Clean climbing is a rock climbing term that describes techniques and equipment which climbers use in order to avoid damage to the rock. 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 damaged rock and were more difficult and time-consuming to install. Pitons were thus eliminated in North America as a primary means of protection in a period of less than three years.
Due to subsequently major improvements in equipment and techique, the term "clean climbing" has come to occupy a far less central, and somewhat different, position in discussions of climbing technology, compared with that of the brief and formative period when it emerged four decades ago.
Read more about Clean Climbing: Rock Preservation, History, Conditions Today, Values and Regulation
Famous quotes containing the words clean and/or climbing:
“Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)