Naming (and Claiming) Vertical Territories

Abstract

‘route names are often creative expressions of the first ascentionist, and can be funny, descriptive, tell a story … ’

Sbarra, 2011, online

Drawing on backgrounds in dance and performance and a passion for rock climbing, I examine the interface between climbing bodies and rock faces represented in climbing route names. Naming rock climbs provides a frame of reference against which to map human experience; ‘naming is … the way we image (and imagine) communal history and identity’ (Lippard, 1997:46). Naming makes the unknown familiar: to name is to tame, to lay claim. Lippard makes a distinction between indigenous naming as practical, and ‘western’ naming as conquering or colonising (1997:46). Thus, names can be an aid to understanding or a sign of ownership: epistemological or acquisitional tools. It is simplistic however to portray these two purposes as binary opposites: names hint at complex systems of knowledge and understanding that must be acquired before it can be put to practical use.

I have undertaken interpretative analysis of climbing route names on four crags in North Wales. The locations in which these climbing ‘performances’ take place are rural, with varying degrees of remoteness. Scrutiny of the practice of route naming provides understandings of the purposefulness of the action (expression of freedom/conquering spirit/aesthetic expression/political statement); and the spatial experience/expression of the participant. First ascentionists colonise new pathways up rock faces, which are then recorded in guidebooks and thus pass into the oral (conversational), visual (photographs and films), experiential (repeats of the climbs) and written (guidebook descriptions, books and articles) discourse of rock climbing, providing an opportunity to examine the ascription of meaning and the expression of power and aesthetic sensibility in this ascent orientated spatial activity. By examining route names, it is possible to consider how vertical worlds are turned into a field of phenomenological experience, mapped and measured and converted into aesthetic and cultural products.

Lippard, L. (1997) The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society, New York: The New Press.

Sbarra, BJ. (2011) http://www.splitterchoss.com/2011/03/17/a-route-by-any-other-name/17/3/2011, (accessed 2 May 2011)

Notes

1 The Clogwyn D’ur Arddu guidebook unusually devotes its second half to chronicles of the major historic ascents (Dixon 2004).

2 What I am suggesting here is that a crack in rock that can be seen to be well worn by its use by others to place fall protection appears safe, and therefore ‘homely’.

3 Pitches are stages into which the climb is split, like chapters in a book.

4 A mountaineering term for a stone jammed into a crack.