“Hey, wanna go for an afternoon scramble to Romsdalshorn?”

That is a common message in our community in Romsdal. Romsdalshorn is a very aesthetic summit, a big black rock tower that dominates the valley where I live. There is not any easy route to the summit. The north face is one of the most classical climbs in Norway, the upper 250m are a IV grade climb (5.5). I have been climbing up there close to hundred times, it’s a very nice scrambling, a beautiful summit views and pretty short from the parking. The perfect afternoon lap to get some vert, some fun.

I called a scramble to the summit because that what we call it. The region has a lot of easy and moderate climbing routes, some short as Romsdalshorn and some with more than 1000m of climbing, and many people in the area have a strong background in climbing and mountaineering, so seeing someone soloing those routes is pretty common. Since is something normalized by the local community, and that feels easy for most of us, we call it scrambling, because it feels to easy to be climbing.

A few weeks ago I saw a post written by Will Gadd, one of the most prominent ice climbers in the past decades. In his article “Scrambling and Soloing to Death,” Will Gadd highlights the increasing fatalities among climbers who underestimate the risks of soloing. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between “scrambling”—navigating steep, non-technical terrain where falls typically result in minor injuries—and “soloing,” which involves climbing technical routes without ropes, where a fall is likely fatal. Gadd warns against the normalization of high-risk behaviors and urges climbers to recognize and respect the inherent dangers of these activities.

When I read it I felt that I’m a part of that culture that trivializes climbing easy terrain with high consequences by calling it a technical run or a scramble. I’m really aware of the consequences of a mistake will make in this terrain, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of my level and capacities to not climb a route without a clear assessment of what risk I’m taking and the capacities I might have to succeed and get down safe in worst case scenarios – here I wrote an article to assess the risk – , but not calling a climb a climb and calling it a scramble it’s the beginning of a normalization in the community of this high risk activities without really understanding those consequences. It’s pretty stupid, but if – in the same route – we say let’s go solo climbing that route, it feels that we go somewhere with high consequences – which are the reality – but if instead we say let’s go scramble that route, it feels that the level of consequences of a fall would be lower, or that we con’t need to be as concentrated as for a solo climb.

Maybe that comes from a sentiment of an impostor syndrome, since I’m not a good rock climber – my maximum climbed grade is low, and very close to what I’ve been soloing, probably because I’ve climbed almost all the time soloing and when I climb with rope my brain doesn’t really makes the difference – It doesn’t feel that I have the competence to call something a climb when I’m going up easily, with running shoes. So the way to escape that impostor syndrome is to call it a scramble.

But when that gets into the community culture, when among our friends and by extension the friends of the friends, we undermine the fact that we are solo climbing those routes it creates a sense of security and diminish the perception of risk. And the problem really comes when someone in that community without the same background goes one day thinking “well, the guys are scrambling that route all the time, and they say is a nice route” and goes there, thinking it is a scramble. And in the best case scenario it turns around in the first meters totally pissed at us. In the worst case, the body needs to be recovered at the feet of the wall.

Maybe we should start to use the correct words for the activities we do.

Scrambling is between hiking and climbing, on a terrain where you need to use the hands to progress but where in general a fall would not result in death. Climbing on the other hand, if we don’t use ropes and/or security equipment, a fall would probably result in death.