Risk

I bought a helmet. It's shiny and it's blue and it's the cheapest one from Decathlon. Despite not really wanting one, peer pressure finally pushed me over the edge. Climbing culture has been subtly and not so subtly pushing helmets on us for a while now, but in the end it was my friends that forced my hand.

Stylin'

A roadtrip was on the cards: multipitch, trad and barely any boudering. The people I was going with told me to get one, so I did. Always pays not to be that guy. I still remember the halcyon days of trad in the peak and n'er a helmet in sight. Were we just idiots? Were we lucky? So now I wear a helmet on trad and multipitch. Except when I forget of course. Anyway, the new gear led long train of thought about risk, and events in the ol' climbing world weren't exactly helping.

Firstly, Ueli Steck died. A guy who always seemed completely solid and in control. According to the accident report he just slipped. Snow or ice seems way more sketchy than rock in this regard. At least rock is solid. Then again, there's that little video of Chulilla that's been doing the rounds on social media, reminding us that most sport crags are also just a good kick away from falling on our heads. Lovely.

Then there was that harrowing article on UKC. Jeeeesus, did they have to include gory photos and everything? It was really great to have those images stuck in my mind as I set off for that weekend's adventure. The only reason that many of us get out there at all is the irrational belief that it won't happen to you. But is that irrational? Only an infinitesimal proportion of climbers actually have a serious accident, and most of them are mountaineering rather than on rock. Even so, we were climbing loose dirty wet cracks on trad gear, so I double checked everything all weekend like a lunatic.

The following weekend it rained and I went to the wall to do some routes. After having led a few, we were told by the receptionist that if we were leading we'd have to wear helmets! In Spain! A country that normally couldn't give less fucks about health and safety. (Is this a thing now in real countries like England?) We'd seen others leading with helmets and quietly chuckled at their punterishness, assuming they were new to the sport or something. After that, we weren't exactly psyched on the whole thing and went back to bouldering. In 2030 when they force you to wear a helmet for indoor bouldering, I'll kill myself.

Honnold soloing Freerider is another thing that even the normies are aware of. An impressive feat, but when ever Honnold so much as moves one of his fat fingers, people start churning out the think-pieces about soloing, coverage of soloing, sponsorship and on and on. You'd think they'd get tired of writing the same article about the same dude every year or so.

Anyway, all this risk related stuff got me writing. (so really I'm not so different than those think-piece authors that I was just rude about) Personally I'd argue the most hands-off argument, which may not necessarily the most popular one these days. Ultimately, every climber is responsible for ensuring their own safety. Well that was a meaningless cliche, so let's try to throw some grey into the picture.

Conglomerate: fortunately not as loose as it looks 

What about when you're in the mountains with friends? If you take a risk and fuck up, you could be jeopardizing their safety. Valid point, but don't the friends in this situation also have moral agency? After all, they freely decided to take you with them on their trip. This leaves two options. Either they were aware of your well known capacity to fuck up and took you anyway, or they hadn't vetted you for this kind of behavior beforehand. So while the idiot-protagonist takes most of the blame, there's still plenty for the supporting cast.

Obviously this blame game is only played when the error is directly attributable to an obvious and dangerous mistake. The spectrum of accident causes runs from pure human error all the way to completely random events, with most somewhere in between. There are so many variables that it's impossible for us to be aware of all of them, so the pragmatic answer has to be personal choice. We're back to the cliche again.

So, climbing is an individual sport and as such, tended to attract people with an individualist mindset. Unfortunately this mindset seems increasingly at odds with modern culture.




That's why they'll ban climbing one day. The same way they'll ban driving as soon as self-driving cars perform better than their fleshy counterparts. The arguments will be exactly the same: that the risks and dangers of 'insert enjoyable activity here' simply outweigh the benefits. Ban smoking, drugs, alcohol, anything with a bit of edge. And climbing has that. No formal rules, the potential for death, and absolutely no barriers to entry. Protection from harm and freedom to harm oneself are often mutually exclusive concepts. Being protected may seem like a universally good thing, but it's smothering in the long run. Agency is like a muscle, it atrophies if you don't use it. If we never face choices, we'll fail the moment a real one is presented to us. And yeah, maybe some people will make the wrong choice and suffer the consequences, maybe some idiot will be 'inspired' and bite off more than he can chew soloing. But the alternative of a sanitized world sounds worse than that.

The problem is that the safety lovers appear to be dominating the conversation at the moment . They have all the right arguments: after all, why does any reasonable person need to smoke a cigarette or climb a wall. This nannying, hyper-rationalist vision of the world that makes perfect sense if you completely ignore human nature in all of its messy glory. It also has the ability to creep in without people even noticing they're ceding ground. So do something stupid while you still can.

Maybe I'm an alarmist? Exaggerating? The climbing equivalent of Infowars? I'm sure if you told
earliest adopters of our great sport that they'd ever be wearing helmets for indoor climbing, they'd have told you the same thing.

So much fun it should be illegal

Remember when climbing had a sense of humor?

Jesus H Christ, climbing media is a comedic wasteland these days. These days, climbing media seems to come in different shades of preachy or pretentious. It's no longer enough to see a climber crushing something in a beautiful corner of the world, there has to be some heavy handed message about overcoming adversity or (shudders) personal growth tacked on to the narrative. Is that really what climbers want? To me, this projected image of climbers as a whole seems to be at odds with climbers themselves. We are, generally, an irreverent bunch, not taking themselves too seriously and prone to cracking jokes at their own expense. Maybe I'm missing out on the whole deep spiritual quest side of the climbing equation, but there does seem to be a pretentiousness oozing into the edges of climbing culture. Take a stroll through Instagram and imagine explaining these (real!) hashtags to anyone over the age of 35:

#nature, #climbingismypassion, #climbingisbliss, #climbinglife, #livefree, #strongisbeautiful, #tradisrad, #sunsoutgunsout 

I could have gone another 50 but my spine was cringing out of my back. You get the point. We're all taking ourselves super seriously. At risk of coming over all Holden Caulfield, it just comes across as, well, phony.

One also can't help but feel the dead hand of corporatism behind this new trend in videos. Every time I come across a super earnest and serious video tackling a super serious issue, it's not hard to imagine managers and market researchers behind the scenes, murmuring about brand identity and projecting the right image. Undoubtedly the increasing availability of cutting edge tech has narrowed the gap between professional and amateur video content, but you can still tell how much money something has behind it. There's unreal gloss to everything. Too many close ups of shoes being put on, too many timelapses and this deadpan earnestness that I've never encountered in a real person. In some cases, you can see that the climbers themselves are clearly uncomfortable at being asked to pontificate in this faux-candid style.  

#notall I hear you cry! I probably should add some caveats and exceptions to my sweeping generalizations for you nitpickers out there. I was careful above to make the distinction between professional and amateur video. Broadly, amateur video still consists of some guy climbing with some sick beats in the background. Nothing wrong with that and a great way to check out an area before you go. More power to 'em!

But the current lack of humor wasn't always the case. Hop in the time machine, whack on the nostalgia googles and I'll take you on a tour of climbing's long lost sense of humor.
Remember Boogie till you Poop? That was mad popular back in that day. The kind of fecal humor that's universal in its appeal.
Even mainstream stuff like the Reel Rock series used to make jokes back in the day? Top Rope Tough Guys was great, and Roxx. Them's were the days.
Any of the old Dave Graham videos, such as Small Amazing Things or the classic Between The Trees. These two, especially the latter, were funny without even trying, and also managed to tell a story without ever slipping into pretentiousness.

Back in the present, climbing related lols are relatively thin on the ground, but they still exist in some dark corners of the internet. Go. Watch and subscribe. Stimulate the market for this type of stuff.

1. Anything with Honnold in it. The guy is surprisingly funny, talks a lot of shit and is clearly not being told what to say by anyone. The combination of really dangerous climbing with seeming irreverence which is a winning combination. Even in interviews when he's talking about stuff he cares about like the environment, he manages not to be insufferably preachy, which is no mean feat.
2. Rawk Tawk's Instagram account. Their meme game is so tight it's ridiculous. They're not afraid to take aim at anyone: pro-climbers, brands,and other sacred cows of the industry. They're also clearly massive climbing nerds, and produced what is possibly my favorite meme.
3. Shit Climbers Say by LT11. Bit old now, but still funny.
4. Rock Climbing Life. Once again it's old but it was a great example of Poe's law in effect. Go back and read those first few articles and you won't be sure if its a parody or not.
5. Punterwatch on twitter.

Just used a non-microwavable bowl in the microwave. Pretty devil-may-care. Will @fivetenuk sponsor me now? #brandofthebrave 

#brandoftheknob

Whats's my conclusion to all this? Well, climbing is getting bigger, the number of climbing walls in Madrid has doubled since I've been here, you've got Shauna Coxey being interviewed by the BBC and the Olympics guarantees a fuckton of exposure. Hell I've even got normies sharing climbing content on my newsfeed. It's a truism but mo' money tends to indicate mo' problems. You can definitely feel the urge by companies to broaden the appeal of our little niche sport. to make it nice and safe and friendly and positive and socially conscious and on and on and on... I guess my worry is that bland commercialism is going to edge out the unique personality of climbing culture. I guess Rawk Tawk's lampooning of things like Ashima's recent sponsorship deal with Coca Cola is the closest thing I've seen to a kickback so far.

Or maybe I'm just misanthropic, overly nostalgic and worried for no reason.Who knows?