Clean climbing is a rock climbing term that describes techniques and equipment which climbers use in order to avoid damage to the rock. These techniques date at least in part from the 1920s and earlier in England, but the term itself may have emerged in about 1970 during the widespread and rapid adoption in the United States and Canada of nuts (also called chocks), and the very similar but often larger “hexes,” in preference to pitons, which damaged rock and were more difficult and time-consuming to install. Pitons were thus eliminated as a primary means of protection in a period of less than three years.
Due to subsequently major improvements in equipment and techique, the term “clean climbing” has come to occupy a far less central, and somewhat different, position in discussions of climbing technology, compared with that of the brief and formative period when it emerged four decades ago.
Morley Wood during the ascent of Piggot’s Climb on Clogwyn du’r Arddu (North Wales) in 1926 reportedly was the first climber to use pebbles slung with rope for protecting a rock climb. These were replaced by the use of machined nuts in England during the 1950s. In 1961, John Brailsford of Sheffield, England, reportedly was the first to manufacture nuts specifically for climbing.
Rock scarring caused by pitons was an important impetus for the emergence of the term, and the initial reason climbers largely abandoned pitons. However, today what was in 1970s called “clean protection” and regarded by many climbers of the day with some suspicion with regard to safety, is now recognized as a faster, easier, more efficient and safer means of protecting most climbing routes than pitons, which are now in comparison with the 1960s, rarely used.
When chrome molybdenum steel pitons replaced softer iron in the early 1960s, pitons became more easily removable, resulting in their more intensive use and alarming damage to increasingly popular climbing routes. In response, there was a “movement” among U.S. climbers around 1970 to eliminate their use.
Although bolts continue to be used today for sport climbing, and aid climbers, rescuers and occasionally mountaineers may employ pitons, bolts and a variety of other hammered techniques, the average free climber today has no experience with hammering or drilling. Prior to the introduction of spring-loaded camming devices (in about 1980), clean climbing involved a safety trade-off in certain situations. Protection methods of today, however, are generally seen as faster, safer and easier than those of the piton era, and average run-outs between gear placements have probably become shorter on many routes.
Although English climbers had long used stones wedged into cracks and slung with cord for protection, this practice was rare in the U.S. In 1967, Royal Robbins returned from England with a sampling of artificially manufactured chock stones. He promptly made the first ascent of the Nutcracker in Yosemite Valley using exclusively these wedges. He subsequently wrote about this 6-pitch climb and others in Summit magazine and the American Alpine Journal but without much obvious immediate influence.
Within several years, another well-known Yosemite climber Yvon Chouinard began to commercially manufacture metal chocks, or nuts, in California. An important milestone occurred with the 1972 Chouinard Equipment Catalog, which included two articles on environmental concerns and climbing gear. One was written by Chouinard and Tom Frost; another was by Doug Robinson titled “The Art of Natural Protection”. Around this time, Bill Forrest also produced a somewhat less successful range of passive chocks, but more notably started experiments with camming which went on to become the first Lowe Alpine System active camming devices (sometimes jokingly called “crack jumars”).
Many other prominent climbers of the era, including John Stannard at the Shawangunks in New York, were influential participants in this early 1970s movement. As a result, climbers en masse rapidly adopted the technique, pitons quickly fell from favor, and the switch to “clean climbing” constituted a landmark change in the sport of rock climbing.
Piton scars from an earlier era are still widely visible. Today, on a relative handful of long-established climbing routes in a few places, these old scars enable the use of clean hardware. Such hardware would have been less useful on these particular routes before the rock was altered. It’s also true that certain routes which formerly were only ascendable on aid “go free” today for the same reason: there are in some places cracks smaller than fingertips which can now be climbed without aid because piton scars provide holds which didn’t previously exist.