocks and Leslie Gulch, two early sport areas] […] and so for me it was just, ‘Let’s slap a couple of plastic holds from the gym on it and just go make it a training route or whatever.’” The trio bolted a handful of plastic holds from Paradise onto the upper headwall, and Smith sent the full pitch at 5.13+.
“We were just out there, we’re young (all three men were in their 20s), we’re just trying to get another route in and just find ways to get stronger,” he says. “If somebody could do it without the holds, like by grabbing onto some micro-crimp, they could just go up there, take the holds off, and then, ‘There you go!’ We didn’t even really think about it.”
When I moved to Boulder in autumn of 1991, I knew of Public Enemy through a profile of Smith in a small publication, The Sport Climbing Connection. Clear Creek was one of the first frequented sport areas in the Front Range—until people caught on to Rifle; then, it just became somewhere to train for Rifle. In the meantime, the bolt-ons had disappeared, and you no longer saw them from US 6 while driving by—en route to Rifle. As Zoller later told me, two local climbers had taken offense and removed the grips. (Says Smith, “The old guard, rightly so, were bent out of shape. I knew when we bolted holds on that thing that people would be upset.”) Zoller told me he got into a heated discussion with one of the men in the parking lot at The Boulder Mountaineer, a climbing shop in town, when he asked for the holds back; apparently, they’d been donated to a kids’ climbing program.
Public Enemy went dormant until 2011, when a local climber, Brian Kimball, snagged the retro-FA to the low anchor. Per Kevin Capps’s Clear Creek Canyon, 2nd edition, “[…] Kimball came along and cleaned it up, filled in some of the drilled pockets (one still remains, but the route can be climbed without it, although it’s much harder), and hung fixed draws” as part of the many linkups up to 5.14b Kimball would concoct on this same panel. (The origin and timing of the alleged drilled pockets, which were lower on the route, remain unclear.)
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From the Public Enemy brouhaha, Smith says that he learned how to better let the rock “dictate what you’re going to do,” and that, “Since then I’ve walked away from plenty of projects that I couldn’t climb and just left the bolts there for somebody else.” In Rifle in 1991, he created his last artificial hold—a drilled pocket on his climb Daydream Nation (5.13c) in the Skull Cave—send the route with it, then, realizing that “That was really dumb,” came back, filled the pocket in, and re-sent the line. (The hold is visible, as a right-hand grip, at minute 49 in the first Masters of Stone film.) Smith says that later in his first-ascent career—which went on to span dozens of benchmark FAs in Rifle and El Potrero Chico, including the world-famous El Sendero Luminoso (5.12+; 1,500 feet)—had he encountered another climb like Public Enemy, he’d either have walked away or just put the anchor in below the blank section.
Today, the top third of Public Enemy remains unclimbed. One climber who has checked it out is Chris Deuto, who grew up just west of Clear Creek Canyon in Saint Mary’s and cut his teeth in the canyon, doing his first 5.14a on the River Wall and establishing new climbs up to 5.14b in the canyon. Deuto, 20, has been climbing since age 7, when he started at the Boulder Rock Club with his parents and, later, continued as a member of the gym’s youth team.
“None of the routes on that wall go to the top,” Deuto says, and so he started to wonder, Could it be done? Deuto rapped down the headwall, where the old bolt holes from the gym holds were still visible. He says that the top third of Public Enemy will certainly go free, though it will be very difficult—“the hardest thing in Clear Creek.” He and Kevin Capps rebolted the headwall around 2020, more or less following the path of the gym holds, though one bolt may need to be moved to avoid a contrived sequence.
“My vision for the line is to start on the 5.12a, the warmup [Love Your Enemies, which finishes at the same anchor], because the climbing up there above the anchor is already so hard,” Deuto says. Deuto spent a couple days on the headwall and “couldn’t pull a single move,” but figures it will break down into a V12/13, to the one hold—a fingerlock—good enough to clip from, to a V13/14 to the top, stacking up to V15/V16 for the integral section.
“Really natural, good rock, aesthetic movement, in this exposed position—it’s going to be really hard, I think. 5.15 for sure,” Deuto says, adding that once the headwall gets sorted, you could begin with any of the starts to the low anchor, including the 5.14b Positive Vibrations. Deuto thinks you could also do the route on gear, leading the 5.12a on pro (which has already been done) and then loading cams into a good horizontal at the lower anchor, though on the headwall you’d need to avoid hogging the key fingerlock with pro.
As for Deuto’s feelings about bolting on holds versus chipping, he brings up a nuanced point, one perhaps known only—or mainly—to active first ascensionists: “With sport climbing, what most people don’t realize is that most routes they’re climbing on were modified in some way, even if it’s justified as cleaning. Because most sport cliffs aren’t solid enough to house a perfect line of holds.” Deuto lists Rifle, where many holds have been comfortized or reinforced but perhaps would only be visible as such to a practiced eye—or are by now so covered in chalk that you’d have no idea. He says that as long as you’re open about your tactics, and don’t wholesale sculpt finger pockets in blank rock, you’re probably operating within fair ethical boundaries; putting up new climbs, especially on softer rock like limestone or sandstone, is a massive gray area. Deuto cites the 5.15b Sleeping Lion, Chris Sharma’s latest testpiece on the limestone of Siurana, Spain, on which Sharma and Alex Megos agreed Megos could glue a key hold back on after Megos broke it, to preserve the route’s flow, even though the climb would still probably have gone. (“It’s not nice at all,” says Megos, in his German way, about this less pleasant sequence.) In this case, the climbers showed the whole process on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Smith points out—before we all clutch our pearls—that manufacturing has been part of free climbing since the Golden Age of the 1970s, when Jim Bridwell chiseled footholds on the second pitch of Outer Limits, the classic 5.10b on the Cookie Cliff in Yosemite, and Ray Jardine chipped a short section on the Nose, crossing a blank slab on 5.11d edges on the so-called “Jardine Traverse” in an effort to free the climb. Says Smith, “It’s part of the history of climbing whether we like it or not. It’s been going on forever.”
And, in fact, it has: In 1882, the guides Jean-Joseph Maquinax and Daniele Battista used a hammer to create holds on the first ascent of the Dent du Géant’s south peak while standing on iron spikes they’d pounded into cracks; in 1892, the English climber Norman Collie carved footholds with an ice axe on the crux of Moss Ghyll gully in the Lake District; and in Yosemite in 1934, on the first ascent of the Regular Route on Cathedral Spire, Dick Leonard used his piton hammer to create a “series of nicks” along a fragile flake he was hesitant to layback. Since then, climbers the world over have chipped, enhanced, glued, and otherwise modified thousands of holds, even if we all pay rote lip service to how “Chipping and gluing are bad” without considering how difficult it is to delineate chipping from cleaning, or how routes at the outer edges of difficulty, where the grips are sparse, can’t really afford to lose any holds—hence the occasional need to reinforce with epoxy. As someone who’s put up dozens of climbs over the past 35 years, I can confirm that it’s extremely rare to find a solid climb with perfect holds that needs nothing beyond a quick brushing. You get those only rarely (usually on granite or water-hardened rock), so if you don’t want your route to be patently unsafe, covered in friable rock and unreliable holds, then you’re going to need to clean it.
Are bolt-on holds ugly? Aesthetically, yes: They rarely match the rock color and they protrude like warts. Even your garden-variety non-climber stumbling by on the trail could pick them out—and then complain to the powers-that-be. But consider that this same civilian, down on the ground, would likely not be able to tell a drilled pocket from a natural one, especially once both holds are covered in chalk; they’d have no idea, and many climbers wouldn’t either. So which scenario is more detrimental, at least from an access standpoint?
In the grand scheme of humankind’s many impacts on our planet, I’d posit that manufacturing and bolting on holds are very small ones that will mostly go unnoticed by anyone but climbers, and have minimal environmental impact compared to industrial-scale depredations like air pollution, plastic waste, tainted waterways, and maritime oil spills. However, within the microcosm of the climbing world, where we’ve agreed to play by certain rules, both violate the idea that “manufacturing is cheating.” The needle has seemingly swung away from the more wholesale, and often distasteful, approach to hold manufacture that went on in the 1980s and 1990s. But I also believe that most of us would be shocked to learn just how many holds on the world’s current hardest sport climbs have at the very least been cleaned, if not comfortized and/or reinforced, even with the big rise in standards. Or how shocked your average-Joe climber would be to learn that hard big-wall free climbing, say on El Capitan, relies heavily on old piton scars—essentially chipped pockets—in the seams and cracks. There is nowhere human beings go where we don’t conform the landscape to our passage nor leave some trace of said passage—just like every other living thing; it’s naïve to pretend otherwise, despite our blinkered American infatuation with some fictional, sepia-toned prelapsarian “wilderness.” And it’s idiotic to insist that rock climbing always reflect this unattainable ideal without considering what really happens with first ascents on subpar rock. Sure, we should aim to minimize our impact when climbing, but we should also bring that same approach to all our actions in life—or it’s all just performative, self-righteous bullshit.
So it is better to bolt on a hold than to chip? If you feel you must do one or the other, them I’d say the evidence points toward yes, at least in terms of preserving the challenge (but probably not access!). The fact that the full Public Enemy could today go at 5.15, the new world standard, is a case in point. But realistically, it’s best to do neither. It’s probably best to, as Smith suggests, slam an anchor in where the climbing stops being feasible for you, and then let future generations take it from there.
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