Secret Crags, Ethics and Big Climbs
I spent my summer driving around Canada visiting classic and hidden crags. Despite the borders being closed, there were countless climbers filling the parking lots at most of our most amazing climbing areas. I met Quebec climbers in B.C. and Alberta climbers in Ontario; it seemed that the pandemic forced Canadians to explore north of the border more than south for a long-overdue change. Even the Toronto climbers were heading four hours north to Sudbury because local escarpment crags had too many access restrictions due to covid-19.
I focused on finding secret local crags to stay away from the crowds, and what I found were places that felt more raw and rugged than the heavily used, now-like-outdoor-gyms crags. There’s a reason why climbers like to keep their quiet not-on-mountainproject crags to themselves. The differences between rarely visited walls and crowded-every-weekend zones is upsetting.
Too many climbers are disregarding the negative effects of our presence in our climbing environments and the results are disheartening. They include damaged vegetation, blowtorched holds, bleached pitches, toilet paper on trails and more. Outdoor climbing spaces are not climbing gyms and we have to stop treating them as if they were. Taking a dump in the boulders is not cool, neither is leaving fruit peels in the bush next to your project. Climbers have to be the best stewards of the land of all of the outdoor recreation users, like mountain bikers and skiers. Our access and freedoms depend on it.
That being said, more climbers than ever were heading off-piste to explore the potential in many of Canada’s backcountry alpine regions. The Bugaboos got a number of big new 5.12 trad routes. The Lake Louise area had a mini alpine-boom during the peak season, with new routes on many wall, including Brette Harrington and Tony Mclane’s new route up the north pillar of Neptuak in the Valley of the Ten Peaks called The Hammer and the Dance, a 700metre 5.11x that will likely go unrepeated for some time.
The best news I heard this summer was that top French climber Catherine Destivelle is the 2020 recipient of the Piolets d’or Lifetime Achievement Award for her accomplishments and contributions to the world of alpinism. Destivelle has long been one of my climbing heroes for her bold climbs. Besides being one of the world’s leading sport climbers and free-soloists of the 1980s, and the first woman to redpoint 5.13b and win the world’s first climbing comps, she tore it up in the mountains.
She made a solo ascent of the Bonatti Pillar on the Petit Dru and climbed a new route on the west face in less than two weeks. She then soloed the north face of the Eiger in winter 1992, the Walker Spur on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses in winter 1993, and the Bonatti route on the north face of the Matterhorn in winter 1994. What a legend and an example to us all of what it means to be a climber.