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Lowdown, dirty danglers
Race up, top out, head home. Bouldering is making its mark in climbing country where fans decipher a puzzle of flakes and nubbins without gear. But traddies aren’t happy with the quick-thrill crowd.
Oh, no! Pad people
May 11, 2004
By Shermakaye Bass, Special to The Times
For a few eternal seconds, the lanky climber hovers beyond vertical. She clings to the rock at a 45-degree angle, fingers crimping a limestone edge, feet smeared onto nubbins. Every muscle in Lizzy Asher's body ripples. She briefly studies the rock, then positions one foot on an impossible kernel, tests it and rockets her upper body across the stone. At the same time, she grabs a slick, sloped pocket with one hand — chalked to prevent slippage — gripping a flake with the other. Within seconds, she has passed the crux of a classic rock "problem" at McKinney Falls State Park near Austin, Texas.
Asher is not dangling 100 feet up a cliff; she's 8 feet above terra firma, bouldering, an offshoot of rock climbing that pits human against rock without the usual tools of vertical combat, such as ropes and wedging devices. The high school student makes her gravity-taunting moves in quick, ballet-like sequences. She wears no special gear besides a chalk bag and climbing shoes. Below her is a 6-by-4-foot chunk of foam — a "crash pad" — and her sister Alexis, 21, a fellow boulderer who is spotting Lizzy in case she peels off the wall unexpectedly.
The 17-year-old pro is part of a bouldering subculture spawned at least in part by the rock gym craze of the '90s. The rocks around Bishop, Calif., the activity's current hub, have become so popular that some residents of the area blame a local author and bouldering booster for an increase in housing prices.
The sub-sport's growth has touched off a rivalry with some old-school climbers, as well as environmental concerns ranging from how wildlife will react to the intrusions to the splatter of chalk holds that don't wear or wash away.
"I hope I'll never be accused of being a climbing curmudgeon," says Colorado-based alpinist Jim Donini, 60, who has racked up first ascents in Patagonia, the Himalayas and Alaska and used to boulder to train for mountaineering jaunts. "But I have my own feeling about alpine climbing being the epitome of the sport. … You love it for the remoteness and beauty…. But you go to some bouldering areas — not all of them — and you find cigarette butts and candy wrappers. It just seems like the younger bouldering set is there for pure physical enjoyment and the challenge, and not so much for the spiritual aspects of climbing. People want to go out and get their quick fix and get back home by dark."
Lizzy Asher, who doesn't smoke or chuck candy wrappers, sees it, not surprisingly, quite the opposite. "Bouldering is almost the purest form of climbing. You're not putting in any gear," she says. "So I totally disagree with people who say it's not the real thing."
Unlike traditional climbers, boulderers define their sport not by altitude, endurance or rope lengths (pitches) up a route, but by degree of difficulty and brute strength. While traddies might spend days on a long route or weeks on a mountain, boulderers bust in, top out, then head home.
Bouldering was used over the years in the U.S. as a training tool for mountaineers. It allowed them to try high-risk moves without having to be far off the ground, says Scott Isgitt, a trad climber and boulderer who owns Austin Rock Gym in Austin. "It was about pushing the limits of the human form."
Isgitt, 34, has seen the sport spurt as gym rats who learned to climb indoors took their newfound moves to real rock. Now there are magazines, videos and gear dedicated to bouldering. "There are people who say it's not real climbing," adds Isgitt, "but I think it's legitimate. Whether some of the old school like it or not, it's here to stay."
The naysayers mistake quicker for easier, says Lisa Rands, a 28-year-old Bishop resident whom many consider America's best pro female boulderer. "Individually, the moves are a lot harder than anything you might find on a route.
"It's not that it's easier to do; it's easier to get to," notes the compact climber, who vaulted to celebrity status after embracing the sport in 1999 when she often found herself too busy to do longer "route" climbs.
Sit a spell in front of Rands' "Hit List" video, which trails the petite, buff, Hello Kitty-collecting blond doing crazy-hard boulder problems (sections) in the Sierra, and it's immediately clear: There is nothing easy about these rock rambles. Whether it's a 3-foot-high overhang parallel to the ground (a "roof") or a 15-foot "highball," with the toughest moves at the top, it requires utter focus. Clinging to microscopic crimps on bare rock, Rands is a picture of hard-body athleticism.
She and fellow California climbing luminary Chris Sharma (also a revered sport climber) tend to stick to problems about 3 to 20 feet high, finessing and powering through highly gymnastic sequences. Unlike alpine or big-wall climbers, who haul reams of clinking protection devices as they ascend, boulderers work the same problems over and over until they top out, doing it for the physical and mental gratification.
Bouldering's popularity has been fueled by affordability — it's way cheaper than trad climbing, which requires a lot more gear ($200 gets you a boulderer's shoes, chalk bag and crash pad) — and by its appeal to social climbers. Route climbers usually go up in pairs or solo. But boulderers, especially the younger ones, tend to hang together at the base of a favorite problem, waiting to one-up their compadres while catching up on the latest. Overlapping their pads like waterlilies on a pond, they frequent the limestone formations around central Texas, the ancient syenite blocks of south Texas' Hueco Tanks, the monzogranite of Joshua Tree National Park and the gnarly granite and volcanic rock near Bishop.
Bishop has become the country's bouldering epicenter, luring the "pad people," as Donini calls them, to places like the Buttermilks and the Happy Boulders. They bring money and start-up businesses into the region, but they also leave chalk on the rocks (as do trad climbers) and sometimes trample vegetation.
Yvon Chouinard, a climbing pioneer and founder of mountaineering equipment maker Patagonia, has publicly dissed the sport as not quite legit.
"It's a generational difference, that's for sure," says Donini. "The reason I got into climbing was to do a new route in Patagonia [South America], get on a ridge or a face that's never been touched before. You bivouac on a ledge that nobody's ever been on…. It's discovery." Though he appreciates bouldering's physical skills, he sees it more as a pastime, not the true embodiment of climbing.
But boulderers find their own version of transcendence facing down a granite or limestone problem.
"There is a mental aspect of bouldering, not just a physical one, like some people think," says Rands. "It's about training your mind to overcome fear and to have control."