The New Clean Climbing

You mustn’t print it.

Though the invisible waves of cellular technology and just over a thousand miles separated us, I could swear that Jeff Smoot was blushing. The “it” in question referred to the translation of a now-retired, extremely vulgar route name at Oregon’s Smith Rock that the climber and author had just deciphered for me as a lewd riff on the purist aesthetics of one of the sport’s most celebrated figures.

It wasn’t his crude epithet; I’d asked Smoot, who spent two decades researching some of the sport’s wildest antics for his book Hangdog Days, to tell me about its practitioners’ infamous penchant for sophomoric lexicon. “Back in the day, the route names that were offensive were usually tongue-in-cheek—an inside joke, a play on words of some kind, or maybe a statement about how they didn’t like a particular climber,” he said. “Even though you might