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60s rack 1-Jun-2005 At 11:02:30 AM oweng

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Here is an extract from the interview with Chris Dewhirst (spelling?) located on this very site:

Q: Dare I ask about the gear you climbed with back then? I'm assuming we can forget cams, modern belay devices, and high performance sticky rubber shoes.

In the 1960’s there were three types of protection: Don’t fall off was the first type. The second type was don’t fall off but involved looping slings over rock projections in case you did and the third type was pitons. One day in 1965 or 66 Bob Bull arrived at Arapiles with an engineering nut - drilled out - and threaded onto a sling. This was the first artificial chock I had seen. I remember Bob Craddock (at the time Craddock was president of the VCC) saying that it would not change climbing. Within 12 months climbing grades went from 14 to 19 and the number of new routes began to grow almost exponentially. Climbing became much safer. After seeing Bob Bull’s new chock John and I went home and drilled out dozens of nuts of varying diameter. I took a long fall from a new route on Tiger Wall when a hold came off and a tiny little nut took the fall. I can’t remember the name of the climb but I can clearly remember the route in good detail. And I am sure the nut is still in place slowly rusting away. We understood the need to belay properly by tying off to multiple points but we did not have friction belay devices. John Moore held a very big fall that day on primitive equipment and his belay was sound. In those days we tied directly onto the end of the rope.

The quality of protection and the quantity of protection evolved with the difficulty of the climbs. I started climbing in Dunlop volleys and later ordered a (fairly large) pair of climbing shoes from somewhere in Europe. They were psychologically better than the volleys but probably more dangerous. They quickly became known as the ‘boats’.

We also experimented with making our own shoes by gluing tyre rubber onto running shoes. It wasn’t until I had been climbing for more than two years before I obtained a set of friction boots.