Does the Bow Valley Need Standards for Unfinished Climbing Routes?

Shaun King almost said it. Just come down.

His daughter Savana, 18, was five bolts up an overhanging prow at Moose Mountain when she mentioned that the handhold under her fingers was creaking. King, a mountain guide with nearly 30 years' experience, was belaying off to the side. He weighed it quickly: steep terrain, a bolt just above her head, minimal fall potential, decades of judgment telling him it would hold.

"I made a very detailed analytical risk assessment at the time," King said. "What I didn't calculate on was the bolt ripping out of the rock. I personally have never seen that in my career."

Moments later, the handhold failed, and so did the bolt beneath it. The rock holding it in place, a piece roughly the size of a soccer ball, tore free of the wall and struck Savana in the face and shoulder as she fell. 

She was not seriously hurt. X-rays came back clear, and within a month she was climbing again, still bruised but otherwise fine. But the incident has brought up a question of responsibility, standardization and communication within the Bow Valley climbing community.

What King saw when he and his daughter came upon the route was an interesting overhanging route he didn’t see on Mountain Project, a crowdsourced climbing website he was using to check the routes. It didn’t seem like it posed too much of a risk, as his daughter is also an experienced competitive climber. 

“Generally, if you fall off of overhanging terrain, you don't hit anything, and it's not a big deal,” said King. “So we thought, well, if it's too hard, we'll just lower off. She did comment that the handhold, underneath her hands at the time was kinda creaking a bit, and, you know, as a protective father, my immediate instinct was… Just come down right away.”

“I blame myself for letting her continue. The rock definitely looked suspect, and I have enough experience to know better. However, there was no red tape on the first bolt” King said in a statement about the incident.

The route was Ravens Feather at Moose Mountain, a climbing area north of Highway 66 and east of Kananaskis. It was put up by Andy Genereux, a route developer who has climbed in the Bow Valley since 1975, and has developed over 2000 routes across North America.

Genereux said he had bolted what looked like solid rock, then discovered a fracture line running through the block. Unable to remove the compromised bolt on the spot, he placed a second one in better rock beside it, planning to return to finish the job and clear the hazard. He didn’t have the equipment needed to finish the job with him and it had already been a long day. He had marked the route as an unfinished project in the spring update on his website, but not on Mountain Projects, where King was getting his information.

Weather and other commitments stretched his return to two weeks. King and his daughter climbed the route in between.

King said he wasn't aware Genereux kept a personal site with condition updates until after the fall, when other climbers sent him a link. This detail captures the underlying problem. Two reasonable sources of information, used by two reasonable people, that never once overlapped.

"This was a closed project that was incomplete," Genereux said. He noted that Moose Mountain in particular has an abundance of loose rock, and that he has repeatedly tried to mark closed projects in the past only to have the markers torn down or stolen. He said he has lost eight ropes over the years at Moose Mountain alone, taken by thieves or, he suspects, chewed apart by pack rats. That history, he said, is why he didn't leave a flag or a fixed line on this particular project.

“Red ribbon tied through the bottom bolt. Not all routes are bolt protected. Signage at the start, but this can be disregarded or stolen. Publish information, but this is ad hoc at best. Some are not connected on social media. There is no perfect solution that fits all scenarios.” Genereux said. "Climbers need to gather knowledge, skills and make judgments. We are all human, and these judgments are never guaranteed to be 100 percent right.”

Genereux has been creating routes in the region since 1982 and is credited with a substantial share of the climbing that exists on Yamnuska and in the Ghost River area today, work King himself described as largely thankless. Genereux is also the author of the current guidebooks for both areas, making him, in effect, both the builder of much of the valley's climbing infrastructure and the person who documents it for others. 

That history shapes how he thinks about oversight. Genereux was skeptical of the idea that a formal safety standard, imposed from outside the climbing community, is the right fix. His view leans instead on self-policing. In Genereux’s opinion, climbers educate themselves, read the conditions of the holds and bolts in front of them, and accept that judgment is what keeps people safe in the mountains.

"Today the Bow Valley is overflowing with eager climbers who can't wait for the next climb," Genereux said. "They train in gyms but have little experience in the outside world." He said the sport's inherent unpredictability, the fact that even a completed route's rock and holds can fail, is something climbers need to accept as a baseline condition of the activity, not something a marking system or a governing body can fully engineer away. 

"Climbing is dangerous. I don't care what avenue of climbing you're doing. You're dealing with gravity and lady luck, and sometimes the two collide."

What is notable about both accounts is how little interest either man has in pointing fingers. King posted publicly to thank Genereux for the largely unrecognized labour that goes into developing new routes. He also says one of his daughter’s first climbs was on one of Genereux’s routes on Yamnuska and that they both see him as a one of their heroes.

"It's a little bit my fault. It's a little bit route setter's fault," King said. "It's a lot of maybe not thinking about everything, or miscommunicating, or misunderstanding, or whatever. But the whole thing is more about just coming up with positive, safe solutions in the future versus blaming anybody."

There is a gap between how two experienced climbers viewed the climb, which was under development, sometimes viewing the same thing in contradicting ways. Genereux describes a closed project where work draws were hung on only part of the route and several clues, such as a lack of chalk on the holds, that should have told a climber it wasn’t ready.

King describes a route with no red tape and draws already hung, which can look exactly like an open one. Both things can be true at once, and that is precisely the problem. There is currently no agreed-upon way to mark a route as closed or under development and no single authority for finding up to date route conditions. It is very much a community-based approach which both men agree is the way they’d like to see it stay.

Route development in the Bow Valley isn't regulated in any formal sense. The closest thing to an institutional check is TABVAR, The Association of Bow Valley Area Rock Climbers, a volunteer-run body that funds new route development and the retrofitting of older routes. 

"There is no sort of body that controls them, apart from just the climbing community," King said. "TABVAR is only funding people if they use appropriate gear, and they’re accredited route builders." Beyond that, he said, there is no licensing, no inspection process, and no enforcement.

King argues that's probably the right amount of regulation for the sport as a whole. Parks Canada officially prohibits bolting in Banff National Park, he noted, yet quietly tolerates thousands of bolted routes because of the tourism and goodwill climbing brings to the region. Formal government oversight of bolting, in his view, would be a mismatch for the actual scale of risk involved.

Both King and Genereux have been here before. 

For King, it was watching a photo of two ice climbing parties crossing ropes at Kitty Hawk (an ice climbing route along the David Thompson Highway) spark a heated debate about etiquette and safety. When multiple parties climb the same ice route at the same time, climbers above can unintentionally knock chunks of ice onto those below, creating a hazard for everyone on the route. Rather than wait for a governing body to act, King wrote his own set of guidelines, modelled loosely on the alpine skiers' code posted at ski resorts, and put it in front of the community.

"I started putting together my own list, and I kind of threw it out to the community," King said. Prominent local climbers, including Grant Statham and Will Gadd, weighed in, and the result, the Ice Climbers' Responsibility Code, is now reprinted in digital and print guidebooks across the region.

King thinks something similar, though far simpler, could work here. Not a bureaucratic licensing scheme, but a basic, agreed-upon convention for signalling that a route isn't ready to climb.

He offers some practical solutions such as red flagging tape on the first bolt, a long-standing but inconsistent practice; a padlock through the first bolt hanger, which unlike tape can't be casually torn off; or a sequencing change entirely, placing the lowest one or two bolts last so a route without a finished bottom section is unclimbable from the ground up.

For Genereux, it was in the mid-1980s when sport climbing was new to the Bow Valley, Genereux walked into Grotto Canyon one evening to find what he thought of as a route creation method that was unacceptable.  

"They were chiselling holds in the rock, and there was actually an air compressor that they'd rented to run a chisel.”

Not knowing who was responsible, he and two others stripped the site that night to force a conversation. "I took down all the ropes, I didn't damage the climbs, but I took all the bolts off... so we could figure out who was doing this and we could have a conversation amongst the community. It got pretty heated and some threats were made," he said. 

But it led to a community meeting where a working set of standards got hammered out. "We all met together and said, this is just not acceptable, and we kind of set a loose set of rules for what was acceptable and not acceptable to the local community."

Part of what drove him was a fear that visible damage like this could threaten climbing access altogether, since most Bow Valley climbing sits on public land. "I was scared that we were going to lose access for climbing."

Genereux points to this episode as the origin of the informal, community-run standard that still governs route development in the valley. "It's been self-policing for the most part since then.”

Having a meeting to discuss standards is a much larger task than when Genereux and others met in the 80s. The Bow Valley climbing community, in Genereux’s estimation, was around 200 people when he started in 1975 and now sits around 17,000, many of whom learn in climbing gyms where routes and holds are always safe and secure and so may not even be aware that outdoor route building is an entirely volunteer-driven effort.

TABVAR couldn’t be reached for comment before publication on whether it has a position on standardizing how unfinished routes are marked, or whether it sees a role for itself in setting further standards and guidelines for new development. Until it, or some other body, does, the standard remains what it has always been in the Bow Valley: word of mouth, personal judgment and trust in the rock and the volunteer route builder.