Homage: Chalk

The myths and truths

When you’re 60 feet up that 5.11 with no idea what your next move is, there is no better, more comforting stall tactic than to reach behind you and dip your hands into fluffy white chalk. It doesn’t matter that your hands are already drier than your physics professor’s dissertation. You needed a break. You needed an excuse. And you needed the confidence — however psychological — that having your fingers coated in that fine powder can give.

Luckily for all of us, John Gill (the father of bouldering and a good name to know) was not only a mathematician and a climber, but a gymnast as well. If he hadn’t seen it used on the parallel bars, we might still be clambering greasily up 5.10s and V2s.

Or maybe not. But the point is, we all use it, whether we buy it bricked or crushed, and whether we pour it into pots, bags, Nalgenes, or old socks. It takes the moisture from our hands, makes manky holds climbable, marks otherwise invisible crimps and pinches, and gives the more OCD among us something to do before every move. What, you may ask, is this miracle substance akin to Tinkerbell’s fairy dust made from? The answer is… not chalk. The stuff we dust on our hands is actually magnesium carbonate, whereas the real chalk is a form of limestone made of the mineral calcite, also called calcium carbonate. The misnomer happened because originally, gymnast chalk was manufactured from calcium carbonate, and when the substance switch happened, the original name stuck (probably to make marketing it easier).

Since its first use in climbing in the 1950s, seeing a climber without their chalk is a little like seeing Obama without hope. It’s become such a central part of climbing that not even a study done in 2001 that concluded chalk actually reduces friction between your fingers and the rock can deter people from using the stuff.

You read that right. According to researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, chalk reduces the coefficient of friction by about 18 percent, both on wet and dry rock. The idea behind it is that chalk creates a granular layer of particles that are small and smooth, and therefore roll on each other, lessening your ability to grip. The testing was done on different types of rock — slate, granite, sandstone — with both wet and dry hands. The researchers came to the conclusion that dry, clean hands have the most friction — and therefore the best grip — and that a towel might be a better attachment to the back of a climber’s harness.

Now, before you jump up in self-righteous protest and tick off all the reasons chalk helps you climb more like Adam Ondra, there is a part of the study that throws the results into question. The testing was done horizontally, not vertically, with a person’s arm resting on an armrest and their fingers on a slab of rock that was pulled forward to measure friction. Last I checked, immobile hands, armrests, and horizontal slabs of rock weren’t part of any routes. But for crimps, jugs, pinches, monos, and the variety of other holds common to climbing, chalk seems to do the job as well as it has for the last half-century.

Some people, not content to merely climb with chalk, actually climb on it. Most of us are familiar with the White Cliffs of Dover, but these calcium carbonate cliffs are found other places throughout Europe, including Denmark, the island Rugia in the Baltic Sea, and the Champagne region in France. (Another confusing misnomer: the Chalk Cliffs near Buena Vista, Colorado, are composed of kaolinite, not chalk.) In the early 1980s, British mountaineer Michael “Mick” Fowler pioneered climbing on the cliffs at Dover. Instead of sport climbing methods, Fowler used ice axes and crampons on the chalk, and tackling these routes using ice climbing tools continues today. However, the routes can be difficult to find, as there are no tell-tale tickmarks like on red sandstone or gray granite.

It isn’t hard to find somebody up in arms about the “visual pollution” of chalk on the rocks, and sometimes when chalk builds up on a hold, it can actually be slicker and almost gummified. It can toy with the aesthetics of the climb; some boulders and crags look like they have a bad case of leucoderma (a skin disease that produces blotchy white patches). Often buildup gets to the point where a good rainfall won’t wash it away, and following climbers have a blueprint of the problem… not that this is a bad thing.

One thing’s for sure: whether it’s purely psychological or completely scientific, we won’t be quitting our little white powder addiction any time soon. So chalk up, send big, and be glad you don’t have a towel dangling from your harness instead.