Rock Climbing Trivia
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47 free Rock Climbing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Rock climbing trivia questions with answers. Rock climbing has a rich history of firsts, and this quiz covers the ones every climber argues about at the crag. Forty questions take in the 1958 siege of the Nose, Lynn Hill's 'It goes, boys!', Alex Honnold's ropeless Freerider, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson's 19 days on the Dawn Wall, Adam Ondra's Silence and the first V17 boulder problem in Finland. There are questions on grading systems from the Yosemite Decimal System to the Font scale, the origins of sport climbing, trad gear and cams, why climbers use chalk, the Grigri, Wolfgang Güllich's campus board, the world's first climbing wall, and how climbing finally reached the Olympics in Tokyo and split into two events for Paris. Easy questions ask what a crash pad is for; hard ones want the cave in Norway and the year the first artificial wall went up in Leeds. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the routes, climbers and disciplines, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which El Capitan route did Alex Honnold climb without a rope in June 2017, a first for the wall?
Freerider
Freerider: Honnold abandoned a first ropeless attempt on the route's lower slabs, then came back on 3 June 2017 and climbed the whole 5.13a line alone.
Q 02Which Oscar did the climbing film Free Solo win in 2019?
Best Documentary Feature
Best Documentary Feature: afraid that the cameras might push Honnold into a fatal mistake, co-director Jimmy Chin's crew never asked him when he planned to climb.
Q 03Which gear does a free soloist still carry on a climb?
Shoes and chalk
Shoes and chalk: a free soloist climbs with nothing but rock shoes and a chalk bag; any rope, harness, bolts or pads would make it a different discipline.
Q 04Roughly how tall is El Capitan's tallest face from base to summit?
About 3,000 feet
About 3,000 feet: El Capitan rises roughly 900 metres from the Yosemite Valley floor, a sheer granite monolith left standing by glaciers because its rock has few joints.
Q 05Warren Harding's team fixed ropes between camps for over a year on the Nose's 1958 first ascent, an approach called what?
Siege tactics
Siege tactics: the team came and went from July 1957 until Harding toiled through a final night up the last overhanging headwall and topped out at 6 am in November 1958.
Q 06Who made the first free ascent of the Nose in 1993, famously declaring 'It goes, boys!'?
Lynn Hill
Lynn Hill freed the Nose in 1993, then came back a year later and freed the whole route again in a single day, reaching the top in 23 hours.
Q 07Which El Capitan route did Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson first free climb in January 2015?
The Dawn Wall
The Dawn Wall: Jorgeson fell for days on the traverse of pitch 15, and Caldwell, already past it, said he could not imagine finishing without him; the two topped out together after 19 days.
Q 08Tommy Caldwell climbs some of the world's hardest rock despite losing most of which body part to a table saw?
His left index finger
His left index finger: doctors reattached it after the 2001 accident, but it was later removed for good, and Caldwell rebuilt his climbing around the stump.
Q 09In 2000 Caldwell and three other climbers were held hostage by militants in which country?
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan: rebels held the four Americans for six days, until Caldwell pulled their lone guard off a cliff edge by his gun strap and the group fled to government soldiers.
Q 10Adam Ondra's 2017 route Silence climbs the roof of a cave in which country?
Norway
Norway: Silence runs through the roof of the Hanshelleren cave at Flatanger, where Ondra fixed the bolts in 2013 and then kept travelling back until he could climb it.
Q 11Adam Ondra's Silence was the first route proposed at which grade?
9c (5.15d)
9c (5.15d): after clipping the anchor Ondra said he could not even scream, only hang on the rope in tears, and the climb he had called Project Hard became Silence.
Q 12Which route did Chris Sharma redpoint in 2001 as the world's first consensus 9a+?
Realization
Realization is the name Sharma gave the line at Céüse in France; many still call it Biographie, because French custom lets the climber who bolted a route name it.
Q 13Wolfgang Güllich's 1991 route Action Directe is regarded as the first climb of which grade?
9a (5.14d)
9a (5.14d): to train for the route Güllich invented the campus board, and the tool he built for one climb became standard for building finger strength.
Q 21In sport climbing, what does a leader clip the rope into for protection?
Pre-drilled bolts, via quickdraws
Pre-drilled bolts, via quickdraws: sport routes are equipped with permanent bolts, so the leader clips a quickdraw to each hanger; the style grew up in 1980s France on blank limestone.
Q 22In traditional climbing, spring-loaded camming devices are commonly nicknamed what?
Friends
Friends: Ray Jardine's spring-loaded cams, sold from 1978 under that name, fit parallel cracks that nuts could not, raising the grades trad climbers could safely attempt.
Q 23Despite its name, climbing chalk is a powder of which compound?
Magnesium carbonate
Q 14Güllich worked as a climbing double for which actor in the 1993 film Cliffhanger?
Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Stallone: Güllich was one of the film's two main climbing doubles, but he died after a car crash in August 1992 and never saw it reach cinemas.
Q 15The Yosemite Decimal System was devised in the 1950s by members of which organisation?
The Sierra Club
The Sierra Club: its Southern California climbers worked the scale out at Tahquitz in the 1950s, so the Yosemite Decimal System was not devised in Yosemite at all.
Q 16In the Yosemite Decimal System, at which grade do the letters a, b, c and d start being added?
5.10
5.10: the scale was built to run from 5.0 to 5.9, so when harder climbs arrived in the 1960s it broke its own decimal logic, and letters a to d now split each grade above.
Q 17What do the R and X suffixes on a Yosemite Decimal System grade warn of?
Poor protection and dangerous falls
Poor protection and dangerous falls: borrowed from film ratings, R marks a runout route where a fall could cause injury and X one where a fall could be fatal.
Q 18The V in bouldering's V-grades comes from which nickname of the scale's inventor, John Sherman?
Vermin
Vermin: Sherman, known as Verm, built the open-ended scale to rate the boulder problems his own circle was climbing, then published it in his 1991 guidebook.
Q 19Nalle Hukkataival climbed Burden of Dreams, the first V17 boulder problem, in which country?
Finland
Finland: the short granite problem at Lappnor waited years for a repeat, which came from Will Bosi after he trained at home in Britain on a 3D-printed replica of its holds.
Q 20The forest around which French town is famous as the birthplace of bouldering?
Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau: alpinists from nearby Paris have trained on the forest's sandstone boulders since the 19th century, and its regulars go by the name Bleausards.
Magnesium carbonate: the white powder absorbs sweat from the fingertips for a drier grip; liquid chalk suspends the same compound in alcohol that evaporates on the hands.
Q 24The Grigri, one of the most popular assisted-braking belay devices, is made by which company?
Petzl
Petzl: the French firm launched the Grigri in 1991 and named it after an African good-luck charm; inside, a cam pinches the rope when a climber's weight comes onto it suddenly.
Q 25The tubular belay device known as the ATC takes its name from what?
Air traffic controller
Air traffic controller: Black Diamond's name for its simple tube caught on so widely that climbers now call almost any tubular belay device an ATC.
Q 26Performance climbing shoes pair a tight fit and sticky rubber with which shape?
An asymmetrical downturn
An asymmetrical downturn: performance shoes curve the toes downward and inward toward the big toe, concentrating power on small footholds, especially on overhangs.
Q 27Competition climbing made its Olympic debut at which Games?
Tokyo 2020
Tokyo 2020: at the delayed Games in August 2021, Spain's Alberto Ginés López took the first men's gold after winning the speed race and placing only seventh in bouldering.
Q 28How did climbing's first Olympic event combine each athlete's three discipline placings?
Multiplied them
Multiplied them: the lowest product won, so finishing first in any one discipline cut a climber's whole score down to the product of the other two placings.
Q 29For Paris 2024, how was the Olympic climbing format changed?
Speed got its own medals
Speed got its own medals: Paris doubled climbing's golds from two to four by separating speed from a combined boulder-and-lead event.
Q 30Who became the first female Olympic climbing champion and repeated in 2024?
Janja Garnbret
Janja Garnbret of Slovenia took the first women's Olympic climbing gold in 2021 and kept it in Paris; in 2019 she had won every Bouldering World Cup event of the season.