Climbing mountains just to reach the top
For most of history, people climbed mountains only to cross them. That changed in 1786, when a hunter called Jacques Balmat and a doctor called Michel-Gabriel Paccard made the first ASCENT of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. A prize had been offered for reaching the SUMMIT, and their climb is often taken as the start of mountaineering as a sport.
Mountaineers later strapped CRAMPONS, frames of metal spikes, to their boots to grip ice. Our mountains page covers the peaks themselves.
The words climbers borrowed
Climbing has picked up words from all over. To BELAY, meaning to hold the ROPE for a climber and catch any fall, is a sailing word: sailors belayed ropes by winding them round a pin. A CARABINER, the metal clip with a spring gate, comes from the German for a carbine hook, a clip soldiers once used to hang a short rifle from a belt. To RAPPEL, or abseil, is to slide back down a rope, from French and German words.
The CRUX is the hardest move of a climb, from the Latin for a cross, meaning a puzzle. A PITCH is one rope-length of a long ROUTE, ending at a LEDGE or ANCHOR where the climbers regroup. An ASCENDER is a device that grips the rope so a climber can slide it upwards but not down.
Chalk, bouldering and indoor walls
BOULDERING means climbing short, hard problems on a BOULDER or low wall without a rope, with thick pads underneath to land on. An American climber and mathematician called John Gill, who had been a gymnast, started using gymnasts' CHALK to dry his hands in the 1950s, and he treated each boulder like a gymnastics problem. Now nearly every climber carries a chalk bag.
The first purpose-built indoor climbing wall is usually said to have been made at the University of Leeds in 1964, from bricks set into a corridor wall. Today most climbers learn indoors, on walls covered with colourful plastic holds, before they ever touch a real CRAG or CLIFF. An OVERHANG, where the wall leans out beyond vertical, demands strong arms and a tight GRIP, while a good FOOTHOLD saves the arms.
Very Difficult is not very difficult
In free climbing, the rope is only there to catch a fall; the climber moves up using hands and feet on the rock. In aid climbing, the climber pulls on gear placed in the rock to make progress. Routes are graded for difficulty, and the systems differ from country to country. France uses numbers and letters, such as 6a, while Britain uses a string of words that made sense a century ago.
The British grades start at Moderate and go up through Difficult, Very Difficult and Severe to Extremely Severe. Because climbers kept getting better, Very Difficult is now one of the easier grades, and a beginner may well climb one on their first day outdoors.
Racing up a wall
Climbing made its Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games, held in 2021, with three events: bouldering, lead climbing (as high as possible on a long route in one go) and speed climbing. Speed climbers race side by side up a fifteen-metre wall with exactly the same holds in the same places everywhere in the world, so records can be compared. The best men now reach the top in under five seconds.