Geek_the_Greek

Aha! An admittance that you've been to X32, and thereby are a SPORT CLIMBER. (Don't even try to pretend you were there for the gear routes.) I have no doubt that all the bolts there were placed on rap, and it's very unfortunate that some of them were probably placed in stupid places. And of course, on most of those routes, you couldn't place gear if you wanted to, so it's not a matter of being wussy, it's a matter of wanting to climb a certain line (and not soloing it, thanks anyway). Yes, the stark truth is that MOST BOLTS PLACED NOWADAYS ARE PLACED ON RAPPEL (ascenders, actually). Lord forgive us all.

Ah, some backup! And a sense of humor. Much appreciated.

Why not? If everyone (with a few notable exceptions) is at least occasionally into sport climbing, but no one will admit it, what kind of wanker chestbeat discussion is this? "Yeah, trad's totally the shit, man. Bolts are for total losers." "But wait, didn't you go clip bolts at Vantage last weekend, and spray all about what a good time it was?" "Uh, yeah, but, um, it was kind of wet on the westside. Whatever, man, I'm not into that stuff." Hypocrisy is the root of all evil.

I defend bolting to a reasonable extent in these discussions because no one else seems too eager to step up and do it. Even people on this board who I climb with and who really enjoy the occasionaly day of sport climbing seem very reluctant to admit it here. If everyone was trashing on trad climbing as crazy or passe or only for moldy has-beens, I would be defending its merits. But it's silly, because there are obviously a huge number of people who enjoy bolted climbs, whether or not they care to talk about it here. If this board is to be at least somewhat relevant to the real world, it's pointless to ignore that reality, or try to wish it away. The ways and reasons people climb are obviously diverse. I think there's room for diversity, and think that more people climbing has made the sport/activity better, not worse (environmental impacts and occasionaly crowding notwithstanding). The world changes rapidly these days, folks. Don't expect climbing to be the same 20 years from now either.

What a snide answer, Joseph. You'd think I was out there waving banners to promote sport climbing, or that I was the first one to discuss bolting on rappel. People climb rap bolted routes. Deal with it - it's been going on for 20 years, and isn't going away. A guy should have the right to ask a how-to question on a Newbies forum without getting everyone's narcissistic fanaticism shoved in his face.

It's kind of funny that the question really had nothing to do with ethics of any sort, or how to trad climb. The dude is asking how (not why!) you go about bolting a steep or long sport rig. Obviously no one here knows shit about it, or doesn't care to get flamed for giving how-to advice on bolting.

?? Scarface was never .14c. It was .14a at first, with much hoopla about it being the first 5.14 established by an American. Then it was downgraded to .13d...

I haven't done it either, but my understanding is that for bolting seriously overhanging stuff people bolt from top down while hanging on jumars, clipping their fixed line into the bolts as they go, to keep them fairly close to the rock. In my mind this still leads to a fair amount of swinging in space far from the rock, so perhaps the odd hook or even (!) piece of gear is used keep them close enough to wield the drill on occasion. I've also heard rumors of using ladders for the lower parts, that being much easier than hooks or whatnot, if you don't mind lugging the damn thing up. Disclaimer: this post may contain poorly informed idle speculation.

Whatever, man. Your ropes, which you hang your life on repeatedly, and frequently handle bare-handed, went flying through a glass window and are now covered in glass shards. Every manufacturer suggests disposing of carabiners when they take a hard hit from hitting the ground. You should have no trouble at all getting that stuff covered, and it certainly isn't fraud. Fraud is when you take an additional 2 ropes you had at home and cover them in bits of glass, and try to get them replaced too.

I'm not sure if this discussion has been moved to Spray or to another forum, and am not interested enough to dig for it. In any case, all I was after was that with this type of discussion it's totally unrealistic to expect any consensus, or to determine the true feelings of the climbing community. The fact is, people posting here like discussing climbing on the internet, and have to be a bit thick-skinned about it. But at the end of the day, you have perhaps determined the RANGE of opinions (or maybe just a random sample of the range), but not the average, or any measure of spread. The fact that more people climb safer routes (that's a guess, but do you disagree?) suggests that adding bolts to many routes would have popular appeal. I'm not saying that makes it the right thing to do, but it would make it the democratic thing to do. My point is that I don't feel that this discussion brought us any closer to understanding the views of "the climbing community" than we knew already - some people are into adding bolts to make scary routes safer, and some people are not into it at all. Whether or not they care to argue stubbornly about it on the internet is irrelevant. FWIW, I'm 29 (for another month or so), and I like sport and trad climbing, among other things. Apparently I also like arguing on the web under a false name, but I don't think any of those things makes my opinion on climbing routes more valid than that of any other climbers.

So none of this discussion actually addresses the real question: given all the back-patting that Erik N is getting for asking the question, how is the apparent opinion of "the climbing community" to be deduced? A question was asked about placing a bolt. Certain individuals were clearly anti-bolt from the beginning, others were clearly pro-bolt (or indifferent to adding a bolt) from the beginning, and other folks asked for more information. Some more information was presented, and more pontificating ensued, along with unhelpful sarcasm, side debates regarding dwarf tossing, questions on who should have permission to offer opinions, arguments about what side of 'the fault' certain climbs were located (or was that in another thread?), etc. So, do we take a vote? Who votes? Do people who climb harder get more votes (a meritocracy)? Do people who have climbed for longer get more votes (a gerontocracy)? Do we just shut up and go climbing? Climbing ethics by community consensus: a guaranteed good time!

Hey Erik N, It sounds to me like the bolts were put up by some no-good dirtbagger drunk on absinthe looking for something to do with his drill that day. Do we honour his inebriated vision? Nyet! You have my permission to relocate said bolt or add a new one to save your ankles. See, I care more about your ankles than about some arbitrary botch job that happened to be the first visit to that hunk of granite. Lucky for me, my opinion counts just as much as those who have done the climb (or might eventually do it), and nothing in the climbing world happens without a thorough democratic process on cc.com, following the report of the ethics committee, the history board, the environmental brotherhood, and the rock desecration police.

Oh yeah, all that was way lame.

Oh and Joseph, your comments about doing FAs, not reporting them, and then coming back later to find lines of bolts and inflated grades are really interesting. I recall rading about the Banff summit a few years back (a book came out about it - "Voices from the Summit") with questions for Todd Skinner, in the context of the ego question and first ascents: something along the lines of 'Wouldn't you be upset if you did a first ascent, didn't report it, and then someone else later claimed the line as their own?' I think his answer was "I aspire to be the type of person who wouldn't be bothered by that!"

Several scattered comments: I may be many things, but certainly not a bolt-everything advocate. I've been trad climbing for about 10 years, and intend to continue doing so, with no need for bolts near good cracks. To me the rules of cragging are pretty clear - if there's decent pro, there's no need for bolts; if there's a blank section that's unprotectable, one or more bolts are warranted. Some stuff is overbolted for me (I would have been happy with about 1/2 to 2/3 of the existing bolts on Condomorphine Addiction), but in the long run, I find it a pretty good system. I mean, it is just a game. We could all invent rules like "no gear with moving parts" to make things more challenging if we wanted to. It tickles me that some ice climbers have upped the ante to consider leashes aid, because their gear had gotten so good that the game was too easy for them! The most popular crags are ones with easy access, with a large urban center nearby, bolts or no bolts. If you make people walk 2 hours or more, you can gridbolt every cliff and you'll still mostly have the place to yourself. If you're out in the sticks, pretty decent crags right near the road are still largely undeveloped. But places like Index and Squamish, with few bolts but easy access, get plenty of crowds. I'm not denying that sport areas are probably more popular than trad areas, all else being equal, and yep, I reckon that has something to do with the gym crowd. But mostly we're not talking about sport climbing, we're talking about adding a bolt here or there to dangerous trad climbs. The fact is, guidebooks, reliable gear, and masses of people participating has made cragging very different today than it was for the pioneer-types. There is still plenty of adventure to be had in the mountains (although even there, the most popular routes are clean and polished, well documented, covered in rap slings, and often crowded - hardly the same sort of dirty adventuring it used to be). I just find it hypocritical to 1)accept fancy CNC-made gear, built by large companies with R&D departments; 2)accept guidebooks, describing the approach, length, descent, and protection options of every route, as well as nearby camping options, rainy-day activities, local places to check email, etc.; and 3)accept that enough people do this shit that we have access organizations involved in land-use planning, paid parking lots and road signs, Hollywood movies centered on the activity, advertisements for corporate services routinely using rock climbing photos as an irrelevant metaphor for risk - accept that all this is the case, and we as climbers benefit in many way from this type of evolution to the mainstream, and then turn around and decide that we can't possibly accept another bolt or two on certain routes that were put up in another era, because it would ruin the soul of climbing. . By these definitions, cragging lost its soul long ago. Good thing it’s still fun to do.

But then you have to ask the question - why even do an FA, or at least why report it, if you don't want other people to climb your route? Is there a shortage of people being scared while climbing? I highly doubt it. Is there a shortage of people hurting themselves out there? Any perusal of ANAM will show this to not be the case as well. After pages and pages of this, I find scant evidence that the "preserve dangerous leads" argument is about anything other than ego and elitism - "let's separate the men from the boys" type of BS, all camouflaged under terms like 'style' and 'tradition'. Are George Lowe and Royal Robbins worried that their reputations as hardmen will suffer if some early hard routes of theirs have bolts added to them? They needn't worry. Does anyone really want to be known as the person who put up the routes that sent fellow climbers to the hospital or the morgue? To me this is like designing a car with shitty brakes.

One more thing: the real way to do clean first ascents is to avoid cleaning a route, avoid flagging the approach, and avoid telling anyone about it (ie no posting on cc.com, no guidebook writeup). Oh yeah, and no bolts or pins either. Those are the things (especially the writeup) that bring 'unclean' impacts. For obvious reasons, few are interested in this approach.

I have but one problem with the purist mentality: it assumes that to climb without placing fixed pro (without altering the rock) is considered clean climbing, and for this reason alone is far superior to methods that involve fixed protection. To me, this is the biggest myth of all. There is a very fine boundary that describes clean (i.e. essentially no aesthetic or environmental impact) climbing, and it DOES NOT INVOLVE FIRST ASCENTS. I'm sorry, but once you do an FA and publish it in a guidebook (and it's a route that for certain reasons will get climbed again - often a matter of a nice line, a reasonable approach, the potential for aesthetic moves, etc.), you have PERMANENTLY (by definition, according to a human lifespan time scale) altered the environment. You tell me you care about the aesthetics of bolts on the rock and chipped rock? That's fine, but humans are the only ones who are impacted (and only aesthetically, unless someone is otherwise injured by the existence, or (more likely) lack thereof of bolts or pins). As an ecologist, I will tell you that I care about cliff vegetation, about lichen and moss communities that take a century or more to develop, about the hardy trees that get gardened out of cracks in the name of a first ascent. Am I weeping every time I see the cleaned line of a climb? Of course not - there's a tradeoff, and as a climber I'm happy others have worked so that I may have fun on the rock. But from the environmental perspective, bolts are the big so what, and cliffside trampling is a big fucking deal, especially in desert areas. The land managers at Smith Rock, for instance, have written off the most popular areas (Shiprock to Asterix Pass), and don't really care about new bolted lines as long as no one gets hurt. But they do care about someone trying to dig out new routes from the Monument area, because - guess what? - there is actually still native grass at the base of the cliffs, and birds and plants living in the cliff. So sure, a new grid bolted cliff developed out of what merely used to be choss is harsh on the environment, but a ground-up development of the same cliff is just as harsh, if it ends up being popular. There is no shortage of trad craggers. Thus, for me the bolt/no bolt issue is missing the point entirely of the very real environmental impact debate. Did I care that Dan's Dreadful Direct was retro'd? Not a whit - the area was already blasted (does a flat treeless area called Logger's Ledge actually strike anyone as the symptoms of 'clean climbing'?), so it might as well have been a line that would see some more ascents. So that's fine if you don't agree with my blase attitude towards bolts, but don't pretend that your no-bolt development represents clean climbing.

Another day, another string of windy ranting by the old guard on the ethics thread.... "Gee, I sure hope all these rules get sorted out soon, 'cause I was hoping to do some climbing, and I wouldn't even think about it without knowing the proper etiquette and behavior! Hasn't climbing always been about respect for the rules and knowing one's place?" ...meanwhile, back at the crag, the climbers were doing their thing, enjoying themselves whilst putting up their new creation "I dream of shiny fins". It was all going swimmingly, and they didn't even notice when they placed the bolt beside a protectable (if you had the right size LoweBall) patch of crack on the third pitch. THE HORROR! Where was JosephH when they needed him?? The purity of the ascent was lost! LOOOOOOOST!

Almost as extreme: Broomboarding "We are the people that ride brooms"

Ah yes, I am but a grasshopper... I thought maybe it had something to do with beta-versions, or beta-testing. G. the Greek is fond of beta, and of its other 23 alphabetical friends.

Dunno where the expression comes from, though. It is kind of dumb.

Beta is a type of radiation that climbers hurl at each other to help them get up routes... Actually it refers to the climbing moves used to get up sections of a rock route, like "match on the positive edge, then reach high with your left to the mono". This probably isn't what you're asking about, but if you know the beta beforehand, then your ascent cannot constitute a true on-sight! (exception: some beta is often provided in guidebook descriptions, and you can still on-sight a route if you have read the guidebook)

I reckon one of these letters refers to me. here's a hint:

Wander by MEC (that's Mountain Equipment Co-op, on Broadway 3 blocks east of Cambie), don't forget to leave while you still have a dime in your pocket, pick up one of the Squamish guides (Squamish Select is the least overwhelming). That should get you started.