Climbing

Climbing involves using hands, feet, or other body parts to move upward on steep natural or artificial features, from the highest mountains (like the eight-thousanders) down to small boulders. People climb for travel, sport, competition, and in jobs such as construction and military work. It takes place both indoors and outdoors, on natural surfaces like rock and ice, and on artificial surfaces like climbing walls and gyms.

The sport of climbing grew as climbers made first ascents of new routes, developed new techniques, pushed difficulty levels higher, and improved equipment. Guides and guidebooks helped make climbing more popular in natural settings. Early pioneers included Walter Bonatti, Riccardo Cassin, Hermann Buhl, and Gaston Rébuffat, followed by Reinhold Messner and Doug Scott, and later Mick Fowler, Marko Prezelj, and Ueli Steck. Around the 1980s, safer bolted sport climbing, the spread of indoor climbing walls and gyms, and the rise of competition climbing boosted rock climbing’s popularity as a standalone sport and created professional climbers such as Wolfgang Güllich, Alexander Huber, Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, Lynn Hill, Catherine Destivelle, and Janja Garnbret. Climbing became an Olympic sport for the first time at the 2021 Tokyo Games, with disciplines in lead climbing, bouldering, and speed climbing; ice climbing is not yet an Olympic event.

Rock climbing traces its origins to the late 19th century and has split into several major sub-disciplines. Single-pitch and multi-pitch (including big-wall) climbing can be done in various styles—aid, sport, traditional, free solo, and top-roping—while bouldering is always performed free solo. Single-pitch routes are one rope length (up to 50 meters); multi-pitch and big-wall routes span many rope lengths (up to 1,000 meters). Aid climbing uses artificial aids like aiders, pitons, and mechanical devices to ascend; much early rock climbing was aid climbing, and many big-wall routes (e.g., The Nose, Salathé Wall) still required aid into the 1970s. Sport climbing is free climbing (no artificial aids) but relies on permanent fixed bolts or pitons for protection; it began in the 1980s in France and includes the world’s hardest climbs (e.g., Silence). Traditional climbing is also free climbing but uses removable protection like SLCDs and nuts placed by the climber and removed by the second; famous routes include Indian Face and Cobra Crack. Free soloing is free climbing with no protection at all, making any fall potentially fatal; deep-water soloing is a form where a fall lands in safe water. The 2017 free solo of Freerider became the Oscar-winning film *Free Solo*. Top-rope climbing uses a pre-fixed rope secured to the top of a single-pitch route as the sole protection; falls simply leave the climber hanging, making it a safe introduction to climbing (common on walls). Bouldering involves ascending boulders or small outcrops free solo, with no protection due to low height; very tall boulders (up to 10 meters) are called highball bouldering. Milestones like Midnight Lightning, Dreamtime, and Burden of Dreams were set by boulderers and free climbers.

Mountaineering as recreation dates earlier than rock climbing, and by the mid-18th century, alpine mountaineering was an established pastime. It has since developed into sub-disciplines: mountaineering (ascending mountains, possibly with rock or ice climbing, and using support and fixed ropes); alpine climbing (ascending large routes requiring rock, ice, and mixed skills with minimal gear and no outside support); scrambling (climbing rocky faces and ridges, including basic rock climbing, but considered part of hillwalking); via ferrata (ascending mountain routes using installed steel cables, rungs, and ladders for protection and aid); ice climbing (ascending frozen water ice or hard alpine snow with ice axes and crampons); mixed climbing (using ice equipment on routes with both rock and ice, or dry-tooling when no ice is present); and solo climbing (ascending alone, possibly with ropes or aid).