Where Climbing Came From: The Origins of Chalk, Climbing Shoes, Grades, Climbing Walls and Competitions

🌏 中文版

Next time you walk into a climbing gym, take a look around: the chalk bags for sale by the front desk, the downturned shoes on your feet, route tags reading V3 or 5.10b, the competition poster by the auto-belay. It all looks like it has always been there, but every one of these things was made for the first time by somebody, in some particular year.

This is the first post in the Climbing History and Culture series. Rather than starting in 1864 and working forward, it starts from things you can touch in the gym and traces each one back to when it appeared. By the end you should be able to point at any three things in the gym and say roughly which decade they came from and where. The densest run of dates is collected in a timeline at the end; the main text explains why each thing ended up the way it is.

How climbing split from mountaineering

Nineteenth-century mountaineers climbed rock too, but the rock was just one stretch on the way to a summit. Climbing became a sport of its own when people started treating how you get up as the point. Three places are usually named.

The first is Saxony (Sachsen) in eastern Germany. Locals treat 6 March 1864, when five members of the Bad Schandau gymnastics club (Turner) reached the top of the Falkenstein sandstone tower, as the birthday of climbing there. They used ladders and other aids; the route is known today as the Turnerweg. Giving up ladders and climbing free with hands and feet came later, with Otto Ufer's ascent of the Mönch in 1874.

The second is England's Lake District. Walter Parry Haskett Smith soloed Napes Needle, a pinnacle on the flank of Great Gable, in the summer of 1886, and that solo is often treated as the start of British rock climbing as a sport. The exact date is unsettled; people have argued for anything from 28 June to 4 July.

The third is Italy's Dolomites. In 1887 Georg Winkler soloed the Vajolet tower that now carries his name, without a rope on the way up or down; UKC's route record gives the date as 14 September 1887.

What the three places share is that the tower itself was the goal, and the way you climbed it mattered more than reaching the top. That idea soon needed rules to hold it up.

Rules came half a century before bolts

In 1911 the Austrian climber Paul Preuss wrote against using pitons for protection in a German-language alpine journal and set off climbing's first big ethics debate, the Mauerhakenstreit. He listed six personal rules. The core of them: your ability should exceed the route you choose; don't climb up anything you can't climb back down; ropes and pitons are for unexpected danger only, never for upward progress.

Saxony went further in the same years. In 1905 Rudolf Fehrmann placed a drilled ring as a running belay on the Großer Wehlturm for the first time, and climbers argued over how such rings could be used and what still counted as a clean ascent. In 1913 he wrote the outcome into rules in a supplement to his guidebook: protection may be used for safety only, not for upward progress. The same article notes that the Saxon climbing rules have since gained legal force through nature conservation law.

The word "redpoint" you hear at the gym comes from this line too. Kurt Albert from Nuremberg visited Saxony in the 1970s and came home to free-climb at his own crags; from 1975 he marked the routes he had free-climbed in the Frankenjura with a red dot, and redpoint climbing took its name from it. Redpointing asked one thing more than the Saxon rules: Saxony allowed resting on the rings, while a redpoint means climbing from bottom to top without resting at all. That became the dominant standard for free climbing worldwide.

The two big shifts that followed, clean climbing in North America in the early 1970s (removable nuts instead of hammered pitons) and sport climbing in Europe in the 1980s (pre-placed bolts), are covered in Who Decides Whether a Line Gets Bolted, so this post won't repeat them.

Grades: why bouldering uses V and rope climbing uses 5.10

Gyms post two sets of numbers because the systems grew up in different places, for different kinds of climbing. The three main scales each have their own origin:

All three share a story: each started out assuming it had a ceiling, and each was later opened up. Dolomites guide Enrico Maioni writes that Welzenbach's grade VI originally stood for "the limit of human possibility", which is why the scale resisted going higher. The UIAA formally added grade VII only in 1978, and in 1985 stated outright that the scale is open-ended. YDS was designed as a decimal system running from 5.0 to 5.9; by 1960 people were climbing harder than 5.9, and 5.10 was born. The a, b, c, d subdivisions above 5.10 were added by Yosemite climber Jim Bridwell in the early 1970s.

Bouldering got its own scale because early rope grades said little about how hard a handful of moves were. In the 1950s John Gill made a bouldering system with just three grades, B1, B2 and B3; Sherman's V scale, by contrast, has no top.

For converting between scales and reading R/X protection ratings, see Reading Grades and Protection Ratings.

Shoes: from nailed boots to soft rubber soles

Early climbers wore mountain boots, and the British hammered nails into the soles. John Gill writes on his bouldering-history pages that as late as the 1940s, British boulderers could tell which problems had been climbed from the scratch marks nailed boots left on the rock.

The change came from Fontainebleau, outside Paris. On his Fontainebleau history page, Gill writes that Pierre Allain invented a soft-soled shoe designed for serious rock work in 1935. It already looked a little like today's shoes but had no sticky rubber. Allain later worked with Émile Bourdonneau, whose family owned a shoe factory, to put it into production, and the line eventually split into two brands, PA (Allain's initials) and EB. The sticky rubber on your feet, Gill's pages say, was developed in Spain in the 1970s.

What overly tight, aggressively downturned shoes do to your feet is covered in Feet and Climbing Shoes.

Rope: from natural fibre to core and sheath

Before nylon, climbing ropes were made of natural fibres. EDELRID's company history says twisted nylon ropes from America reached Europe around 1940; Gill's pages say Pierre Chevalier introduced nylon climbing rope to the Fontainebleau crowd around 1943.

The rope hanging in your gym is a separate invention: in 1953 EDELRID produced the first marketable kernmantle rope for mountaineering, with a load-bearing core inside a protective sheath. That construction is still the standard for dynamic climbing ropes.

Bouldering and chalk: Fontainebleau and John Gill are two separate lines

"Who invented bouldering?" has no single answer, because it grew out of two traditions.

Fontainebleau's is the older one. Gill's pages say climbers were already scrambling on the Fontainebleau boulders in 1874; quoting Ratouis, he adds that the Club Alpin Français was founded that year, and its members found the sandstone boulders ideal for practice during hikes in the forest, as preparation for the Alps. In the 1930s Allain and his companions began arguing that climbing boulders was worth doing for its own sake, and in 1934 he climbed L'Angle Allain, the forest's first problem at grade 5+. In 1947 Fred Bernik laid out the first circuits at Fontainebleau: sequences of problems climbed in a fixed order, used as training for alpine climbing.

The American line comes from John Gill. A gymnast first, in the 1950s he brought a gymnastic approach to short, hard bouldering, and brought gymnastics chalk into climbing. He writes that within a few years after nailed boots were abandoned, he saw to it that chalk marks served the same purpose. From the releases and catches of gymnastics he also took controlled dynamic moves, which he called "free aerials": what we now call dynos.

So if someone asks whether Fontainebleau or John Gill started bouldering, the answer is that Fontainebleau came much earlier, but Gill brought in gymnastic movement and chalk. They are separate traditions.

Climbing walls: from a Seattle rock pile to a Leeds corridor

The earliest gym walls didn't look like walls. Seattle Parks and Recreation describes Schurman Rock in Camp Long as the oldest purpose-built climbing structure in the United States, a training ground for Northwest climbers since 1938. Its designer, Clark Schurman, wanted a human-made mountain that included every kind of climbing problem.

What is generally accepted as the first modern climbing wall was built in 1964 by Don Robinson at the University of Leeds. He had noticed climbers getting injured each spring after a winter of not climbing, so he listed the different types of climbing moves and reproduced them by setting pieces of rock into a brick wall in a university corridor. The wall was later demolished, but Robinson went on to found a company that built climbing walls.

Competitions: from Soviet speed events to the Olympics

The competition poster by the auto-belay traces back to the Soviet Union. The official history of the IFSC (International Federation of Sport Climbing) says the first climbing competitions were held in the USSR in the late 1940s. They were speed events, and until the 1980s mostly for Soviet climbers.

Lead competition began with SportRoccia in Bardonecchia, Italy, in 1985, held on a natural crag in the Valle Stretta. Things moved fast after that: the first World Cup in speed and lead in 1989, and the first World Championship in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1991. In the early 1990s it was decided that international events would be held only on artificial walls, to avoid environmental impact, which is why international competitions are still held on artificial walls today. Bouldering became an official competition discipline only in 1998, with a World Cup the following year.

On 27 January 2007, 48 national federations met in Frankfurt to found the IFSC, and competition climbing became independent of the UIAA. In August 2016 the 129th IOC Session voted to add sport climbing to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Tokyo combined speed, bouldering and lead into one score; Paris 2024 split it into a separate speed event and a combined boulder-and-lead event. How to follow Olympic formats and scoring is left for the competitions series.

When all this reached Taiwan

Taiwanese climbers mostly met these inventions some years after the fact. In an American Alpine Club (AAC) feature, climber Ta-Chi Wang recalled that in the late 1970s he was reading an issue of Climbing magazine a friend had brought back from the US, and that climbing in Taiwan was running about five years behind Europe and America. How these things reached Taiwan one by one, who opened the first routes at Long Dong, and how gyms multiplied is the subject of the next post, Taiwan's Climbing History.

Practice: four scenarios

The answer is under each one. Think first, then check.

1. A friend says: "John Gill invented bouldering. He's the father of bouldering."

2. At the gym you see a V4 boulder problem and a 5.11a top-rope route and want to know which is harder.

3. Someone says: "Climbing competitions have always been held on indoor walls."

4. At Long Dong an old-timer tells you, "We didn't use chalk back in the day." Is he bragging?

What's next

Continue with Taiwan's Climbing History: From Dapaoyan to Bouldering Gyms to see how these things reached Taiwan.

For climbing literature and training classics, A Knowledge Map of Climbing Books has a timeline of climbing writing from the 1950s to the 2010s. If you're just starting out, begin with Rock Climbing for Beginners.

References

• Sachsen-Lese: Die erste Bergbesteigung in der Sächsischen Schweiz (Falkenstein, 1864; in German)
• outdoor-magazin: Elbsandstein – die Wiege des Freikletterns (Ufer, Fehrmann, the 1913 rules, Kurt Albert's redpoint; in German)
• Footless Crow: Walter Parry Haskett-Smith – To Napes Needle and Beyond (2017)
• Mountain Project: Vajolet Towers
• UKC Logbook: Winkler Crack
• Climbing: Mauerhaken Streit – The Great Piton Debate of 1911
• UIAA: Rock Climbing grades
• Guide Alpine Dolomiti: The Sixth Grade
• Wikipedia (German): Schwierigkeitsskala (Klettern)
• Sestogrado: La scala Welzenbach e l'equivoco del sesto grado (in Italian)
• Idyllwild Climbers Alliance: History (Tahquitz and YDS)
• Climbing: The Source – How Hueco gave birth to modern bouldering
• Climbing: John Gill, Father of Bouldering
• John Gill: Bouldering History 1.0 (Origins of Modern Bouldering)
• John Gill: Bouldering History 2.0 (Early Bouldering in France, quoting Ratouis, Alpinist 12)
• Outdoor Inov8: EB Super Gratton History
• EDELRID: 160 years of EDELRID
• Seattle Parks and Recreation: Schurman Rock at Camp Long
• DR Climbing Walls 1975 to 2016 (Don Robinson)
• IFSC: Climbing Competitions' History (2015 archive)
• UKClimbing: Sport Climbing Makes Tokyo 2020 Olympics (3 August 2016)
• IOC: Sport Climbing – History at the Olympic Games (PDF)
• LACRUX: Climbing at the Olympics – competition format in Paris
• Britannica: El Capitan
• TOCC: AAC Guidebook XIII feature (October 2025; bilingual)
• Who Decides Whether a Line Gets Bolted: From Clean Climbing to Rock Ethics at Long Dong
• Reading Grades and Protection Ratings: 5.10a, 6a, VI+, E1 5b, and R/X
• Feet and Climbing Shoes: What Tight, Downturned Shoes Do to Your Feet
• A Knowledge Map of Climbing Books