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The best climbing invention ever is not the dynamic rope. It’s not the cam. It’s not the seat harness or the stick-clip or the Grigri. It’s not the hangboard or the campus board or the crash pad or the modern gym. Hell, it’s not even sticky rubber or the downturned rock shoe or the strap-on kneepad or the pink TriCam.
No, it’s a monosyllabic word: “Take!” Let me explain.
When I began climbing in the late 1980s, so many of the tools we have today were either in an incipient form or hadn’t yet been invented. My first harness didn’t even have a belay loop. Instead, I clipped a giant locker up through my leg loops and waist belt, fed a bight of rope through the small hole on a figure 8, and belayed. Rock shoes were flat as a board, and most came way up your ankles, which was great for cracks but not so great for overhanging rock. We only had one rock gym in town and it was 18 feet high, with weird 90-degree roofs, slabs, and bizarre, awkward angles; the only way to make the routes difficult was to make them tweaky, and more than once I risked serious injury tugging on a mono on an Entre-Prises hexagonal plate. And we bouldered—and highballed—without crashpads, which is about as heinous as it sounds.
This might all sound like the Dark Ages, but it was also a special time, because you could feel that we were on the precipice of something—the sea change fueled by sport climbing, bouldering, competitions, and gyms that has brought us to where we are today. You know, 5.15d, Instagram influencers, “deloading weeks,” “day flashes,” “personal grades,” “ground tries,” 9c fitness challenges, drones, battery-powered fans, hammocks, overrun crags, etc…All the best stuff!
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We have also gotten much better—read: more specific—at talking to each other, not only in how we share beta but in communicating logistics at the cliff. Our language has become a refined tool.
In 1987, when I started climbing, if someone had told me, “Rodeo up through bolt one—there’s a gnarly drop-knee drive-by to a dual-tex slimper that will feel way highball without the pre-clip, unless you’ve been working max power on the MoonBoard,” I would have stared at them with blank incomprehension. But, in fact, a sentence like this relays a ton of information. So, too, does the word take. In one quick, easy-to-shout syllable it lets your belayer know either to reel in extra slack, if you’re close to the bolt or on a toprope, so that you don’t lose ground; or it lets them know to catch a fall. It is an incredibly efficient belay command.
Before take, we in a way had to use three commands for the one: 1) “Up rope,” asking your belayer to reel in extra slack, 2) “Tension,” asking them to keep the rope tight or hold you in place, and 3) “Falling!” for, well, falling. Picture bumbler me, age 16, pimply faced, bike helmet on slightly askew, blown-out pair of Firé Cats with holes in the toes worn over wool socks, giant neon-green chalk bag, on a day out toproping with friends, say on the vertical basalt bluffs you find all over New Mexico, where I grew up. Slopping my way up some slippery, silt-covered 5.10 obscurity, I’d have first gotten gripped (“Up rope!), then gripped + fatigued (“Tension!”), then fallen (“Falling!”). I had to say three things just to end up hanging on the rope, and for someone like me who says about 10 words a day, that’s a lot of talking.
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The first time I heard take was in July 1989 at the City of Rocks, Idaho. I’d driven up from New Mexico to pick up my friend Mark in Boulder, Colorado, where he was staying with friends. After a few days of climbing sweaty Colorado sandstone in the heat, we headed west to Idaho.
Mark and I were both motivated climbers, but pretty lousy at everything else, probably because we spent so much time climbing. We ate the cheapest, most low-hassle food possible while traveling (cold beans and hot sauce on French bread, with a side order of Twizzlers), slept in a half-collapsed REI tent both of us were too lazy and maladroit to try to repair, and spent our rest days either lying around in the shade reading crap sci-fi novels or watching syndicated sit-coms on a tiny TV you could plug into the car’s cigarette lighter. We did, however, have some success on the rock, particularly Mark, who had strong fingers and a martial-arts background that made him very flexible. But we were no strangers to the word tension.
One day at the City, we saw two “cool guy” climbers wearing Lycra tights and tank tops across the way on another formation, trying a grievous 5.11c slab that involved pawing at sloping muffins. The lead climber oozed his way upward, but eventually reached an impasse.
“Take!” he hollered down to the other climber, who promptly reeled in the rope.
Take?! Mark and I both looked at each other, laughed, and silently mimed the word. We’d never heard it used that way before, and it seemed preposterous. Was this a lazy shorthand for “Take in the rope”? “Take me home tonight”? “Take a long walk off a short pier”? Who on Earth had come up with such a thing?
“Take!” we barked at each other the rest of the day whenever we needed to hang, cracking up each time we said it. “Take, take, take, take, TAKE!” A day or two of that, however, and the word became ingrained, and I honestly can’t think of the last time I’ve said “Tension” since.
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If you think my stance on the importance of take is hyperbolic, consider that anyone who climbs anything on a rope anywhere can use it, to the same effect. It’s the great universalizer. Pumped on toprope in the gym? Take! Take! Gripped stupid on an ice pitch, just got a screw in, and need a breather? Take! Running Micro Traxion laps on a fixed line and feel tentative about the next move? Take—well, the Traxions technically can’t hear you, so perhaps you’re just saying it for your own benefit. But, you know, say “Take!” anyway. It’s a great word; use it lots!
As final proof, I’ll leave you with this anecdote. Some months before I first heard take, a friend from high school, Jeff, was working on his first 5.12a, La Espina at Cochiti Mesa, an area of welded tuff much like Smith Rock. Jeff had been solo-toproping the route and dialing the moves. He had a fluid, balletic climbing style, and liked to get everything locked in just so. Eventually, Jeff was ready to give redpoint efforts, and I came out to belay him on the climb, which moved up two-finger pockets on a rounded prow.
About halfway up, Jeff began to get pumped and his technique faltered, his toes sloshing around in the little pockets. He probably had the physical strength to keep going, but his willpower was dwindling.
“Tension!” Jeff said still hanging onto the rock, his fingers plugged into tight two-finger pockets, the bolt at his waist. Then, “No wait, slack, no, wait… tension! No… Slack, no …. Up rope! No… ”
Down on the ground, my device locked off, I stepped forward and back below the climb, alternately feeding and taking in slack as Jeff vacillated—“Ten- … Sla- …. Ten- … Sla- …Ten-… Sla-” Finally, after like 30 seconds of death-gripping the rock, Jeff had had enough and simply called “Tension!” I took in the rope.
“Man, I didn’t know what to do up there,” said Jeff. “Whether to keep going or not. Sorry about that.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what to do either. I was just trying not to pull you off while you figured it out.” But all I could think was, There must be a more efficient way to communicate that you’re gripped and/or need to hang. Maybe someday we’ll invent that….
Matt Samet is a freelance writer/editor and longtime climber based in Boulder, Colorado.