Rock Climbing in Aotearoa New Zealand: From Novel Activity to Popular Sport, c.1965-2024

<p><strong>This study examines the growth of rock climbing in Aotearoa New Zealand between c.1965 and 2024. Rock climbing emerged as a novel activity in the 1960s out of New Zealand’s long established mountaineering culture. Over the next 60 years, rock climbing underwent distinct evolutions to become a popular and multifaceted sport and recreational activity. The adaptable nature and wide appeal of rock climbing across its different forms led the activity to have a more dynamic trajectory than other outdoor adventure sports over the same period. Rock climbing guidebooks and climbing club literature provide a record of rock climbing activities, achievements, and insights into key issues from the period under discussion. Oral history interviews give context and further enrich the history within the archival sources. They provide in-depth, reflective accounts from the experiential perspectives of a range of individuals involved in rock climbing over the course of its growth.</strong></p><p>Themes of place, identity, and risk closely inform the evolutions of rock climbing in Aotearoa. From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, rock climbers developed unique, technical challenges on urban crags in less dangerous environments, previously overlooked by the alpine-focused climbing community. Rock climbers established social scenes around specific rock climbing sites, publishing their activities in the New Zealand Alpine Journal. Some individuals used their identity as rock climbers to adopt alternative appearances and lifestyles and reject mountaineering conventions. High unemployment, social non-conformity, and protest through the early 1980s influenced a period of anarchistic behaviour among rock climbers at Whanganui Bay on the western shore of Lake Taupō. This resulted in tensions with tangata whenua and landowners, access issues, and divisions within the New Zealand Alpine Club. The establishment of Women Climbing in 1985 brought new energy to the climbing community and provided a supportive environment for women, reflecting a wider mobilisation of women in outdoor recreation. A convergence of new developments and international influences in the late 1980s led to a proliferation of climbing competitions and indoor climbing facilities and the establishment of the New Zealand Sportclimbing Federation c.1987. These developments increased rock climbing’s accessibility and public profile and encouraged growth in commercial and high performance capacities through the 1990s and 2000s. Indoor climbing and competitions drove sport climbing and bouldering as popular and more accessible forms of outdoor climbing. But high growth in numbers and impactful climbing practices led rock climbing sites across Aotearoa to become contested, including Whanganui Bay, Motuoapa to the south of Lake Taupō, and Kura Tāwhiti Castle Hill in the Canterbury High Country. Increasing address of Māori land claims in the 1990s, including the Ngāi Tahu Treaty claim, challenged long-held beliefs over free access to recreational areas among the predominantly Pākehā climbing community.</p><p>Rock climbing in the 2020s, across its various forms, can be defined as both popular and novel. Rock climbing became a part of mainstream sports programmes, school curricula, the Olympics, and was an accessible recreational activity. In some of its forms, rock climbing remained more fringe and at a distance from public view. Continual participation growth, environmental change, and access challenges prompted rock climbers to reconsider the physical, social, and cultural impacts they had in places whose identities extended beyond that of a rock climbing site. Through the late 2010s and 2020s, rock climbers and organisations, including the newly formed Aotearoa Climbing Access Trust, explored new ways of making rock climbing a less impactful and more sustainable activity within New Zealand’s dynamic places and landscapes.</p>