Clean climbing

These techniques date at least in part from the 1920s and earlier in England, but the term itself may have emerged in about 1970 during the widespread and rapid adoption in the United States and Canada of nuts (also called chocks), and the very similar but often larger hexes, in preference to pitons, which damage rock and are more difficult and time-consuming to install.

Such "clean" gear, as of contemporary times, now include spring-loaded camming devices, nuts and chocks, and slings, for hitching natural features.

Contemporary alternatives to pitons, which used to be called "clean climbing gear", have made most routes safer and easier to protect, and have greatly contributed to a remarkable increase in the standards of difficulty notable since about 1970.

Protection methods of today, however, are generally seen as faster, safer and easier than those of the piton era, and average run-outs between gear placements have probably become shorter on many routes.

In the early 1960s, after climbing a while in Britain, Yale physicist and notable New England climber, John Reppy, imported nylon-slung machine nut protection to Connecticut's Ragged Mountain.

Nuts were therefore used as climbing protection in Connecticut about a decade before popular use in the U.S. [4] In 1967, Royal Robbins returned from England with a sampling of artificially manufactured chock stones.

To encourage others to follow, he put a logbook in the climbing shop, Rock and Snow, in New Paltz, NY, where any climber could receive credit for a "First All-Nut Ascent" in the Gunks.

[6] The same year, another well-known Yosemite climber, Yvon Chouinard, began to commercially manufacture a carefully-calibrated line of metal chocks, or nuts, in California.

Some contemporary routes, like a number of long, limestone climbs in the Bow Valley, Alberta, are notable for fixed bolts at belay stances and for protection at relatively wide intervals,[11] and thus a kind of hybrid of trad and sport is possible—if supplementary gear can be placed.

A relatively small number of climbers believe in varying degrees that fixed gear should never be placed on any route in order to preserve the rock and its inherent challenges.

For example, bolting is not banned in Pinnacles National Park, but the local climbing community does not tolerate rap-bolting — bottom-up route development is expected.