Smith Rock: Where American Sport Climbing Was Born

About twenty four miles north of Bend, the Crooked River cuts through a landscape unlike anything else in Oregon. Sheer walls of orange and tan rock rise three hundred feet above the water, twisted into columns and spires by forces that operated nearly thirty million years ago. This is Smith Rock State Park, and it is where American rock climbing in its modern form was born.

The geology of Smith Rock is the geology of catastrophe. The cliffs are the remnant walls of the Crooked River caldera, a volcanic crater formed by a series of super volcanic eruptions between about twenty nine and twenty seven million years ago. The tuff and rhyolite left behind by those eruptions are the rock that climbers have been working out ever since.

The park contains more than one thousand eight hundred established climbing routes and is widely credited as the birthplace of American sport climbing, the discipline in which bolts are pre-placed in the rock and technical difficulty is the primary goal. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, climbers pushed the limits of what was considered possible here, establishing some of the hardest routes in the country and developing practices that spread to climbing areas worldwide. The name of the park is uncertain.

One account from an eighteen sixty seven Oregon newspaper says the rock was named for John Smith, who was Linn County sheriff and a state legislator in the eighteen fifties and sixties. No one has confirmed this definitively. What is certain is that the landmark has been drawing people to Bend from around the world, the sport climbing revolution having started on these orange walls.