Simulclimbing, a historical perspective

[Lowell_Skoog]

Forrest's helpful response about simulclimbing in the Newbies forum,

 

http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/threadz/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=UBB18&Number=224268&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&vc=1

 

reminded me of something I've wondered about for a while. How did roped simulclimbing on rock come to be a legitimate technique in the Northwest? When I started climbing in the early 1970s, I'm pretty sure The Mountaineers did not endorse simulclimbing or teach it in any way. (I'm not positive about this, since I never took their climbing course, but instead learned from friends and books.)

 

Around 1977, my brother Gordy coached freestyle skiing in Zermatt for an school called Swiss Challenge. On his days off, he climbed with a British climber who introduced him to the concept of simulclimbing. Gordy brought the technique home, and we started using it in the Cascades in 1978. We were the first in our small group to use this technique, but we didn't talk about it much, feeling that it was sort of frowned upon.

 

In "Climbing Ice" (1982), Yvon Chouinard describes simulclimbing in the Alps. Many years later, simulclimbing even appeared in The Mountaineers' "Freedom of the Hills." (Perhaps they even teach it now. I don't know.) I've always wondered when and where this technique got started and how it migrated to the Northwest to become recognized by an organization as cautious as The Mountaineers.

 

This would be an interesting thread to trace, for someone with historical curiosity.

 

[Dru]

you can see references to "moving together" while roped (incl. guides shortroping and more simulclimbing like techniques" in lots of European and British mountaineering narratives dating back to the 1930's. Not to mention Canadians in the Rockies where the Euro guides predominated early in the 20th century.

 

Then again I heard that Washington climbers did not know how to jam, and liebacked everything, until someone went to California and brought back this amazing new technique in the early 1960's????

[Bug]

In Montana (where men are men and sheep are nervous), We simul-climbed before we belayed. We just did what we had to to get up alpine routes. I suspect, like Dru said, it has been around by one name or another as long as alpine style climbing has been around. It may have fallen out of "vogue" during the vertical wall phase of the 60's and 70's when Yosemite was being developed in a whole-hog way. But this is all anecdotal and speculative. I just remember what I saw and read about from those times.

[Lowell_Skoog]

Dru said:

you can see references to "moving together" while roped (incl. guides shortroping and more simulclimbing like techniques" in lots of European and British mountaineering narratives dating back to the 1930's. Not to mention Canadians in the Rockies where the Euro guides predominated early in the 20th century.

 

Thanks Dru. I'm not surprised that the technique goes waaay back. I'm still curious, though, how it migrated to the Northwest. My sense (and here I'm on pretty shakey ground as far as any formal research) is that the techniques taught in the Northwest after WWII were influenced more by climbing in California and the East Coast (and techniques taught by the 10th Mountain Division during the war) than by Europe. These other U.S. regions don't have the sort of alpine climbing environment we have in the Northwest. Long moderate climbs, perfect for simulclimbing, were perhaps not what most U.S. climbing schools focused on. The Northwest could have benefited from the European experience long ago, but my sense is that it didn't happen until fairly recently. I think simulclimbing spread in other parts of the U.S. around the same time it took hold here, as a technique for climbing fast on more technical rock climbs.

 

----

 

p.s. I should also clarify that I'm talking about something more specific than just "moving together". I'm talking about systematic, roped, protected climbing, where the leader places gear (normally on a shortened rope) and the second removes it. We called it running belays when we started doing it. Again, I'm sure it goes way back, but it's only been in recent years that it has become well accepted and described in U.S. climbing literature.

Edited August 11, 2003 by Lowell_Skoog

[Dan_Petersen]

I can only offer an anecdote. I climbed the NE Ridge of Bugaboo with Jim McCarthy in 1969. We were on the first pitch when a party came up behind us. I led the second pitch using chocks, which was unique then, and we put some distance on the two below us.

 

Several pitches later the two caught and passed us. They were simulclimbing at the time, although we didn't have a name for it. We were moving well, but belaying each rope length, since that's what we knew.

 

They introduced themselves as Gray Thompson and Denny Eberl, who I think had just done an ascent of the North Face of the Matterhorn the season or so before. I suspected that they had picked up that little trick during their European tour.

 

I remember a description in one of Terray's books about climbing on the Eiger and having Lachenal do surreptitious simulclimbing behind him in an effort to speed things up. I suspect he was wanting a rest (mental and physical) and couldn't figure out why the pitch went on so long. Anyway, it seemed to me that simulclimbing had a long history on the continent.

 

I haven't talked to Jim in many years, but I suspect that he took that example away as a handy little application for later efforts around the range, and I am sure spread it around among his partners.

[Lowell_Skoog]

Thanks Dan. Great anecdote. It confirms, perhaps, that I'm not imagining things, that simulclimbing was not "always present" in the Northwest (and U.S.) climbing scene.

 

I also don't think it's a matter of the Northwest being a "conservative backwater." I've never been very fond of that theory, because there are so many contrary examples, and I become suspicious whenever anybody suggests it.

 

[catbirdseat]

Lowell, I really have been enjoying your posts. They bring a much needed touch of class to the board.

[forrest_m]

Lowell - here's another personal anecdote... I took the mountaineer's basic climbing course in '86 and there was definately no mention of simulclimbing. The closest thing was on a climb, one older guy showed me the technique of "carrying coils" where you each coil up the rope and climb together to move the belay up across easy terrain. This was imparted in a whisper as being somewhat unorthodox. I carried a lot of coils in the early years (the entire upper half of serpentine arete, large portions of the n. ridge of stuart) where we would obviously have been better off just soloing.

 

The first time I personally employed simulclimbing was on the NE ridge of Triumph in the early nineties, my partner had read something about it in one of the climbing magazines. We had independently reached the conclusion that carrying coils for any distance was pretty silly. We had probably read about simulclimbing before, but this time the idea fell on fertile soil.

 

I just re-read Harrer's The White Spider, and he describes protected simulclimbing on ice on the Eiger in 1938. The leader placed "ice pitons" periodically as they moved up the ice (this is what saves them when the avalance hits them on the white spider icefield below the exit cracks), but they didn't use it on rock. Instead, the leader climbed each hard bit to a stance, put in pro and belayed the others to the stance, then continued, kind of halfway between simul-climbing and belayed climbing...

[Jason_Martin]

forrest_m said:

 

I just re-read Harrer's The White Spider, and he describes protected simulclimbing on ice on the Eiger in 1938. The leader placed "ice pitons" periodically as they moved up the ice (this is what saves them when the avalance hits them on the white spider icefield below the exit cracks), but they didn't use it on rock. Instead, the leader climbed each hard bit to a stance, put in pro and belayed the others to the stance, then continued, kind of halfway between simul-climbing and belayed climbing...

 

It makes sense to me that simul-climbing started on snow and ice and then evolved to include rock. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect that there were people simul-climbing steep snow and ice in the Northwest long before the technique evolved enough to be employed on the rock.

 

Jason

 

[iain]

Jason_Martin said:

forrest_m said:

 

I just re-read Harrer's The White Spider, and he describes protected simulclimbing on ice on the Eiger in 1938. The leader placed "ice pitons" periodically as they moved up the ice (this is what saves them when the avalance hits them on the white spider icefield below the exit cracks), but they didn't use it on rock. Instead, the leader climbed each hard bit to a stance, put in pro and belayed the others to the stance, then continued, kind of halfway between simul-climbing and belayed climbing...

 

It makes sense to me that simul-climbing started on snow and ice and then evolved to include rock. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect that there were people simul-climbing steep snow and ice in the Northwest long before the technique evolved enough to be employed on the rock.

 

Jason

 

That seems pretty likely. I couldn't imagine pitching out routes like most of those on Hood or Rainier, for instance. How else do you climb them efficiently besides roped simul-climbing, or unroped?

[ketch]

[Around 1977, my brother Gordy coached freestyle skiing in Zermatt for an school called Swiss Challenge. On his days off, he climbed with a British climber who introduced him to the concept of simulclimbing. Gordy brought the technique home, and we started using it in the Cascades in 1978. We were the first in our small group to use this technique, but we didn't talk about it much, feeling that it was sort of frowned upon.

 

In "Climbing Ice" (1982), Yvon Chouinard describes simulclimbing in the Alps. Many years later, simulclimbing even appeared in The Mountaineers' "Freedom of the Hills." (Perhaps they even teach it now. I don't know.) I've always wondered when and where this technique got started and how it migrated to the Northwest to become recognized by an organization as cautious as The Mountaineers.

 

This would be an interesting thread to trace, for someone with historical curiosity.

 

Lowell

I think that your in the right era. My first real class on rock climbing was in 75 out at Camp Long. Mostly classroom and some time on that training rock of theirs. I can't remember who taught the class but the question was brought up as to, why can't we climb together tied up like a glacier traverse? The instructors reply was that on the international level some people were advocating a "running belay" but, it was not a safe practice and so they didn't reckognize it. It was many years later that I started to look at simulclimbing and saw it as the running belay that I was told wouldnt work

[Lowell_Skoog]

Jason_Martin said:

It makes sense to me that simul-climbing started on snow and ice and then evolved to include rock. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect that there were people simul-climbing steep snow and ice in the Northwest long before the technique evolved enough to be employed on the rock.

 

This certainly seems possible, but the question is how often people actually placed protection on snow/ice while moving together. (Perhaps I should have titled this thread "running belays" rather than "simulclimbing", since that's what I'm really talking about.)

 

There's no doubt that simulclimbing is riskier, foot for foot, than climbing with fixed belays. But it does work. In late August 1978, I climbed the N ridge of Mt Stuart with my brother Carl. After completing the Gendarme rappel, we started simulclimbing up the easier ground toward the summit. There was new snow on the rock, and I placed a bomber hex before traversing a snow covered slab. There was a block on the slab, which looked solid enough, so I stepped on it. The block slipped away like a banana peel and I was suddenly watching the Stuart glacier come up toward me very fast. My brother saw me fall, yarded in the slack hand-over-hand, and caught me with his bare hands before I'd gone very far. I finished leading the climb and descended Ulrichs couloir with a painfully bruised hip. I still think about that hex, the only piece we had in at the time. It was probably the closest call I've had in the mountains.

[DCramer]

In the late 70’s there were several of articles written by the climbers bringing alpine style ascents to the big mountains. In at least some of these simulclimbing was advocated. I remember at the time being quite interested in trying it out but soon discovered that my interest in climbing really did not involve mountains so much as cliffs.

[terrible_ted]

The Mountaineers are coming around on this. You'll see many descriptions of snow and ice routes calling for running belays, and you'll often see it in the trip reports for intermediate rock climbs as well. It still is only given cursory coverage in field trips, and as often as not, when you talk about 'kiwi coils' or traveling in coils to students (basic or intermediate), the usual response is for people to coil up a bunch of rope in their hand and/or drape it over their head and shoulders without an additional tie-off. This is usually pretty easy to talk folks out of...

 

Simulclimbing has been given less emphasis on rock, and I often worry about newer climbers confusing 'protected simulclimbing' with 'dual-free soloing.' Usually something like the W ridge of Forbidden will be their first exposure to simulclimbing on rock, and instruction is on a case-by-case basis. I believe that the majority of active climb leaders have appropriate simulclimbing skills in their bag of tricks.

 

I'll be curious to see if this gets any more coverage in the newest version of Freedom.

 

-t

[iain]

There's the classic Matterhorn image of the consequences of unprotected (I assume) simul-climbing (not sure why it says 1965)...

[j_b]

i am not sure montaineers courses are the place to teach simul-climbing. covering it in freedom of the hills is an altogether different issue.

 

old timers (pre-hardware) were pretty much climbing simulatenously most of the time since they were often more than 2 on a rope and they only had rock bollards, and wedged sitting belays.

Edited August 11, 2003 by j_b

[Jason_Martin]

Lowell_Skoog said:

This certainly seems possible, but the question is how often people actually placed protection on snow/ice while moving together. (Perhaps I should have titled this thread "running belays" rather than "simulclimbing", since that's what I'm really talking about.)

 

This is what I meant. I suspect people were using running belays on snow and ice first... Sorry about the confusion in my last post.

 

Jason

[terrible_ted]

iain said:

There's the classic Matterhorn image of the consequences of unprotected (I assume) simul-climbing (not sure why it says 1965)...

 

Successful?? And I thought my standards were low...

 

-t

[JayB]

It'd be interesting to post this question on one of the national boards like rec.climbing or rockclimbing.com in order to get a sense of when and where the tactic had its origins in each state.

 

I know that in Colorado Albert Ellingwood was responsible for bringing tactics he learned in the English hill district back to the state in the 1920's. I am not sure about this, but I can recall reading something about heading over to Europe and hitting the Alps during his stay. Some people give him credit for single-handedly importing modern (circa 1920) climbing tactics to the state, and it would be interesting to see if this was one of the tricks he brought back with him. As both Colorado and Wyoming have a fair number of moderate rock routes, it'd be interesting to see when simulclimbing caught on out there, and if it came along any earlier or later than it did in the PNW.