History of Aid Climbing

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Some climbing historians date the origin of aid climbing to June 1492, when France's Charles VIII ordered his chamberlain, Antoine de Ville, and a handful of companions to scale Mont Aiguille (6,783 feet). To reach the summit of what was previously believed to be an unassailable peak, the de Ville party used aid in the form of wooden ladders.

Most climbers, however, view the 1786 ascent of Mont Blanc, which also required wooden ladders, as the true beginning of aid climbing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not uncommon for guides and porters to lug heavy wooden ladders to the base of difficult rock steps.

Artificial aids were scorned by many climbers, and as alpine clubs were organized, opposition grew to what mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young termed "publicity stunting and mechanical acrobatics."

Despite such vocal opposition, history is replete with accounts of artificial climbing on many important first ascents prior to the twentieth century. In Yosemite, aid was used by Scotsman George Anderson to ascend the "inaccessible" Half Dome in 1875. In an engineering feat that took six weeks, he drilled bolts in the granite dome and strung a rope ladder to the summit. The oft-photographed Devil's Tower in Wyoming received its first ascent in 1893 via a 350-foot wooden ladder hammered into cracks.

Aid climbing really started to take hold after the turn of the twentieth century, spurred by improvements in equipment, especially pitons and carabiners. Used in conjunction with the climbing rope, better equipment permitted better technique. Europeans, who had been responsible for most of these advances, could now attack steeper, more difficult faces. Some of the great spires of the European Alps were climbed, though not without a price. The death toll soared as climbers tried to push their equipment beyond its limits.

It would take a Swiss-born blacksmith named John Salathé to upgrade the equipment for the next climbing breakthrough. Salathé moved to California and began a climbing career at age forty-six. He discovered that the soft iron pitons imported from Europe were no match for the hard granite cliffs of Yosemite. One day he was climbing a crack that narrowed to almost nothing. Upon closer investigation, he saw a blade of grass growing out of the minute crack. "If a blade of grass can come out," he thought, "a piton can go in." But when he tried to drive in an iron piton, it just bent.

Using his knowledge as a metal worker, Salathé hand-forged a piton from strips of high-strength carbon steel salvaged from discarded Model A axles, creating the first hard steel pitons in the world. Then he returned to the tiny crack. As he later told the story in his heavy Swiss accent, "I took my piton and I pound and pound, and it goes into the rock." Salathé, whom Yvon Chouinard would call "the father of big-wall climbing," was now able to nail up hitherto hopeless cracks and thus avoid the need for bolts. Even today, fifty years later, Salathé's Lost Arrow design is regarded as the best for small pitons.

The effect was to revolutionize both free climbing and aid climbing. Freed of the burden of lugging extra backup pitons to replace ruined ones, climbers were able to carry more food and water, allowing them to attempt longer and more arduous faces. The twelve years after the introduction of Salathé's pitons saw every major cliff in Yosemite climbed: Lost Arrow Spire in 1946; Sentinel Rock in 1950; the great Northwest Face of Half Dome in 1957; El Capitan in 1958. It was the realization of what climber-photographer Galen Rowell would call "Yosemite's potential as the ideal locale for testing human limits on rock."

In the early fifties, California climber Chuck Wilts invented the knife-blade piton, using chrome-molybdenum aircraft steel for the first time. These pitons, smaller than anything available at the time, could fit in cracks no wider than a dime.

Although most of Europe's major rock faces had been ascended by the time climbing caught on in the United States, Americans now took the lead in aid climbing, especially on big walls. In 1957, when Royal Robbins, Jerry Gallwas, and Mike Sherrick climbed the Northwest Face of Half Dome, it catapulted Yosemite to the forefront of big-wall aid climbing, a position it would hold for several decades.

In 1958, in a monumental engineering feat that received a lot of attention, Warren Harding and various partners conquered the South Buttress of El Capitan, the most difficult and technical aid climb in the world. Three years later, Royal Robbins, regarded as the finest aid climber in the world, teamed up with Chuck Pratt and Tom Frost to climb the Salathé Wall on El Capitan, named for their innovative predecessor.

Many climbers today still regard the Salathé Wall as the finest rock climb in the world. And although it has been climbed without aid, most climbers still employ aid moves to scale this classic route.

Royal Robbins and his peers were far from done. In 1964, Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Frost, and Pratt completed the extremely strenuous North America Wall on El Capitan, which was immediately given the title ''most difficult aid climb in the world." It seemed that each time Yosemite climbers found a new climb, it acquired that reputation.

Yvon Chouinard, like John Salathé, had a huge impact on both equipment design and ethical standards. His invention of the rurp (realized ultimate reality piton), a tiny postage-stamp-sized piton that could fit in a crack no wider than a blade of grass, helped to reduce the need for placing bolts. Chouinard also designed the chock, a piece of hardware that fits securely in a crack or behind a flake, greatly reducing the damage that results from repeated piton placements. In fact, it was Chouinard who spearheaded the movement toward clean climbing that took hold in the seventies.

If Royal Robbins was the most prolific aid climber of the sixties, Jim Bridwell was the dominant force of the seventies and eighties. His ascents of aid routes with names like "Sea of Dreams," "The Big Chill," and "Zenyatta Mondatta" are among the most difficult aid climbs in existence. Perhaps the zenith of aid climbing was Bridwell and team's 1978 ascent of the "Pacific Ocean Wall" on El Capitan. A climb that demanded several tricky aid placementsmainly rurps,
copperheads, and hooksit set the standard for today's strenuous aid climbs.

Also in 1978, free climber Ray Jardine began marketing the Friend, a spring-loaded camming device that gripped a crack to provide a bombproof anchor. Friends and other camming devices have promoted clean climbing and permitted safer climbing of loose, dicey rock.

Today's aid climbers use a variety of protective devices, including cams, chocks, hooks, copperheads, and yes, pitons. Despite significant advances in the quality of climbing equipment, the sport's risk hasn't been totally eliminated. Aid climbers routinely risk falls of a hundred feet or more in their quest for height.

What does the future hold for aid climbing? Clean climbingthat is, without pitonswill continue to grow in step with environmental awareness. As equipment continues to improve, some longer aid climbs will cease to be multiday events, and fewer bivouacs will be needed. And perhaps someone will invent a new gizmo that will replace the destructive but heretofore necessary piton.

Just as long as they don't come up with something that eliminates the actual climbing."