WHAT'S MADE YOU?
S"That climbing woman off the telly": Catherine Destivelle in the Verdon Gorge.
magazine
In 1990, Trail Magazine formed as Trail Walker (catchy) against a landscape of appalling outdoor purple. The walker was quietly dropped eight years
later, but their fascination with Alan Hinkes continues.
Trail
Redpointing
Masters of Stone videos
What climbing
fi lms there were in the 1970s and early-80s were plodding, cerebral affairs. Into this world blasted Eric Perlman’s high- octane speed- metal video series Masters of Stone where, over six volumes, over excited Americans swarmed over rock with the same verve as a Las Vegas air guitar competition.
Terrible, brilliant, naff and cool.
Great news everybody! The Euros have invented a beautiful new concept. You can fall off a climb as much as you like and as long as you might come back and try to do it in the future no one can say you’ve not done it. It’s called Rotpunkt – redpoint – even though it does have a German name, like schadenfreude. Amazing – suddenly it was OK to fail.
Johnny Dawes
At a time when the English were the best French climbers in the world, Johnny Dawes came up trumps and showed that he was the best British climber Wales had ever produced. Having proven a mastery over gritstone like none before him, he then turned to the seacliffs of Gogarth and mountains of Snowdonia to top everything including, almost, himself. The Indian Face was acknowledged as the hardest lead these lands had ever seen and his magnetism swung the needle away from the attraction of bolts.
Maggie Thatcher
The Iron Lady’s policies set a generation of climbers free from the shackles of labour, granting them the benefi ts of endless climbing days. Without work to get in the way, the climbers of the dole era were on constant 13-day climbing trips returning home once a fortnight to sign on. Grades rocketed.
SMC Munro Guide
Scottish Mountaineering publishes the fi rst edition of its defi nitive tome on the mountain tick-list to rule them all, dragging bagging into the mainstream.
Leeds ‘89
In May 1989, Leeds played host to the fi rst-ever climbing world cup. Things went well: our Jerry Moffatt won and Lynn Hill met Simon Nadin: her belay partner on her fi rst attempt to free The Nose.
Touching the Void
Joe Simpson’s Andean slither, and subsequent book and movie, have become the touchstone for the general public’s opinion of climbing. The book’s meteoric rise to national bestseller status has had wannabe mountain writers trying to engineer balls-ups in the hills ever since but, so far, none have reached Simpson’s peak.
Catherine Destivelle
Incredible French climber who was one of the fi rst champions of competition climbing in the 1980s and went on, along with Lynn Hill, to dominate for several years. Also an accomplished alpinist and sport climber, she was
54 | 70TH ANNIVERSARY | FOR BRITISH CLIMBING AND WALKING SINCE 1944 The Foundry
The 1980s: home to bad hair, worse music and terrible climbing walls. But this era of permed, Lycra-clad rock stars prancing around on old brick walls came to a screeching halt with the opening of
one of the fi rst women to climb F8a and F8a+ and the fi rst female to solo the North Face of the Eiger. However, despite all this, and thanks to a TV programme where she soloed sandstone in Mali, she will always be remembered simply as “that climbing woman off the telly”.
Rockfax
It's 1990 and time for Rockfax to start sexing up traditional guidebooks with their titilatingly user-friendly colour photos, topos, symbols, ticklists and maps. They redefi ned the style of guidebooks in the modern era and helped give BMC guidebooks a dose of inspiration.
Rope access work
The climbers of the 1980s spent a generation on the dole. They were dishevelled work-shy fops who avoided the ‘W’ word like soap and climbed endlessly. Who knew what they were actually doing was vocational training? In the 1990s, the roped-access industry started giving climbers jobs: abseiling down buildings tightening nuts. They earned a fortune. In a few years many of the brightest stars of the 1980s were working all the overtime they could get, driving fl ash cars and refusing to wear a harness unless they were getting £20 an hour.
PHOTO: G.KOSCIKI.
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