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Rock Climbing
What is the history of
rock climbing?
BY JESSIKA TOOTHMAN
Tom Cruise's opening
sequence in the movie "Mission: Impossible II" is a pretty good
example of what people picture when they imagine extreme recreational rock
climbing.
But
folks haven't always considered scaling vertical rock faces as smashing good
fun.
Throughout
history, people have been faced with obstacles.
Sometimes
the obstacles came in the form of repressive dictators or lean growing seasons,
but at other times, they were direct and tangible -- take mountains, for
example.
Before
cars, trains and airplanes, if someone wanted to travel from one side of a
mountain range to the other, it was a lot trickier than simply navigating
sharply winding roads.
Welcome
to the world of hoofing it.
Speaking
of hooves, to uncover early incarnations of mountaineering you simply need to
determine which historic professions would have required people to putter
around near the summits of mountains.
Shepherds
are a good example: In order to follow their flocks of sure-footed sheep,
shepherds were often forced to cover terrain that others would have bypassed
for flatter lands.
By
doing so, they picked up the basic skills needed to manage the steep slopes, as
well as developed the rudimentary gear to make the task easier.
Pinpointing
the exact inception of any sport is tricky, however, especially when you figure
in the hometown pride factor -- athletic enthusiasts love having a claim to
fame, and similar ideas often develop simultaneously in separate locales,
leading to competing claims.
Plus,
there's the matter of determining what event truly counts as a definitive
start.
For
instance, when does a shepherd's trek turn into sport? When he leaves the flock
to the care of his sheepdog and ventures off for little side jaunt?
There's
certainly been a lot of gray area as rock climbing evolved and entered its
current recreational incarnation.
Further
complicating the question are others: What exactly is rock climbing? And how
closely is it related to mountaineering?
What
different styles can it be broken down into?
But
this isn't the history of some ponderous intellectual game like chess; this is
rock climbing! A sport renowned for its extreme physical challenges and surging
adrenaline rushes.
Rock Climbing as a Sport
Two men sometimes cited as establishing
mountaineering's modern age are Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat --
score one for the French -- who scaled all 15,771 feet (4,807 meters) of Mont
Blanc in 1786.
Soon
others followed their lead, scrambling all over the Alps trying to master the
lofty summits.
Mountaineering
began to capture the imaginations of many at this point, although it wasn't
until 1857 that the first mountaineering club, the Alpine Club, came along.
But
the club's formation still isn't typically considered the dawn of rock climbing
as a sport of its own.
After
all, while climbing a mountain often involves some vertical ascents, there's an
awful lot of hiking in there, too.
In
order to tackle the cliffs that were encountered during expeditions,
mountaineers would often practice on smaller mountains and rock faces to build
up their endurance and develop their abilities before setting off for the big
leagues.
Eventually,
enthusiasts increasingly began to enjoy these smaller climbs in and of
themselves. There was less danger than on full-blown mountain peaks and less
downtime in between thrilling climbs.
Plus,
suitable ascents were easier to come by since not everyone who wants to get
into rock climbing lives within driving distance of the Matterhorn or Mt.
Kilimanjaro.
John
Muir, the first president of the Sierra Club, was an early fan of rock
climbing.
Story
has it that in 1869 he was herding some sheep in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite
when he meandered over to Cathedral Peak and decided to take a crack at it.
Modern
rating systems are a matter of endless controversy among rock climbers, but to
give you a basic idea, today the climb is generally considered to be around a
Class 4 (out of 5) and is not often tackled without a rope.
Over
time, rock climbing started to be seen as a pleasurable athletic pastime.
From
the early activities of pioneering aerial daredevils, it has evolved to
encompass a whole slew of rock-related recreation.
Recreational
rock climbing blossomed in the early 20th century but really came into its own
in the middle of the 20th century.
A
range of developments emerged as it became more popular as a sport.
For
example, various grading systems were created to rate the difficulty levels of
different climbs.
Climbing
styles were developed based on conditions like the terrain, the use (or lack
thereof) of equipment and whether the climbing was done indoors or outdoors.
Jessika Toothman
Jessika has traveled to 47 of the 48 continental
United States -- New Mexico, you're the last one left, but she hopes to visit
you soon. Of course, it's helped that she's lived all across the U.S. -- in
Washington, New York, Wisconsin, Colorado and her current digs, Atlanta. There,
she earned two undergraduate degrees from Georgia State University, one of
which is in print journalism, but after spending some time in the newspaper
biz, she decided the Web was where it's at.
Besides being a staff writer and
blogger for HowStuffWorks.com, Jessika enjoys painting, expanding her
vegetarian recipe repertoire, walking her cat and spending afternoons by the
pool. She's also a junkie for modern American literature, although she pours
over nonfiction books from time to time, too. As co-captain of the How-to Stuff blog, Jessika is always willing to
explore fresh topics and try new tasks, getting down in the trenches so others
can reap the benefits of what she's discovered. Her plants know this all too
well, for example, as Jessika's cheerful hit-or-miss gardening experiments
usually end with green thumb goodness, but sometimes turn into learning
episodes loaded with botanical bereavement.
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