Naming (and claiming) vertical territories

‘route names are often creative expressions of the first ascentionist, and can be funny, descriptive, tell a story…’

Sbarra, 2011, online

Drawing on my background in dance and performance and my passion for rock climbing, I propose to examine the interface between climbing bodies and rock faces represented in the practice of route naming. The process of naming rock climbs provides a frame of reference against which to map human experience; ‘naming is…the way we image (and imagine) communal history and identity’ (Lippard, 1997, p46). Naming makes the unknown familiar: to name is to tame, to lay claim. Lippard makes a distinction between indigenous naming as practical, and ‘western’ naming as conquering or colonising (1997, p46). Thus, the process of naming might be an aid to understanding or a sign of ownership: an epistemological or an acquisitional project. It is simplistic however to portray these two purposes as binary opposites: names hint at complex systems of knowledge and understanding that must be acquired before it can be put to practical use.

I have undertaken interpretative analysis of traditional climbing route names on four crags in North Wales in order to try to shed some light upon the naming process. The locations in which these climbing ‘performances’ take place are rural, with varying degrees of remoteness. Scrutiny of the practice of route naming provides understandings of the purposefulness of the action (expression of freedom/conquering spirit/aesthetic expression/political statement); and the spatial experience/expression of the participant. First ascentionists colonise new pathways up rock faces, which are then recorded in guidebooks and thus pass into the oral (conversational), visual (photographs and films), experiential (repeats of the climbs) and written (guidebook descriptions, books and articles) discourse of rock climbing, providing an opportunity to examine the ascription of meaning and the expression of power and aesthetic sensibility in this ascent orientated spatial activity. By examining route names, it is possible to consider how vertical worlds are turned into a field of phenomenological experience, mapped and measured and converted into aesthetic and cultural products.

Lippard, L. (1997). The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society. New York: The New Press.
Sbarra, BJ. (2011). (http://www.splitterchoss.com/2011/03/17/a-route-by-any-other-name/ 17/3/2011, accessed 2/5/2011)

c. Kate Lawrence 2018