29 December 2010

Lynn Hill: The great debate

Article from the 8a yearbook 2010

Barber, Robinson, Vogel, Kauk, Lynn Hill, Bachar, Skinner, Griffith, Watts(c) Michael Kennedy 1986
(c) Wikipedia
Lynn has been a world class climber between 1978 and 2010. She has won five Arco Rock masters and four WC events. In 1989 she took a 22 meters ground fall in Buoux after having forgotten to tie in properly. She landed in the trees and some f months later she won again in the WC. The year after she became the first women to do 8b+. In 1993, she did the first free ascent of The Nose, 8a on El Capitan, returning the following year to make it free in a day. In 2008, she bouldered Chablanke 8A+. In an 8a poll of “Who is your female climbing hero?”, Lynn did get 45 % of the votes! Here she explains how she took part in the creation of the sport climbing in America.

"If a climber fell on a route, they were immediately lowered back down to the ground. It was considered cheating to hang on the rope and practice the up-coming moves. If you hung on the rope even just to look at the up-coming moves, you were called a "hang dogger". In 1986, I participated in the "Great Debate" at the American Alpine Club meeting. Various notable climbers were invited to discuss this ethic of hang dogging. The people invited were myself, Ron Kauk, John Bachar, Henry Barber, Rob Robinson, Todd Skinner, Alan Watts, and Christian Griffith.

I felt right in the middle of this Great debate discussion. Though I appreciated the culture and ethics of my generation of traditional style climbers, I was also intrigued by the possibilities and potential of this new sport climbing style. The idea of lowering back down to the ground after each fall seemed too contrived. I wanted to explore new terrain that was harder than anything I had ever tried and this approach didn't make sense to me anymore. I thought of it as comparable to a gymnast starting their routine from the beginning again each time they made a mistake. When asked to explain my style on a notorious route in the Gunks called, "Vandals", during this Great Debate, I explained my perspective in front of this large gathering of people and media: I had simply hung on the rope to check out a hidden hold in the roof after I had fallen since I didn't feel like repeating all the moves up to that point, including one move that strained my shoulder a bit. But it wasn't until around the end of the 1980's that sport climbing became more widely accepted throughout the U.S."

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