There may be a need to say a few words generally. Specifically, perhaps, something about the notion of a line.
During the mid-19th century, when climbing first emerged as a dedicated leisure pursuit (distinct from religious pilgrimage or scientific exploration), climbers focused their attention on the high mountains of the European Alps. Initially they sought out the most obvious routes to various summits. They gazed up at mountains, considering which set of ridges, gullies, corners, ramps, scree slopes and ice walls would provide the easiest possible way to the summit. Their concern broadly was to map natural affordances to human climbing capacities, to recognise sequences of features that could be relatively easily negotiated to obtain the summit. Very quickly, however, once many of the major summits had been reached, attention shifted towards discerning more challenging possibilities – harder and harder lines up mountains. In this manner, an aesthetics of the line emerged.
Worth noting that in the early to mid 20th century, associated with currents of war, industrial expansion and nationalism, there was a short-lived shift away from the traditionally beautiful natural line towards envisaging impossibly direct lines up blankly improbable faces. The notion of the line didn’t altogether disappear. It was just that for a time it was no longer concerned with discovering paths of natural affinity, but instead with imposing technologically enabled routes through apparently impossible territory. This alpine technological sublime was, however, quickly displaced by more adventurous and re-conciliatory approaches. It would seem that climbing maintains a crucial Kantian aesthetic imaginary – it is about conceiving a level of agreement between nature and artifice – unconscious natural conditions and human modes of ascent.
Rock-climbing has a more restricted field than mountain climbing. Instead of taking in whole peaks, the focus is upon cliffs and crags. In this manner, there is no longer necessarily the need to travel to distant alpine places, small local cliffs can be just fine. Traditional rock-climbing lines are the large corner cracks and low-angled featured faces that promise both predictable climbing and regular opportunities to place protection. From the mid 20th century onward, improvements in climbing technology and technique produced more and more difficult, devious and unlikely lines. The development of bolt-protected sport climbing during the past few decades has shifted the focus in this direction even more strongly, particularly towards a concern with seemingly impossible steep and overhanging faces. In many cases the sequence of holds may be scarcely perceptible from the ground. Any sense of a line may only be apparent as an associated line of bolts leading up towards a set of permanent anchors. In this sense, the line emerges now less a strictly visual phenomenon than as a series of gymnastic movements, only gaining fully coherent form through embodied experience.
Bouldering reduces the scale even more. Dispensing with tall cliffs and all the traditional paraphernalia of ropes and protection, it focuses on short sequences of pure and unencumbered movement up or across bits of rock that may only be as big as a car or a caravan. The line can be next to nothing – just a single move, for instance, from one tiny rock dimple to another, but at the utmost limits of difficulty and distilling everything into an intense momentary effort. These are the kinds of lines that concern me here.
For those particularly interested, you may like to read my 1994 article, “Bolts, Climbing and the Aesthetics of Wilderness Experience”.