Vertical-Life
Griffith: Ground-up bolting 1981
An old-school ground-up bolting in 1981 By Said Belhaj
Christian Griffith is a USA climbing legend having been on the scene for more than 30 years and here is a crazy story from the beginning of the sport climbing era with ground-up bolting. During the 80-ies CG put up some of the hardest routes and he was also in the top of the national competitions. He also travelled a lot, climbing with JerryMoffat, Ben Moon and Wolfgang Gullich. Later he became an UIAA route setter and started the Verve clothing company. During the last years, at 40+, CG has done his first 8A+ and onsighted several 8a+s.
Before people started bolting by hanging from a top rope, people would put up bolts ground-up and John Bachar had taken the bold style a step further. I think I was about 16 years old at the time. The idea was that you climbed as far as you could, which meant you were basically free soloing and it meant you would hurt your self pretty badly if you fell. Then you would put a bolt in. And in this case standing on some small knobs or edges and using a hand drill.
Said and Christian in his office http://www.verveclimbing.com/home.html
Then you would keep going until you reached a point where you would just barely not hit the ground. Put another bolt in. Then keep going like this all the way. It meant that the bolts would be spaced further and further although the climbing didnt necessarily get easier. And its hard for people to imagine this now because usually today you hang on a rope and bolt with a power drill. If something goes wrong (with the bolt) you can easily redo it. In any way it takes you a few minutes to do it.
But back then bolting on lead with a hand drill, one hole taking over 10 minutes to drill, and looking into taking a maybe fatal whipper, was a different story. I remember Eric Zichi was up climbing and had put in about 3 of these bolts. He was at a point where he was looking into taking maybe a 70-foot fall and he probably would have hit the ground if he did. He started drilling his last bolt for the route. After drilling (in really hard granite, with his hands over his head) for about 10 minutes, suddenly he couldnt take the pain in his feet anymore. So he reached down to untie his shoes to try to loosen them up a bit, as he had lost almost all his sensation in his feet at this point of time. He then starts drilling again.
As he was about to finish as he snaps the drill bit of inside the hole At that point he started crying; he had broken his drill bit, couldnt really climb as he couldnt use his feet and was looking into maybe taking 70-80 foot fall to the ground So we ran, all the way around this huge dome, to the top. It took us probably around 35 minutes. We then lowered him a rope and a figure of eight so he could get down. We basically saved his life this time. And that was the ascent of the route Star Rover.