Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
wivanoff
Trad climber
CT
|
|
Yeah, I remember those discussions....
I find myself using chalk to just to relax. Not because I need it. I can quit anytime I want. Besides, I only use it recreationally. And it's not like I use it every day. Really, I can quit anytime. <twitch, twitch>
OK, serious answer. I do use chalk out of habit more than sweaty hands and lately have been trying to use less or not at all. But, to answer your question: like you I've been climbing since the early 1970's and I think that tagging holds with chalk, overbolting, chipping, leaving trash and stuff like that became PC when climbers began to believe it was OK to sh!t in their own beds. As a group we don't care. We became selfish and we won't police ourselves. The landowners will have to do that for us.
|
|
patrick compton
Trad climber
van
|
|
Ahhhhh! I get it, just like the pin scars are presents from the 60's climbing gods, so that we can have all of those nice little finger wrenchers :-)
Now you are getting it! And the amazing thing is: you can still pound scores of pins on El Cap or Fischer towers raining down chossy mud and it is considered fine style....
... but don't chip a boulder or the Ethics Police will film you and anonymously post up a vid, and DPM will gladly post it up for a rockin out hate fest!
... and if you chip a whole crag, you get a spread in Rock and Ice!
Its like an ethics roulette wheel, you never know who will win and who will lose!
But chalk is always a sure bet, because it is invisible.
|
|
Gilroy
Social climber
Bolderado
|
|
Chalk Balls rule and it's the only way I use chalk. Anyone against chalk can suck my chalk balls....
|
|
Baggins
Boulder climber
|
|
Well, at least it keeps you on route. Actually, looking at that picture you posted, then maybe not so much
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
Chalk was used on climbs in the Meadows and Yosemite when I started climbing in the late 1960's, although not by everyone. Chalk was used by virtually everyone bouldering there, and in Berkeley, by then. I used to use a block for fingertips or palms, if it was a greasy mantle, at the start of a boulder route, but did not sew up a chalk bag until 1971. I didn't start using it on climbs until about 1975, and then only sparingly. I don't recall when I noticed that everyone seemed to be chalking up for everything, but I would say sometime in the mid- to late- 1970's. At that point, and since, I've gone with the flow.
John
|
|
TwistedCrank
climber
Dingleberry Gulch, Ideeho
|
|
I blame society.
|
|
Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
|
|
Well, at least it keeps you on route...
On popular routes topropers and deluded leaders will chalk up all kinds of sucker holds. This makes an onsight flash more difficult, so I say we up the grades on such climbs.. ;-)
In areas where acid rain is a problem it should be a policy for climbers to introduce as much chalk as possible into the environment. I remember back in the '70's they were dropping the stuff into Adirondack lakes from planes in an effort to neutralize acidity carried in rain from midwest power plants.
Seriously though, it's not like it's toxic or does any real harm. After that aircraft carrier sized asteroid augers into Earth and life as we know it is destroyed the whole thing will seem pretty trivial.
|
|
Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
|
|
I'm not as ethically pure as Yvon, so I have never actually seen anybody chalk up to rappel.
|
|
Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
|
|
using chalk is gay...
I thought gay folk used lube, not chalk.
|
|
Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
|
|
But on a more serious note... I first started using chalk in about '73 when I was bouldering with Barry Bates. If it was good enough for him you KNOW I was all over that shite!
|
|
mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
|
|
Chalk. Disgusting substance that belongs in a rock gymnasium or in a gymnasium. I never do any bouldering, never really did much at all if I could help it. Too much like work, and frankly, I didn't give a damn about chalk on boulders.
When it began showing up on the Harry Daley route on Monday Mornig Slab, I took umbrage, to say the least.
I recall an entry in the Climbs section about the Crescent Arch on Daff Dome (was it RR who penned it?) where mention was made of a certain young Coloradan taking off on it in a cloud of chalk dust.
|
|
McHale's Navy
Trad climber
Panorama City, California & living in Seattle
|
|
I was climbing in the Alabama Hill last fall when I realized I was off and on staring staring at the ground at the base of a climb when I remembered that we used to put our hands in the dirt at Stoney point to calm the sweat. In that sense it was a very practical behavior. If the standards of climbing were not being pushed so hard, chaulk would not have come to be. Has anyone blamed John Gill yet? Hahah! It had to be the gymnast element that brought it in. I have no problem with it, but in popular areas, it certainly can be a problem. Ron Anderson already brought up the Taping analogy;
Yup many screamed it was AID,, just like they did when taping became the standard. Now we have gripper gloves and every other gadget going on..
The use of chaulk is certainly less egregious than mummifying the hands to jumar a crack.
|
|
ruppell
climber
|
|
How about the guy who's taped up then dips in the chalk? lol
|
|
McHale's Navy
Trad climber
Panorama City, California & living in Seattle
|
|
I don't chaulk when I builder - maybe I'll try to carry that forward. Wouldn't hurt to climb bare once in awhile. I could claim I have a behavioral disorder for the reason I could not make the moves. Would be a good way to get even with the guys that say I'm too tall.
Fuggin thing was viscious with sharp crystals inside the finger sized crack.. It was survival only usage.
Maybe the ethic for cracks like that is to do them in a way that you don't F*#K yourelf up, and if that doesn't work, call it clean aid and use true aid devices, or have a separate standard where if it is done without tape it's rated harder at least. We all know how F*#king easy tape can make something.
|
|
Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
|
|
A point not made yet I think is what was used before chalk (besides dirt). At Indian Rock and in the region, we were using powdered rosin. I am referring to mid sixties. What dancers use on their floors. We had it in a bag like chalk or in a sock. I got into it for a couple of years until chalk came in. Rosin had tremendous friction, far more than chalk, until it would get gooey. We would put it on our shoes sometimes for boulder moves. Problematically it would become "part of the rock" far more than chalk, and probably more quickly. It would contribute to burnishing and filling in holds, actually, like the varnish it actually is.
|
|
rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
|
|
A complicating factor with chalk is that, although climbers think of chalk as a grip-enhancer, it performs another function, which is to inhibit the deposition of oils from the skin on the rock. I suspect that high-volume routes climbed repeatedly without chalk would become insufferably greasy. (I know when I used to climb the rope in the gym BITD, I first had to make a trip up and thoroughly chalk the rope from top to bottom, otherwise the grease from other users made it impossible, at least for me, to hang on one-handed.)
This is why the solution isn't no chalk, it is the chalk sock.
As for rosin, the Bleausards were totally into it (pouf, they called it). You carried some tied up in a bandanna and not only put it your hands but also used the bandanna to smack the rosin onto footholds. The rosin did help feet to stick, but it removed a thin film of rubber from shoes and bonded it to the rock. The result was that every foothold became a blackened smudge.
|
|
Crackslayer
Trad climber
Eldo
|
|
What's super lame is tick marks...especially on easy climbs. Next time I see a person ticking a hold I am litterally going ape sh#t on them. NOT Acceptable to tick holds IMO.
|
|
mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
|
|
Original pouf = pine sap
Tried it once at Black Mountain on a boulder already covered in sap due to the drought and beetles. It is lame.
|
|
McHale's Navy
Trad climber
Panorama City, California & living in Seattle
|
|
I do think there should be a separate standard. I have a bone spur on my right wrist from a break that has forced me to try things differently. We have standards up the yin yang, so why not?
I'm not saying you get extra points for f*#king yourself up - you get the extra points if you don't use tape and don't f*#k yourself up.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!