History
Bouldering's documented origins may be found in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy in the last quarter of the 19th century. The British coined the word bouldering at that time. The first documented bouldering advocate may have been Oscar Eckenstein, a British engineer and innovative climber who wrote about bouldering, and in the 1890s conducted an informal bouldering competition for natives in Askole, a village in the Karakoram mountains. For many years, bouldering was commonly viewed as a playful training activity for climbers, although in the 1930s and late 1940s Pierre Allain and his companions enjoyed bouldering for its own sake in Fontainebleau, considered by many to be the Mecca of bouldering. The first climber to make bouldering his primary specialty (in the mid 1950s) and to advocate its acceptance as a legitimate sport not restricted to a particular area was John Gill, a mathematician and amateur gymnast who found the challenge and movement of bouldering enjoyable.
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