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Back in the dark ages of sport climbing—the 1980s and 1990s—we didn’t know enough not to mix zinc-plated and stainless steel, nor did we pay much thought to how plated bolts and hangers in water streaks would rust and fail. Neither was there an American Safe Climbing Association nor local climber coalitions upgrading bolts in the field. I had a box of whichever cheapo expansion bolts—often Red Heads—I could score at the local fastener store, and a hodgepodge of hangers I’d mix and match to fit.
My climbing partners and I were young and broke, just making do with whatever was on hand. More-prolific bolters of that era—like Bob D’Antonio and the Colorado Springs crew at Shelf Road and Penitente Canyon; Utah and Idaho climbers at the City of Rocks, Idaho; and Porter Jarrard, Doug Reed, et al. out at the Red River Gorge and the New River Gorge—sometimes saved money on hangers by sawing off chunks of angle iron or bed frames, and then drilling holes in them: one for the bolt stud and one for the quickdraw. No one had any idea how strong these homemade rigs were. I never had one fail, but on slabby terrain they were terrifying; we called them “can openers,” and worried about fileting ourselves on the sharp metal corners or caroming against the wall and sustaining puncture wounds or splintering our shins on the edges.
Still, by today’s standards, hangers were cheap, maybe $1–2 each, and you could install an entire route for $50 or less: 12 bolts at, say, 50 cents each ($6); two open cold-shuts from the hardware store for your anchor ($6; prone to rope-grooving and random torsion, but, hey, at least there were two of them!); 10 hangers at $1.50 each ($15); and one wire brush ($2). Grand total: $29.
All of which begs the question, with bolting hardware so inexpensive, why did we sometimes feel the need to steal from each other?
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In spring 1992, a small crew of Boulder, Colorado, climbers—myself included—got fired up on bolting in Rifle Mountain Park. It was only the park’s second season as a climbing destination, and hundreds of undone lines beckoned from the blocky caves and water-streaked walls. The only problem? Putting in what were often big, long routes like these required money, and as a college freshman living on my parents’ dime and with a severe allergy to working, I had little discretionary income. Neither did my friend “Steve,” a dreadlocked skater kid from Evergreen, Colorado, whom I’d met bouldering up in the Flatirons during fall semester 1991 and who, like me, was taking the 8 a.m. Intro to Geology course at the University of Colorado that first semester because he “liked rocks” and otherwise “had no fucking idea what to major in.” (Not surprisingly, neither of us became geologists.)
Steve, however, knew where to score some hangers.
“There’s this shitty crag up by my house called Lapland,” he told me one day while we were up bouldering on Flagstaff Mountain. “Nobody ever climbs there—it’s just this big, lame slab.”
“Really?” I asked. “Like how many routes?”
“Not sure—maybe a dozen. If we stripped all the climbs, we’d have 100 hangers.” I did the math: 50 hangers each was at least three new Rifle routes, if not four. But wasn’t this stealing? It seemed wrong, even if “nobody” ever climbed there. Clearly the cliff appealed to someone—they’d taken the time to bolt it.
“I dunno, dude,” I said. “It seems dishonest.”
“No one will care,” Steve said. Or, as he pointed out, they’d just think the bolts had succumbed to the usual internecine squabbles between “sportos” and “trad dads” that were still common back in that bolt-chopping era. He continued, “Next time we’re up at my parents’ house”—where Steve and I would go once a month to stuff our faces, tired of mushy dorm food or often having missed dinner, because we were out late climbing—“we’ll go harvest some hangers.”
“OK, I guess . . . ” I said.
And so it was that some weeks later, after a spectacularly unsuccessful day trying to redpoint the short, slick quartzite climb The Web (5.13b) in Eldorado Canyon followed by a misbegotten attempt at “cragging” in the blazing sun on the dark, subpar basalt of North Table Mountain, above Golden, we ended up at Steve’s parents’, bored, with time to kill before our monthly feeding frenzy. Steve grabbed an adjustable crescent wrench from his dad’s tool bench, said, “Let’s go,” and we headed up to Lapland with our harnesses, rope, and a handful of draws.
Our harvest turned out to be pathetic. Steve led three bolts up a route, spent about fifteen minutes trying to unscrew the hangers on the first two bolts with his dad’s wonky crescent wrench as the studs rotated in the holes, bloodying his knuckles against the rock, and then said, “This sucks—it’s taking forever.” Steve left a bail carabiner and said, “Lower me,” which I was happy to do, still being uncomfortable with this whole idea and also having noted that this cliff, with its unique, overlapping plaques of granite that formed an upside-down staircase of underclings, looked like the coolest crag we’d seen all day—and surely didn’t merit stripping simply because we were a couple of lazy, immoral assholes.
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Whether you are Hindu Buddhist or not, you are surely familiar with karma: the concept that your actions in this life affect the form you’ll take when you’re reincarnated—i.e., if you’re deliberately cruel to others, perhaps you might come back as a cockroach, and not a human or an eagle. More informally, karma can also be understood to work in our daily lives as cause-and-effect—perhaps this is best understood through the lens of Newton’s Third Law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” i.e., push bad energy out into the the universe, and the universe will push that energy right back at you. Or, in other words, “Fuck around and find out.”
It should come as no surprise then that, a year or two later and as apparent karmic retribution for my role as accomplice in stripping hangers at Lapland—precisely two hangers that probably cost less than the bail carabiner we’d left—I had a climbing area I’d help develop in high school de-hangerized down in New Mexico, where I grew up. The area is called New Canyon, and is a short limestone bluff my friend Kirk had found out near his home on the east side of the Manzano Mountains. No routes were taller than 40 feet, and some were risibly short, like two or three bolts and only 20 or 25 feet tall. But the cliff was shady on summer mornings, the walls were stacked, and you could get a quick pump in a quiet, pretty place far from the urban sprawl of Albuquerque. Two New Mexico climbers, however, labeling the area as “lame and way too short” and surmising that “nobody ever climbs there,” decided to strip the routes—at least, this is the story I heard through the rumor mill.
However, as the tale continued, the hangers from New Canyon somehow ended up on these two guys’ own climbs (sound familiar?) at an area called Monster Island, near the Enchanted Tower in the southern half of the state—on routes said to be equally short! As far as I know, their routes at Monster Island are still there, but I’m sure I’ll never find out. Per a Mountain Project post, the road to Monster Island washed out in 2017 and you now must slog to get in there. Karma, it seems, settled the score—as it has, does, and always will.
Matt Samet is a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado.