2. Bouldering has higher standards of difficulty than traditional climbing allows. Originally - in the 1880s and 1890s - climbers approached boulders and small outcrops as mini- or micro-climbs, reflecting difficulty standards existing at that time on longer routes.  Beginners were brought to the boulders to learn fundamental moves. But a small contingent of boulder-climbers, even then, saw the potential for going beyond mere introductory training, and began attempting harder problems. Oscar Eckenstein, ca. 1890, and Siegfried Herford and John Laycock, ca. 1910, in England, were early proponents of this more advanced concept of bouldering. For Herford and Laycock, bouldering was merely one aspect of crag climbing, which they considered worth doing not only as training but for its own sake.  Pierre Allain and his group established problems at Fontainebleau during the 1930s and 1940s that eclipsed previous traditional efforts.  And, beginning in the late 1950s, American bouldering standards took a significant upward jump, away from the traditional roped-climbing yardstick, at first largely due to my efforts - I was the only serious climber aknowledging bouldering as my primary climbing activity - then due to the efforts of an initially small, but increasing number of talented new boulderers. And in the 1970s at least one American boulderer - Jim Holloway - did problems that, even today, rank at the top of the international bouldering difficulty scale.


3. The sport may be seen as a kind of  gymnastic enterprise, similar to formal, competitive gymnastics, and involving the use of chalk, spotting,  safety or crash pads, and dynamics. And rock is seen, to some extent, as an 'apparatus' upon which the climber does a difficult sequence of moves or 'routine', called a 'problem'. Chalk was introduced by me in the 1950s, and the act of spotting has always been part of the game - although the expression 'spotting' derives from gymnastics, and has only been used in bouldering since the 1950s. Modern rock dynamics - inspired by formal gymnastics -  began in America in the 1950s.

The term spotting has interesting origins: In 1930, a new gymnastics coach at the University of Illinois, Hartley Price, painted 4' diameter white circles on the gymnasium walls, calling them "spots". Gymnasts seeing the "spots" were supposed to think safety and look for those who could assist them through one element or another. Such assistance became known as "spotting".

   
University of Illinois gym, 1930s    

Crash pads appeared in the early 1990s (although small mats for keeping the shoes dry were used by the 'Bleausards in the 1940s, as was POF). In Moors, Crags, and Caves of the High Peaks(1903) the author, E. A. Baker, speaks of the prototype for bouldering crash pads: "For if, as is likely, the stony giant knocks you backwards, there is a thick pad of heather to fall on, with deep cushions of peat below."   form plays different roles in artistic gymnastics and bouldering :  In formal gymnastics, form is sought for aesthetic reasons - while in bouldering, form is  almost entirely functional in character. Perhaps, as bouldering matures, this perception will change.


4. There are rules of the game or ethical guidelines specific to bouldering. These rules shift over time and vary somewhat within the bouldering community.  For instance, most boulderers these days avoid top-ropes, using pads instead. But some competitions require ropes, for safety's sake. Nevertheless, one of the defining characteristics of contemporary bouldering is that ropes are not used. This opens the door to the ancient, but only now evolving, separate activity of top-roping. Historically,  before the inroduction of crash pads in the early 1990s, bouldering was done both with and without top-ropes.  A problem requiring a sit-start would not be considered the same if done without it. Many young climbers, coming into a natural environment and having learned about bouldering in a gym, see the designation of eliminates as a natural extension of the color-coded problems with which they are familiar. In a moment, a few more words about this. These contrivances are analogous to structuring a routine on a piece of traditional gymnastic apparatus.   


5. Bouldering has its own rating system, and preferably the system(s) is not merely an adaptation of an existing free-climbing scale (if it were, one might conclude that bouldering had not cut its bonds with the mother sport entirely).  E. A. Baker (1903), says ". . . our Sheffield friends can teach us something yet, for here they have reduced climbing to a systematic art, and can show a variety of problems graduated for the novice or the expert, and compassed about with as many rules and prohibitions as those of the smartest gymnasiums", implying the existence of some sort of preliminary grading system - probably based on that suggested by O. G. Jones for longer climbs.  Prior to that time, there is the strong inference that Oscar Eckenstein had designed and used a kind of scoring or rating system for bouldering competitions in the early 1890s (see the brief bio I've done on him in the Origins section of this site). The 'Bleausards devised and documented a variant of an existing French scale in the 1930s or 1940s, and so were the first, perhaps, to have an "official" bouldering rating system. However, the first completely independent structure to be widely used may have been the unpretentious and now largely discarded B-system I devised in the 1950s - doomed from inception since it had only three levels of difficulty. The simple V-scale, created by John Sherman in the 1990s, is open-ended and the most popular in America today. Some boulderers spend more time arguing ratings than actually climbing.


6. There are both informal and formal competitions. Informal contests probably existed as far back as the 1890s in Great Britain, and Oscar Eckenstein reports bouldering contests he conducted in Kashmir in 1892, for the local natives. Almost certainly, informal, if not formal, contests occurred at Fontainebleau over fifty years later. But the first formal competition possibly occurred in America in the very early 1960s, at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. It was an invitational affair organized by Harvey T. Carter, who set the courses, judged the performances, participated as a competitor, and won a prize.
 

7. There are training procedures  that enhance bouldering (as well as rock climbing) performances. The 'Bleausards, in the 1930s and 1940s, probably trained in some fashion for their version of bouldering. Especially since Guy Poulet was a fitness instructor. And the practice, in one form or another, goes all the way back to the beginning, in the 1880s. Aleister Crowley reports that Oscar Eckenstein, the first documented bouldering advocate, did a one-arm pull-up in the 1890s. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, describing Pen-Y-Pass climbing gatherings during 1900 through 1914, says how the "casual visitor might enter to find Eckenstein hanging upside down by his hands on a rope." And George Abraham tells a (ridiculously tall) tale about the incredible gymnastic strength of Owen Glynne Jones during the same time period.  Jones himself comments occasionally about his training regimen. For example, with reference to his climb of the Walker Gully in the winter of 1898, he states : ". . . I blessed the previous three months' monotonous training with heavy dumbells".  E. A. Baker (1903), speaking of an associate, comments  " . . . an esteemed friend of mine keeps his muscular mechanism in order by ascending the outside of an iron staircase on his fingers, and, after a short 'stomach traverse', crossing in a sitting position the tie-bars of the lofty roof beneath which he is doomed to spend the intervals between his holidays." Haskett Smith wrote (ca. 1900) of a colleague, that he "had prodigious muscle power. I have seen him go up one edge of a house gable, over the ridge and down the other side, swinging by his fingers all the way from the edges of the slates."


8. Dynamic moves are a strong, even necessary component of the sport. Prior to the late 1950s most American bouldering could be described as microclimbing - difficult enough, but really just pushing the sort of moves one could encounter on a traditional climb, but done on a very small piece of rock. As Professor Klein points out, the regimentation of technique imposed by several mountaineering bureaucracies in America, including the Army, made 'three-point-suspension' an almost religious injunction, and one that contaminated bouldering as well. The introduction of truly difficult, technique-intensive dynamics in the mid to late 1950s - a significant part of what makes the sport a gymnastic enterprise, and an aspect of bouldering I explored, relished, and promoted - changed its character. Before that, in the 1930s and 1940s at Fontainebleau, French climbers employed simple dynamics, like jumping from the ground to reach the first handhold, on some of their climbs - probably unaware that such technique was disparaged across the Atlantic.



9. Bouldering can also be performed as a risk sport.   Bouldering well above the ground without a rope has been a part of the British version of the sport, going back to the 1890s. There's a rumor that Owen Glynne Jones, the first gymnastic climber, did a high-ball route on Gash Rock in the Lake District in the 1890s. He certainly soloed Kern Knott's Crack - about 5.7 - at that time, after practising it on a top rope.  Pat Kelley, one of Britain's finest rock climbers during the 1920s - and it's a 'she' not a 'he' - did this sort of thing on the Scoop in the Peak District, and probably elsewhere. And Pierre Allain and his compatriots did similar things, as well, with Allain moving smoothly high off the deck on 5.9+ terrain in an old film clip from the 1940s. In America,  the 1961 ascent of the thirty foot Thimble - when viewed as a boulder problem - proved that somewhat harder bouldering (5.11-5.12)  need not be entirely safe.

Where to Draw the Line . . . If a Line is Appropriate?

'Historical vs. Modern' or Simply Different Paths . . . ?