Climbing Ethics Revisited - Chalk

Chalking Up for Better Performance Has Its Drawbacks

Mar 16, 2009 David Black

The no-chalk or low-chalk ethic failed just as the no-bolt ethic did. Three decades ago climbers were concerned with clean climbing. What happened?

The Way It Was - Dust in the Wind

Half a century ago when climber's wanted to dry the sweat off their hands, they wiped them on their pants and grabbed a handful of local dust to rub between them. It was the same color as the rock that produced it, and when it rained it washed off the rock. It was the perfect grip-enhancer..

As climbers pushed limits they imagined they needed something better, and if magnesium carbonate worked for gymnasts, why not for climbers? Soon climbers were running all over with little cylindrical bags of chalk hanging from their behinds, spreading white smears and slime across the land.

Like the other x-factors in the ethics battle (bolts, sticky rubber, etc), chalk eventually became a normal, accepted part of climbing. No respectable climber would be seen without his or her bag of the stuff, and white powder-caked fingers with a hint of blood became the mark of machismo. Somewhere in the dust the concept of not altering the rock got left behind.

As with the no-bolting ethic, there has continued to be the occasional outcry against the use of white chalk on colored rock. Threats are occasionally made by Quixotic park rangers tilting ethics windmills. But the bottom line is that chalk is an intrinsic part of climbing now. The typical college climbing instructor tells his beginners to get three items to start out: climbing shoes, a harness, and a chalk bag.

The Way it Is - Climbing by Numbers

There are three primary problems with chalk:

1. Mixed with sweat and a bit of grease, chalk can become an almost permanent varnish of slime, making jam cracks and edges, for instance, nearly impossible to stay in or on.
2. Chalk plus moisture equals paint. As chalk and sweat get layered repeatedly on the handholds of a route, the route becomes permanently marked. When the route is so clearly marked, the value of a route as a challenge drops a level. The skill needed to climb it is less.
3. It's an eyesore.

Thus, through one or both of these processes, chalk eventually changes the nature of a route, whether it's a boulder or a wall.

The Solution

There are a few things climbers can do to minimize the negative effects of chalk. The first, of course, is to not use chalk at all. But that's too old-school for today's climbers, so the next best thing is to use very little chalk. That helps until the next couple of hundred climbers also use little chalk, which adds up to enough chalk to slime the route or mark it.

Colored chalk was at one time a good idea. It didn't solve the slime problem, but it might have helped the marking problem if the climbing industry hadn't started charging outrageous prices for that dash of color.

Finally there's chalk prohibition - the illegalizatiion of chalk on park lands. Prohibition simply does not work. There aren't enough rangers to patrol climbing areas, and none of them want to spend their careers looking into little cylindrical bags as their owners snicker loudly

In the end, just as with bolts and sticky rubber, there is no solution, because to all but a few rebel geriatric climbers there is no problem. And there is no real ethic regarding chalk, possibly because modern climbers have no ethics.

The copyright of the article Climbing Ethics Revisited - Chalk in Rock Climbing is owned by David Black. Permission to republish Climbing Ethics Revisited - Chalk in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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