Mountaineering Routes : Page 303

Cliffs: the face, wall, or precipice.—Between the couloirs and ridges are high-angle slopes for which the names are interchangeable. If the slope is very steep, subtended by ridges, and broken only by cracks, chimneys, shallow chutes, and ledges, it is either a face or a wall. The precipice is more the poet's word than the mountaineer's—but it is perfectly permissible for a man to be both. The climber is prone to consider not the entire cliff, but its separate faces, overhangs, bulges, slabs, flakes, or offset cracks; and whether he is on a cliff, a ridge, or in a gully, the portion of route between belay positions is a pitch. Cliffs are subject only to sporadic fall of rock or ice, provided there is no hanging glacier