How High Can You Stick-Clip Before It’s No Longer a Send?

Imagine it’s your turn to lead a bolted route at your favorite outdoor crag. Your friend brought a long stick-clip, which reaches impressively high—to the third or even fourth bolt. They ask you how many bolts you’d like pre-clipped. What do you say?

For many sport climbers, including those who are new to climbing outdoors, the answer will depend on the specific route and its decking potential. But it also depends on a very personal understanding of unspoken rules, local ethics, and rarely-discussed definitions. If half the route is on top rope, for example, does that still count as a “send?” What about a third? Is stick-clipping fine up to a certain number of bolts, or is it only justified when protecting a deck? And when does leading in a “purer” style matter, if at all?

Last week, I called up Michaela Kiersch and Matt Samet, two crushers with six decades of climbing experience between them, to help me untangle these hypotheticals. Kiersch, a professional climber who recently established the hardest bolted first ascent by a woman in North America, has sent up to 5.15a and now lives in Innsbruck, Austria. Samet, a managing editor for the American Alpine Club, has been climbing for nearly 40 years—since before stick-clipping was even a thing—and still ticks 5.14 routes in Colorado in his fifties.

A conversation on stick-clip ethics with Michaela Kiersch and Matt Samet

The following answers have been abridged and lightly edited for concision and clarity. 

Climbing: What’s your earliest experience with stick-clipping, and how do you see people in your climbing community talk about it now?

Michaela Kiersch: I grew up in an era of climbing where mentorship was a really big part of the community. I was climbing at the Red River Gorge, where stick clipping is commonplace because the rock is sandstone—it breaks; it’s unpredictable. I was also a child when I was starting to lead climb outside. So there’s no reason why I wouldn’t have been stick-clipping. I think it was just built into my experience as a young climber in the Red River Gorge.

I view stick clipping primarily as a safety mechanism, and it’s definitely more prevalent in some areas than others. I think there are a variety of factors for that, but probably the biggest one is the way that the cliff was bolted. If the first bolts are particularly high, you see more and more people stick clipping.

Matt Samet: I started sport climbing around 1987, ‘88 in New Mexico, and there were very few sport areas at that point. They all sort of took their cue from the ethic back then, which was that bolts should be used minimally and sparingly. There weren’t any crash pads. There weren’t commercial stick clips. We were just doing what was in front of us, with the best tools we had. I think I remember my friend Mark showing me a stick and some climbing tape—you tape the top carabiner to the top of the stick. I don’t remember that there was a controversy per se with stick-clipping high first bolts. It was just rarely done because it was a pain in the ass.

Climbing: Matt, as stick-clipping has become more popular since the ‘90s and now, with the invention of modern stick clips, how did people’s attitudes change? 

Samet: For the first sport routes in Rifle, the first routes were there in the ’80s, but the first wave of routes where there was enough of a density that it was a climbing area was summer 1991. I came there in the fall, and I do remember going out there and it being a topic: How high can you stick-clip?

One bolt, sure. No one said anything. Two bolts? You start to get some looks. And then three? There was a climber who was definitely known for liking to have the third bolt pre-clipped. It took a name; it was his last name, “-pointing,” instead of redpointing. I’m not going to throw him under the bus, but he liked to do that. People would give you shit if you had that third bolt clipped.

Climbing: Have you ever seen someone lead climbing with a couple bolts stick-clipped and thought to yourself, “That’s not a redpoint?”

Kiersch: I don’t feel like I’m in a place to judge what other people consider their send or not. Personally, I don’t stick-clip past what I deem to be absolutely necessary, so it’s uncommon for me to stick-clip past one, two, or three bolts, depending on the route.

As long as you’re honest about it went—if you really felt like you needed those three, or you were doing it because other people were doing it, but you feel good about it, then congratulations on your send.

Samet: I never did, but I probably don’t care that much about what other people are doing, and never had. We were emerging from an era where there were all these rules. They weren’t written down. They aren’t even necessarily codified, but they’re informal, so a lot of it was regulated through community pressure.

I do remember, funnily enough, later in the ’90s, telescoping poles became more of a thing. At first, it was just this eight or 10-foot painters pole. Then Mike Caldwell, Tommy Caldwell’s dad, had a telescoping pole that could go to 20 or 30 feet. I remember seeing him at Rifle, Colorado. We were just such dicks; we were in our twenties and we were full of testosterone and whatever. I remember a bunch of us seeing him hang the first five or six draws on a route for Tommy, who at that point was just a kid. We were off to the side grumbling and making fun of it. If you have a long stick and there’s no draws on the route, you’re going to put as many as you can on from the ground. But I remember thinking, “What’s he doing? That’s cheating.”

Climbing: So let’s address a hypothetical. Say you’re leading a route with 10 bolts, the first five are pre-clipped, and you go from bottom to top, without falling. Would you consider that a redpoint?

Samet: Maybe the distinction that would be more useful is free ascent or redpoint in the traditional sense. Coming from the Frankenjura when Kurt Albert did it, he would draw the red circle around a route was projecting, and then when he did it free from the bottom to the top, he would fill in the circle. But I don’t know if he had any rules per se about how high he could be clipped or hanging the draws or things like that.

Kiersch: You have to defer to your personal judgment. A similar argument could be made about how many pads you can have under your butt when you’re sit starting. There are just so many factors that go into that.

Samet: I don’t think I would claim a redpoint, but I’d say I freed the route.

Kiersch: I think I would use them as synonyms.

Climbing: Should stick-clipping be used only for safety, or is it okay to use it to save yourself an extra step?

Kiersch: Generally, my opinion on it is that you stick-clip for safety first. Depending on how the route is bolted, it could be several close bolts in a row. Then secondly, I would defer to the style that the first ascensionist did the route in and how many bolts they might have stick-clipped. That is particularly useful if you’re climbing a route that has a crux low down. Oftentimes, clipping can be part of the sequence or one of the harder parts of a route.

That said, I personally will stick-clip if I feel unsafe, whether that goes against the first ascensionist’s style or not. I think the biggest concern ethically would be being dishonest about that.

Samet: I think anywhere up to the third bolt is fine. On just about every route, there’s just a lot of risk near the ground. Bolt one, you’re bouldering; you have a boulder mentality. Bolt two, you’re usually not pulling that much rope and you’re usually not much higher above bolt one, so if something goes wrong, your belayer can suck you in. Bolt three, you might be up a bit above bolt two, and by the time you’ve pulled out all that slack, it could be a ground fall. At bolt three, you’re 15 to 20 feet up, which is high enough to kill you. So I think it’s completely legitimate to clip bolt three and maybe even four if a route’s really sustained and bouldery down low. Above there, if you cared to make the distinction, you might be hard-pressed to say this was a redpoint if you’re pre-clipping above bolt three or four.

Climbing: Michaela, what do you think of Matt’s three-bolt rule?

Kiersch: On average, I would never go above three, but if you’re using that rule to apply it generally to every route that exists in this world, you’re not really considering all the factors that come into play, like the spacing of the bolt, the angle of the wall, where the belayer is, and whether the route is traversing to the side. So I don’t believe that you need a hard and fast rule for how many bolts you can stick-clip. Some first bolts you can reach from the ground—or I can reach from the ground, and I’m five foot one.

Climbing: Do you have different standards for yourself, in terms of stick-clipping, when you’re going for the first of the grade or for a particularly important ascent?

Samet: You mean, I hold myself to a stricter standard if I wanted to have a “pure” ascent or something like that? I don’t think I would.

There’s a route I did in the Flatirons called Joe Exotic on Hillbilly Rock. It’s a long route, 13 or 14 bolts long, and I put in a lot of lead burns. It’s 14b, with a really hard slab crux in the lower third, with a hard clip in there. You clip off this side pole that’s friction and temperature dependent and skin dependent. There were often times when I pulled up rope and where I could dry fire. There’s a ledge below you and a tree, and you’re not that high off the ground. After a while, because I was putting in so many burns on the route, I was like, you know what? Screw this. I’m tired of being scared up here. I mean, I have three kids. I can’t afford to break an ankle, much less get killed. On my last sort of final push to do the route, which was weeks of effort, I would just start my day by warming up, climbing up, going bolt to bolt, and then rigging myself through the sixth bolt out of 13. I didn’t feel any less psyched when I topped out that route than I would have had I clipped all the bolts. For me, what mattered was seeing if I could climb this thing that was at my very physical limit.

Kiersch: If it is a record-breaking ascent, or, you know, any ascent, as long as you have the thought process to back up your actions, and you aren’t coming from a place of like, “I’m trying to make this route easier” or “I’m adapting this so that I can do it in a way that other people aren’t already doing”… if you’re coming from that dishonest place, then it doesn’t really count as a send because it’s dishonest. You have to come from a good place and not be afraid to back up your thought process.

Climbing: Do you more often see people overuse or underuse stick-clipping?

Samet: I see people both underuse and overuse stick clipping. People underuse it near the ground because they’re being macho or being lazy, and I know I could have that tendency too. But then sometimes I see people go up on a route and go bolt to bolt and stick-clip every bolt on terrain that they could climb through…just wimpy stick on every bolt. In that sense, it can get overused.

Kiersch: People could stick-clip more. The first bolt is the sketchiest, especially if you’re climbing out in a chossy area or in an area where holds are likely to break. I’m generally stick-clipping the first draw, especially if I’m in a new place or on a route that I’ve never tried. And people can do with some more safety in climbing.

I think stick-clipping in an unsafe scenario is a courtesy to the other people at the cliff. Because if you fall and break your leg, then they have to deal with you. It’s a courtesy to everybody else to be safe.

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