This article was written by John L. Needham concerning sport climbing. It was previously posted on the "News & Info" board.

To all those who would call themselves Sport Climbers:

So this is the point which it has now reached: finding itself so driven to short cuts and quick fixes, our society stoops to any possible angle to shave away some of the effort and the discipline, to subvert absolutely the means in order to have immediately the goal, to gain some appearance of excellence having never endured the effort nor the risk that imbues such with true quality. I suppose that I should not be terribly surprised in witnessing the invective dialogue you espouse, for in far too many ways you are merely mirroring the ugly, self-centered, self-serving attitudes which you see in so much of mass and popular culture. Your disregard for your environment, your world, and your fellow inhabitants can only be termed crass and callow -- your own sort of "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead" reeks of the worst sort of self intoxication. In writing of his early summiting of Maine's Mt. Ktaadn, Henry David Thoreau records, " I improved the little daylight that was left, in climbing the mountain alone . . . pulling myself up the side of perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches..." Yes, without the omnipresent bolt, he would have climbed without your company, so far you are too from the John Muir and the Sierra Club and the axiom of taking only memories and pictures, leaving only footprints. Yes, that it would evolve so far, so far that you must now resort to the cheapest of anonymous and criminal threats towards those who would dare to chide you for your lack of character and ethics.

While it is not difficult to criticize your baseness to people outside of the climbing community, nor to gain their agreement in the execrable quality of your attitudes and practices, I find myself looking a bit for analogies and metaphors for such behaviors. I wonder. If you go backpacking or hiking, do you take chain saws to remove those trees detrimental to your path or do you simply contract Caterpillar to clear the offending obstacles while leveling the grades? If you cycle, do you always have a sag wagon with spares and a mechanic, a large sport utility vehicle running ahead to provide an excellent lesson in drafting? If you paddle a canoe, do you have one of those transom mounted motors to reduce the effort? If you run the five or ten kilometer, do you have a short cut of say a kilometer or so that helps you turn in a respectable time? If you go fishing, do you have a diver who places the fish on your line? If you go hunting, do you set up a feeding station weeks ahead of season to condition the animals to a spot? If you are in need of life-saving surgery, do you hope that the doctor cheated his/her way through medical school? If you could gain some particular goal in the outdoors, would you permanently mar or destroy the environment to gain such, even if by so doing the goal itself became fallacious?

Lastly you would audaciously suggest that such climbing greats as Royal Robbins would support you in a yes-answer to at least some of the above questions. I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to Mr. Robbins during his December visit to our area, and he left no doubts that what made climbing the sport of sports was the challenge it placed upon the individual. The challenge, as he explained, involves mental acuity, physical discipline, clear sense of purpose, and acceptance of the risk. It is only through all of these and through a constant improvement in all of these that quality may be reached. In this light quality is something much different from gaining the summit of some 5.10 climb that has been heavily bolted from bottom to top. Perhaps you should take some time to read Eugen Herrigel's little book Zen in the Art of Archery. Perhaps the time has arrived for you, the sport climbing community, to undergo some reflection and thought on the fleeting appearance and consequent emptiness of actual accomplishment your style produces, some reflection and thought on the irreparable damage your physical actions exact upon our environment, some reflection and thought on effort, achievement, and what it truly means to be a climber.