Historical evolution of the means of climbing the walls and of the relationship with the technical company.

From the end of 1800 when the first pioneers, not yet defined mountaineers, ventured into the mountains in an attempt to reach the peaks, there was more a cognitive thrust of the mountain environment than a sporting one.

They climbed, geologists eager to study little-known areas, military with the aim of updating the geographical maps as much as possible and climbed, intrepid gentlemen, who had the money to be accompanied by local guides.

We can say that the mountaineering movement was born after the Second World War, when the climbs of the eight thousand Himalayans began, intended as a land of national conquest, with a race for who first he reached the summit.

The 50s and 60s of the last century spent experiencing a "military" mountaineering, where expeditions were rigidly organized as assaults on meticulously prepared peaks, with a army of climbers, porters, cooks, journalists, executives and liaison men.

Nothing was left to chance as they were there only to conquer the summit, at all costs and by any means available.

The mountain was an object to be taken, a means with which to give oneself glory and a pill to increase the self-esteem of a country and a people.

Oxygen was used to climb to altitude, fixed ropes that were abandoned on the spot, advanced camps were equipped with tents, stoves, gas cylinders and oxygen that were left on the mountain, as if it were an open-air trash can.

Having conquered all 8000, the youngest alpinists, already at the end of the 1960s, wondered if there was a new form of relationship with the mountain, a a different and more respectful way of approaching the alpine environment.

The new mountaineers began to climb the walls, ceasing to think that man had to move with a spirit of conquest at all costs, but he had to fit into the environment, creating a symbiosis with the mountain, being loyal in the athletic gesture that made it possible to climb it.

They began to challenge the ascents made by filling the rock with pressure nails, inserted with pneumatic hammers, which gave the possibility to overcome the difficulties that opposed the walls, creating a kind of aerial ladder.

They abandoned the use of nails, means seen as a help element to facilitate climbing, starting to use means of protection that would not remain in the walls after the climbed, but recovered by the climbing partner, so as not to leave a trace of the passage.

In fact, in 1967, the American mountaineer Royal Robbins saw in England the first prototypes of safety systems to be inserted into the cracks in the rock, without damaging it or it gets destroyed, like the insertion of a nail.

He brings this novelty to America and within a few years a Yosemite climber, Yvon Chouinard, begins the production of these sustainable safety systems.

These are nuts, movable washers, hollow hexagons, wedges, all in metal and of different shapes and sizes called nuts and friends, which are inserted into the natural slots of the riccia and recovered by the climbing partner.

A revolution that baptized the beginning of clean and environmentally friendly climbing, to which traditional climbers who used invasive safety devices looked with suspicion and self-sufficiency.

The new approach to rock climbing spread like wildfire throughout the world, marginalizing traditional mountaineering in a couple of decades.

Established that the approach to the mountains should be sustainable and non-invasive, the new generations measured themselves, in the years to come, with the overcoming of increasingly difficult walls , using what was called "free climbing" which was based only on the strength, skill and courage of the mountaineer.

The walls that had once been climbed with nails and ladders, were covered only through perfect athletic gestures.

In the new millennium, when the urge to repeat the technically more complicated walls through free climbing was exhausted, a new form of climbing was born, definitely extreme, which it was characterized by the repetitions of these very difficult routes, without ropes and safety systems.

A dangerous mountaineering, for a select few, where man is naked towards the mountain, without safety protections, without the possibility of getting off the wall quickly, without the possibility of being wrong.

This discipline is seen, on the one hand by the environment, as the consecration of the technical qualities of an athlete, but on the other hand as a suicidal activity, where a small mistake can put life on the line.

The leader of this discipline is the American Alexander Honnold who free soloed the 884m Freerider route in El Capitan on 3 June 2017. with difficulty of 5.12d VI in 3 hours and 56 minutes.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.

Photo Nat Geo