One Man’s Vision to Widen the Collective Knowledge of a Small Island’s Climbing Community
By Holly Yu Tung Chen
Photos by Shao Ping Weng
Originally published in Guidebook XIII
Across the Pacific, on the small island of Taiwan, climber Maurice Chen received an email from Dougald MacDonald, the Executive Editor of the American Alpine Club. It was July 2024, and the summer air hung as heavy as mist. Attached to the email was a large document: the full version of the 2024 Accidents in North American Climbing (ANAC). Chen called his two colleagues at the Taiwan Outdoor Climbers’ Coalition (TOCC), Matt Robertson and Ta Chi Wang. Together, they began their meticulous work—marking pages, circling terms, and discussing any accident relevant to Taiwanese climbing in obsessive detail. The task ahead would be long and tedious.
Zy Li on Captain Ahab, Music Hall. Photo by Shao Ping Weng.
Taiwan is an island shaped like a yam, floating between the South and East China Seas. It sits in the shadow of two superpowers, one threatening to occupy it and another half-heartedly protecting it. A young island by geological standards, it was formed by the collision of two tectonic plates. The island is 89 miles wide and 250 miles long, with its eastern half stitched to its western half by a spine of mountain ranges. Among these ranges are 151 peaks taller than 10,000 feet, with the tallest, Jade Mountain, standing just shy of 13,000 feet. Taiwan is a land of sea and sky.
The island’s diverse climate shifts from coastal tide pools to alpine tundra and back to tide pools in less than a hundred miles. Thanks to these rich natural landscapes, the Taiwanese have always embraced outdoor activities such as hiking, mountaineering, diving, biking, surfing, and climbing.
The first mountaineering clubs of Taiwan were formed as early as 1905. Chen and Robertson belonged to Taiwan’s third generation of climbers, Wang to the second. The first generation of Taiwanese climbers were born during the Japanese occupation, and were early-century mountaineers, tackling the many tall peaks with traditional expedition and siege-style strategies.
Mountaineering and hiking gained mainstream attention when a list of a hundred notable mountains was published in 1972, aptly named “Taiwan’s Hundred Mountains.” The serious Taiwanese mountaineer aspired to climb all hundred.
By the late 1970s, mountaineering boots were the go-to climbing shoe, but tales of the Stonemasters had floated across the Pacific. Wang remembers reading an issue of Climbing Magazine that his friends and brought back from the States, but without the internet, information passed slowly. The climbing scene lagged behind the Americans and Europeans by about half a decade. Gradually, Taiwanese climbers began distinguishing rock climbing from mountaineering.
When Chen began climbing in the 1990s, free climbing—primarily trad climbing—was already widespread. By the time Robertson arrived in Taiwan in 2002, sport climbing had just begun to gain traction. In the mid-2010s, the indoor climbing scene boomed, and the number of gyms tripled. Due to the limited real estate in the maze-like Taiwanese cities, most of these facilities were bouldering gyms, which gave rise to the fourth generation of Taiwanese climbers, predominantly boulderers.
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Scenery of Long Dong. Photo by Shao Ping Weng.
Chen and Robertson met at Long Dong (meaning “Dragon’s Cave”), a seacliff climbing area on the northern end of the island.
Climbers have compared Long Dong with the Shawangunks in New York or Clear Creek Canyon in Colorado, but Wang waves away those comparisons—it cannot be compared because the serenity of home is an incomparable experience. Seacliffs rise out of the Pacific and waves crash behind the belayer, requiring not only knowledge of the rocks but knowledge of the tides. The lines are short and stout, punchy, getting the grade in less than 50 feet in most places.
This was before the first climbing gym in Taiwan had opened, and the pair collaborated to publish the second bilingual edition of Rock Climbing Taiwan: Sport Climbing & Trad at Long Dong. Robertson had recently ejected from the corporate sphere, trading in neatly pressed suits for a harness and patched-up pants. Chen, enamored with climbing and wishing to contribute to the community, lent Robertson his background in graphic design. Wang, a prolific and early developer of Long Dong, contributed his extensive knowledge of the area’s history, first ascents, and geology to the book.
Around then, Robertson told Chen about the yearly publication of accident reports by the American Alpine Club. Chen was intrigued. Climbing, being an inherently dangerous sport, had its share of accidents in Taiwan, but these incidents were typically managed by individual climbing clubs and were rarely made publicly available. Taiwanese climbers were also conservative about accident details, out of fear of embarrassing the climber or causing further grief to their families. In the age of rapid information sharing and the internet, rumors of accidents frequently made rounds on online climbing forums as people speculated and analyzed the limited information they had. It often devolved into a muddle of misinformation.
According to the TOCC’s records, there have been two fatalities, three severe injuries, and several minor injuries between 2009 and 2020. Chen knew that many climbing accidents are preventable, but only if people can learn from past mistakes. Having read each year’s accident reports cover to cover, Chen began taking stock of how accidents happen and tried to implement prevention measures in his home climbing area of Long Dong. The unique safety problem at Long Dong lies in the interaction between sea salt, containing chloride ions, and steel. Combined with moisture, it significantly speeds up rusting, and several serious accidents have happened as a result of bolt failure. The social trails along the cliffs also present a safety hazard, as gym climbers transitioning to outdoor climbing are less apt at navigating exposed and complicated terrain.
In the decades since Robertson began climbing at Long Dong, two significant rebolting efforts have removed most expansion bolts and glue-ins that are a decade or older, and replaced them. Taiwanese climbers learned from climbers in southern Thailand, another place with abundant seaside climbing, that titanium is the only long term solution for safe seaside bolts. The most recent rebolting effort in 2011, spearheaded by both individual climbers and community donations, replaced dangerous bolts with titanium glue-ins or SS 306s, installed bolted anchors on popular trad routes to prevent walk-off accidents, and pull-tested any remaining old bolts to ensure their integrity. Yet rebolting was only part of the safety equation. In the 2024 ANAC, they pored over an alarming report on a carabiner cutting a climber’s rope and shared their thoughts with their community.
The trio worried over misinformation being passed around online, and the lack of an authoritative voice to manage accident reports. Chen wanted the Taiwanese climbing community to have readily available information on accident reports so they could learn from them, analyze them, and use the information to research climbing areas and prepare for hazards. The TOCC has an accidents database for climbers to self-report. They collected 19 reports between 2009 and 2020. But self-reporting has its limitations. Both Chen and Wang express concern over the cultural reluctance to talk about climbing accidents, particularly those involving a fatality or serious injury. The topic is avoided not only out of respect but also due to superstitions that discussing death may invite bad luck or misfortune. Close-calls often go unreported, sometimes because climbers think it may be too trivial, other times because climbers are embarrassed by human error.
To cross that hurdle, Chen theorized, he wanted an example of accident reports that are meticulously documented and freely available. So he turned to the Club.
ANAC had seen translations in the past, notably to Spanish in 2021 and to Simplified Chinese in 2022 by notable Chinese climber and translator Zhou Peng. Chen knew it would be a daunting task.
Two months and several hundred hours of labor later, Chen finished a Traditional Chinese translation of ANAC. The TOCC posted the document on their website, free to download.
Chen says he will continue to translate ANAC next year, and wishes to continue in the years after. Chen, like many AAC volunteers who give their time, skills, and energy to causes they believe in, is often working in challenging environments or with limited resources. Downplaying the sacrifice of his own time, Chen instead emphasizes the rewarding aspects and intrinsic joy of giving in volunteer work. This translation will serve the Taiwanese climbing community for years to come, and may serve as a catalyst to climbers embracing the idea that hard topics like accidents warrant discussion and analysis.
Before there can be a Taiwan climbing accident report, Chen knew he needed to share existing data of how meticulously documented accident reports can add to the collective knowledge of a community.
Photo by Shao Ping Weng.
The mountains and hillsides of Taiwan are green year-round. At Long Dong, you turn north and you see the sea, you turn south and you see sweeping swaths of green hillside. The subtropical mountainsides of Taiwan are always lush with camphor laurels, peeling elms, banyans, sugar palms, and charcoal trees, a mess of jungle, undulating waves from the foothills all the way to the top. Not a speck of anything else but green and blue.
The trio of friends say Taiwan calls you home. Wang specifically remembers climbing in Yosemite, marveling over the big walls and seas of granite, but in the back of his mind, he still thought about the seacliffs of Long Dong, and the mountains of Taiwan. They stand together on the cliffs overlooking Long Dong Bay, racked up and ready to climb, marveling over how they’ll never get sick of the view.
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