With about 50 feet of open air beneath him, Matt Goudreau leaned back into his climbing harness and rested his weight in it, pulling taut the rope that ran from his rappel device to an anchor tied above. His life depended on his harness, rappel device and rope—and the two steel anchor bolts in the rock above that the rope was attached to. Goudreau, 36, bent forward, gripping a powerful electric drill, and drove the bit into the rock, sending a cloud of beige dust into the air. Within an hour, two brand-new stainless steel bolts, with hangers and about 1 foot of chain each, comprised the anchor at the top of “School Daze,” a popular climbing route on Haystack Rock, near Clancy. A local family of four was quick to set up a rope and burn laps on the route, as work continued to replace the bolts atop an adjacent route.
From Spire Rock to Sheep Mountain, spanning Jefferson County from end to end and dotting the granite outcroppings that poke through the ground from the Boulder Batholith below, as many as 150 climbing routes attract local climbers and climbers from around southwest Montana. And almost all of those routes, according to Helena Climbers Coalition Board Member Dan Bachen, feature bolts of some sort—generally a pair of two bolts at the top, and often a series of bolts running vertically up the route, too. And all of those bolts, he said, will someday need replacing. Many already do.
“Like anything, fixed hardware degrades through time. A lot of the hardware that’s in place right now is steel that … might not be dangerous to use right this minute, but in the next 10 years, 20 years, might be less safe to use. The quality of the hardware is deteriorating,” Bachen said. “Besides things rusting, use can also degrade hardware. Folks, by virtue of climbing, that puts wear and tear on hardware.”
