OFFENSIVE NAMES IN CLIMBING
A new generation sparks a conversation about racist or sexist monikers and w at s ould be done about t em as t e sport becomes more diverse
Routes or walls are named by the first person to conquer them. A debate has arisen over racist or sexist choices and what to do about them.
It didn’t really hit Melissa Utomo until she went climbing in Wyoming’s Ten Sleep Canyon. ¶ The Boulder resident had been rock climbing for several years, but when she went to scale one of the sport’s renowned climbing areas a few years ago, she was struck by the names: the Slavery Wall. Routes dubbed “40 Acres and a Mule” and “Happiness in Slavery.”
“They were extremely inappropriate and harmful,” Utomo said. “I’m not Black, but even for me that was shocking.”
A web developer by trade, Utomo decided something needed to be done about problematic names that have existed for decades in a sport long dominated by white men.
So she came up with a flagging feature in which users could report misogynistic, racist and homophobic names that are commonplace from Tennessee to Colorado, and in Eastern Europe and Canada. Names such as Parade of Whores or Mein Kampf.
“If there was one hill I was gonna die on,” Utomo said, “it was to change the culture around route names and uplift voices so people don’t feel like the first ascensionist gets the final say.”
As protests this summer over the police killings of Black men and women thundered through cities across the country, a simmering debate in the climbing community spilled out into the open, exposing a cauldron of route names and walls that once were considered emblematic of climbing’s rebel spirit, but now are being reexamined in a new light. The conversation — which has consumed message boards, Facebook groups and personal conversations between old friends — echoed larger themes that have rocked cities around the country as citizens argue over the names of mountains and parks, statues and pieces of history. And the issue has prompted difficult conversations and strained relationships across the rapidly growing sport that is getting more diverse by the day. “The way we gatekeep in this sport is really problematic,” Utomo said. “This is a stepping stone to make things more accepting and diverse.”
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Climbing culture long has held that the first person to map out and set up a route gets the privilege of naming it.
The task for those climbers, known as first ascensionists, can be arduous and time-consuming: cleaning and removing rocks, installing bolts and forging the path that would be followed by future climbers.
“The whole aspect of how you name routes is a big deal in the climbing world,”
said Darek Krol, a longtime Rifle climber who spoke to The Denver Post about this issue before he was killed in an avalanche while skiing in December. “Route naming has big meaning to authors of the routes — very often it’s an expression of something deeper or something personal.”
During the sport’s formative years, many of these first ascensionists were white men. Sometimes the names would stem from a bunch of guys sitting around the fire, alcoholic beverage or two in hand, to “see how gross they can get,” said Bob D’Antonio, a veteran climber who writes the guidebook for Colorado’s San Luis Valley.
“A lot of them were rebellious against the times,” D’Antonio said. “It was like putting your middle finger up to everything.”
What to do with controversial names
For decades, many names that used racial slurs, homophobic epithets and gendered vulgarities were simply part of the climbing experience — whether people liked it or not.
But after the George Floyd protest, people began to more forcefully question the role of offensive names — triggering more intense scrutiny and rancorous public debate in the climbing community.
The longtime publisher and editor-in-chief of Rock and Ice magazine, Duane Raleigh, stepped down after he commissioned a white male writer to pen an opinion article on the topic, and acknowledged his own role in creating racist route names decades ago.
Climbing organizations such as the Access Fund wrote blog posts titled “Why Route Names Matter,” in which indigenous climbers detailed what it means to see routes such as “Trail of Tears” and “Squaws in Heat.” An LGBTQ climbing guide detailed his experience leading college students at a wall with routes containing gay slurs.
“These route names — and the acceptance of them by the climbing community — are hurtful and dangerous, but unfortunately unsurprising,” Ashleigh Thompson, a Red Lake O jibwe tribal member, wrote. “After climbing for more than four years now, I have noticed that cultural misappropriation, cultural insensitivity and racism is more prevalent in the climbing community than I first realized.”
Names such as these were everywhere. In Red Rock, Nev., climbers encountered the “Panty Wall.” In Ottawa, kids may approach a route called “She Got Drilled.”
Names that send a message
For climbers of color, outdoor climbing may mean venturing into parts of the country that are less accepting of people who look like them, said Kai Lightner, a 21year old Black climber from North Carolina and one of the sport’s brightest young stars.
He recalled a moment before November’s election, sitting in the car with his mother near the well-known Red River Gorge climbing area in Kentucky. As they sat in a parking lot reading the guidebook, a pickup emblazoned with Confederate flags and Donald Trump sidings sped toward them.
The truck circled the block, tailgating them, Lightner said. He and his mother had planned to stay in Kentucky longer to do more climbing, but after the incident, they decided it would be best to leave early.
“You have to bring it all to the start,” Lightner said. “If I’m already uncomfortable visiting these places — I’m already driving through areas with Confederate flags and racist flags to get to the crag — by the time I get to the area named after something racist, it’s kind of the last straw.
“It sends a pretty clear message,” he continued. “These spaces are not inviting to me or intended for me.”
Early in her climbing career, Azissa Singh remembers the strange feeling of climbing a popular route — known as a “problem” — in North Carolina called “Slave Driver.”
“There were racist and sexist things I encountered, and I would be processing them and think, ‘that was weird,’ ” said Singh, a multiracial climber and former Boulder resident. “I didn’t put
much more thought into it than that.”
But when she started having more conversations surrounding the lack of women within the climbing and outdoor guiding world, Singh began to put a finger on her prior negative experiences.
“Once I had my eyes open (to) … what sexism looks like in your job or hobby or sport,” Singh said, “it was pretty apparent.”
The debate comes to Colorado
Colorado has not been exempt from the public debate over inclusion in climbing.
D’Antonio has been approached about several of the names he coined in the San Luis Valley.
Two routes, “When the Whip Comes Down” and “Whipping Post,” both stemmed from the Catholic Church’s history in the Penitente Canyon, a popular climbing area south of Trinidad near the New Mexico state line, D’Antonio said. The names refer to Catholic penitents who used to whip themselves to show remorse for sin.
“It had nothing to do with racism,” D’Antonio said. “But with ‘When the Whip Comes Down,’ what would you think of ? To me, if a Black person walks in there, it’s pretty offensive.”
Now when climbers go to climb “Whipping Post,” they instead find a renamed route called “Black is Beautiful.”
“It didn’t offend me at all to change the names,” D’Antonio said. “I have to look at it through someone else’s eyes.”
But guidebook authors in Colorado and elsewhere are encountering a murky new world without an established set of rules over how and when to go about changing routes.
When Krol initiated a community debate over two routes in Rifle — “The Gay Science” and “The Gayness” — the discussion quickly turned contentious, with vigorous debate over the importance of asking the first ascensionist for permission or how much the time period, context or intent should matter. “The Gay Science,” for instance,
comes from the 1882 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
“People need to put a little more consideration into the times it happened and when routes went up,” Alec Hull, a Boulder climber, said, “instead of reading the name and judging the book by its cover.”
First ascensionists should have their opinions respected, and should be consulted, when it comes to names, Hull said.
“You wouldn’t go and see a painting in a church and say, ‘Oh man, the Crusades were really (expletive) up. Let’s change the name of this painting to something else,'” Hull said.
The future of route names
Nowhere has this debate been more present than at Mountain Project, a company started by two Boulder climbing buddies that serves as a hub and database for hundreds of thousands of routes around the world.
Utomo first pitched her flagging concept to REI in December 2019, as the outdoor retail chain controlled Mountain Project at the time.
The idea was simple: Utomo’s tool would allow people to report offensive names on the Mountain Project website and give feedback as to why they should be changed.
But the rollout didn’t go as planned.
Utomo says soon after she pitched the idea to Nick Wilder, one of Mountain Project’s cofounders, the tool appeared on its website, but in a slightly altered form, and without her knowledge or consent.
“To me it perpetuates this cycle of white people meaning to do well, wanting to take on this work and creating more diversity,” Utomo said. “But they don’t give proper credit and collaborate with people most connected to that community.”
Wilder, in an interview, declined to address Utomo’s accusations, referring The Denver Post to a July post he wrote on the Mountain Project’s website in which he apologized for not “acknowledging the care Melissa put into her proposal” and for not consulting more with groups of color before releasing the new website feature.
He insisted that Mountain Project used existing code from previous flagging features.
It was a mistake, Wilder wrote, for Mountain Project to have taken
a passive stance on route names added to the website by others.
“I regret having taken that stance in the past and sincerely apologize to the community, particularly to those climbers who are the targets of that hate speech,” Wilder wrote.
He insisted that addressing discriminatory names on the website was a “top priority” since rejoining Mountain Project in the spring.
Some 750 names have since been redacted on the website, Wilder said, with 150 of them — such as “Black is Beautiful” — already renamed.
In August, a board comprising nonprofits, climbers of color, first ascensionists and others convened a working group to address, according to Wilder, “the systemic issue of racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and homophobic behaviors in climbing culture.”
One of the first topics on the agenda: problematic route names.
But after her experience pitching the flagging tool went south, Utomo decided she would build something herself “to prioritize the things we wanted to see in Mountain Project,” she said.
A team of developers and designers is working on an alternative app, with the hopes of having a prototype by the middle of this year.
“We want to overhaul the system and reimagine what a good guidebook app can be,” Utomo said.