Chimneys: how to climb the wide stuff without fighting it

The feature nobody sets indoors

You can climb for five years indoors and never once put your back against a wall. Modern setting is built around holds you pull on, so the whole language of climbing you learn inside is about hands. Then you get on a classic route at Stanage or on a mountain crag in Snowdonia, the line disappears into a gap wide enough to stand in, and none of it applies.

That is the honest problem with chimneys. They are not hard because the moves are subtle. They are hard because there are no moves in the sense you are used to. There is no hold to reach for. There is a gap, and you have to work out how to stay in it while you go up.

Most people's first chimney is a mess of thrashing and scraped knees, followed by the conclusion that chimneys are horrible. They are not. They are just the one part of climbing that has to be explained rather than copied, because you cannot watch someone do it and see what is happening.

What is actually holding you up

Every hold you have ever used works by friction under a downward pull. A chimney works by friction under sideways pressure, and that changes everything about how you move.

You are not hanging off anything. You are wedged. Two opposing surfaces are pushing against each other through you, and the friction that creates is what stops you sliding down. Your hands are not gripping, they are pushing. Your feet are not standing on edges, they are pressing.

That has one very useful consequence. Pressure is something you can generate with your legs, and your legs do not get pumped the way your forearms do. A climber who understands this can stay in a chimney more or less indefinitely. A climber who does not will treat it like an overhang, hold on with their arms, and be gone in a couple of minutes.

So the first thing to fix is not a technique. It is the instinct to grab.

Pick your method by the width

Chimneys are graded in your head by one number: how far apart the two walls are. That, and nothing else, decides which technique you use.

Wide enough to stand across (roughly a body length). This is bridging, or stemming, and it is the friendliest version. A foot on each wall, hands low, hips down. You are basically doing the splits in slow motion and moving one limb at a time. If you have read our piece on stemming corners and dihedrals, this is the same skill in a wider box.

Wide enough to sit in, too wide to bridge (roughly shoulder to hip width). This is back-and-foot, the classic chimney. Back flat on one wall, one or both feet on the wall opposite. This is where most named chimney routes sit, and it is the one worth learning properly.

Barely wide enough for you. The squeeze. Everything is in contact with something, and you move by inching. Deeply unglamorous, quite secure once you commit, and murder on a shirt.

Get the diagnosis right and the rest follows. Try to bridge something that is too narrow, or back-and-foot something you could comfortably stand across, and you will make hard work of easy ground.

Back-and-foot, step by step

This is the one to learn. Get in the gap, put your back on one wall, and set your feet like this.

The near foot goes on the wall behind you, sole flat, roughly under your hips, knee bent. This foot is not doing much except stopping you sliding down.

The far foot goes on the wall in front of you, high, with the knee bent hard. This is the engine. Pushing through this leg is what jams your back into the wall behind and creates all the friction you are relying on.

Your hands go low, palms down, on the wall behind you at about hip height, fingers pointing down. Push down. Do not reach up and try to grip the edges of the chimney, which is the single most common mistake and the reason people describe chimneying as exhausting.

Now the movement. It is a cycle of three, and you only ever move one thing at a time.

1. Push hard with the far foot and the hands to take weight off your back, and slide your back up the wall a few inches.
2. Set the near foot higher on the back wall to hold the new position.
3. Walk the far foot up the front wall, then move the hands up to match.

Then repeat. Small increments. A chimney climbed in twenty short cycles is far less tiring than one climbed in eight desperate ones, because you never let the position get bad enough to need a rescue.

The three mistakes

Facing the wrong way. Look up the chimney before you get in it and see which side has the better footholds and where it narrows. You want your feet on the wall with the features, and your back on the blank one. Getting this backwards makes an easy chimney feel desperate, and swapping halfway up is genuinely awkward.

Climbing with your arms. If your hands are above your shoulders and your fingers are curled, you are doing it wrong. Palms down, below your hips, pushing. Your arms should feel like they are doing a press-up, not a pull-up.

Going too deep. There is a strong instinct to burrow into the back of the chimney where it feels safest. It is usually the worst place to be. Deep in the back the walls are closest, so you have the least room to move, and the exit is at the front. Stay nearer the outer edge than feels comfortable, and keep an eye on where you actually need to end up.

Resting, which is the real point

A chimney is one of the few features in climbing where you can take a genuine no-hands rest almost anywhere. Find a spot where the width suits you, push hard through the far leg, and let go with both hands. You are wedged. Nothing is going to happen.

This matters more than any of the movement above. Chimneys often turn up in the middle of long routes, and a pitch where you can stop, shake out and eat something changes how the rest of the day goes. Trad climbers use them for exactly this. If you find yourself pumped in a chimney, you have missed a rest, not run out of strength.

Gear, briefly

Protecting a chimney is its own skill and worth saying plainly: the placements are often in a crack at the back or on the outside edge, and you may go a long way between them. Two practical things. Carry your rack on the side away from the wall you are pressing against, or it will be underneath you and unreachable. And put the rope over the shoulder that lets it run out of the front of the chimney rather than dragging behind your back.

Knee pads, or at least trousers you do not mind wrecking, will make the difference between finding this fun and never doing it again.

Where to try one

You do not need a mountain route to practise. Most UK crags have a short, well-travelled chimney at an easy grade, and they are usually the routes nobody queues for. In the Peak, the gritstone edges are full of them. On the limestone crags of the Yorkshire Dales and the Avon Gorge they run longer. In Snowdonia and the Lakes they turn up as pitches on the big classics, which is exactly where you do not want to be learning.

Go and do two or three easy ones on a dry autumn afternoon while the friction is good. Climb them slowly and deliberately, stop halfway up and take a proper hands-off rest just to prove to yourself that it works. Then the next time a route description says the words "into the chimney", it will read as a rest rather than a problem.

Log the ones you get on in Sendit and you will build a picture of which widths suit you, which is more useful than it sounds. Everybody has a size of chimney they climb well and one they hate, and it is usually not the one they expect.