crimper

shameless plug for re-bolting: if anyone reading this thread wants to re-install the 2 bolts that got chopped on "sharpen your teeth," have at it. (the chopper now believes he never should have chopped the bolts, so he wouldn't go chopping them again). It's one of the better routes there - which is not saying much - and as it's steep it never had any vegetation on it to begin, and so it actually stays dry and clean. also, we called it 10b, not 10d as the olson guide states. sorry Tim, don't know how you missed that one, but I sent you exact route descriptions and for some reason you bumped the grade up a couple notches! anyway, just PM me for some beta and drilling suggestions if anyone seriously wants to re-bolt this route

crags gain character both from their developers and the climbers who come after. if the dropzone is going to have its coming out party due to olson's book, we'll see whether its character changes. if climbers want to rig a safe and quasi-permanent toprope setup, then they will. but if they think the routes suck even on toprope or are too scary to lead, then they'll quit coming. i wonder how the crag will look by fall...

Joseph, it's true that the Dropzone isn't really set up for toproping, for all the reasons that you mention. Anyone who disagrees is just arguing with you because it's their default reponse to anything you say (this website holds 20,000 pages of evidence for that proposition), or they haven't climbed at the Dropzone enough to know what you know. Or both. However, you've made your point and hopefully you got the word out to a few climbers who might listen. Also, I was out there a month ago and out of 80 or so routes, half of them are abandoned. Covered with grass, bushes, dangling vines, etc. The routes with roofs or bolts have traces of chalk, and at least haven't been totally reclaimed by nature. i guess what I'm saying is that I welcome ANY traffic out there, because the crag was being reclaimed by nature, but i bet the first several dozen parties are going to feel like they got tricked when they show up looking for 80 routes and see evidence of about 20. Has anyone actually been out there lately?

i am still waiting for the day this site and these threads brings people together. it is so rare to see someone say "you know, at one time i disagreed with you, but your superior logic and name-calling during the course of our internet argument has made me agree with you!" has that ever happened??? instead, each side gets entrenched, nothing gets resolved, and you wind up with weird grudges and vibes. two of my bolts got chopped last year by opdycke, of all people, and the experience of debating the issues on this site and in person turned me off to these spats so much i still haven't had the heart or desire to replace the bolts even though opdycke gave me two replacement ones. something tells me that years from now i'll be glad i invested more time in my actual childen than "my" routes. nobody will care as much as you about your route, or how it looks on paper (or on screen) on one twentieth of one page in a 300 page guidebook. they'll just remember how you made them feel when you were around. that said, props to taking the time to craft a route, or clean an old one, because we all benefit from thoughtful uses of local stone.

i just want people to climb my routes and keep 'em clean for the rare occasions i get to climb outdoors these days! and i bolted 'em so i wouldn't worry about dying or breaking bones when i show up out of shape mentally and physically. and joe, you already told me there's not 1 bolt out of 12 that you could skip on my routes, so i know they aren't overbolted...(there's only 10 bolts until i replace the 2 that got chopped...maybe this winter...)

i think routes at the drop zone are fairly graded if you are on toprope. they aren't that physically demanding. not too steep or reachy, in general. the problem is that the gear can be tricky, especially if the cracks haven't been recently cleaned. it's one of those crags where you are best off toproping and/or following a few routes, memorizing the key placements, then repeating the routes on lead and realizing that the gear is there, just not always when you want it. and for the record, i threw in like 12 bolts on 6 routes precisely to keep my routes PG. most are 5.10, and the bolts protect the 5.10 parts. maybe some day bill will retro his own routes to keep them PG....or allow someone else to do the bolting...they're his routes, he can do what he wants with them....

i'm pretty sure i climbed here, back in 2002 or so. it's just east of the mountain bike trail/geological feature called "the syncline." the crag is short and pretty much all under 5.10. there were a handful of bolted anchors here. maybe a 20 minute walk north and a bit east from the parking area at the base of the synclimb. lots of ticks and rattlesnakes too!

i hear you ivan, but every single route at drop zone requires trad gear. and some of the gear is consistently thin or interesting. it's not like beacon where there are 5.7 and 5.8 well protected trad moderates. but i hope the traffic picks up at least a little bit.... http://www.mountainproject.com/v/washington/farside/106862529 maybe this will help with that...

it's going down as "the far side" in olson's guide and that settles it for everyone except kevbone and whoever replies to him. and i know joe just wants it to stay quiet, but except for my routes that have bolts and a few of the best lines, it was looking pretty mossed over last time i was there (early summer) i can only imagine what a winter of neglect will do.

bill, thanks for understanding where i was coming from, and for clarifying your memory of how the "naming" went down. at the end of the day, it's become a nice little crag that is quieter than ozone and also sports a handful of gems for those who can climb 10a on occasionally techy gear. i'm glad the second wave hit the crag and started developing because between kids, death and people moving away i bet there'd be less than 20 routes still to this day. i hope somebody besides the 6 or 7 posters here actually drive past ozone one day and check the crag out. it sure could use the traffic...

i'll piss in the wind myself here: bill is way too smart not to know that of ALL the people he and jim "consulted" about a name for this crag, NONE of those people included those of us ALREADY putting up routes at what we had been calling "the drop zone." those climbers would be mark d, jon stewart, myself, arent wortel, ryan sund, kevin evansen, jason fricke and others. not to mention kevin rauch, who we were keeping posted on our developing, and one day carried down the trail to see for himself. in other words, we were all putting up routes and saying "let's go work on routes at the drop zone!" because that's what it was called. so that's the drop zone tribe. THEN bill and jim showed up with an entirely different tribe, never asked the 6 to 8 of us what we called the place, and just started to call it "the far side." they brought lawn chairs, excavated terraces for belaying, and added dozens of routes very quickly. more power to them, we were glad to see the place get developed further. not giving 2 shits, we let it go at that and just kept calling it the drop zone. the reality is that the later tribe is the majority, and olson's guide will call it the far side because as we know the majority rules. this little story of mine and ours will be as lost as any other native american history that gets written over by anglos with more power drills and numbers. if mark or stewart or arent or ryan cared as much as bill and jim maybe things would be different. but that's OK - dramatic analogy aside - this is just rock climbing.

We learned how out of shape we are at about the 70 foot mark of this route and bailed off two nuts. if anyone wants to show us some pity, you can lead past them and return the nuts, biners and slings. if not, we know the rules of the game. thanks, bryan.

...and when i have rapped in, i have cleaned each and every inch of every crack to sort for gear, no matter how small, before considering any bolts. that's the "arts and crafts" part of putting up a route top-down. just because you rapped in doesn't mean you are mindlessly committed to a g-rated route with bolts every body length. i think the rock around portland is well suited for mixed routes like that, with bolts between the gear: young warriors, classic crack/red eye, superstition, gandalf's,and plenty of the routes at madrone (into the wild blue yonder, mind games, ant abuse, etc.) being great examples of routes that are mainly gear but are kept reasonable and repeatable by bolts here and there. it's kind of making lemonade out of lemons: we have choss and moss, but dilligent cleaning and judicious use of bolts can make for challenging but reasonable routes.

on another note, of course an onsight ground-up FA is the best style to shoot for. but it's not always sane or safe to try that approach. from our armchairs we can't see what you see from the base of your proposed route, so any advice from this site is strictly rhetoric. i usually rapped in to the routes i've put up (maybe 80% of the 20-25 pitches i've put up - actually all, except the ones i put up around bend, where there's no moss and less choss!!) but i respect my friends who have groundupped their routes even when i wouldn't have done the same. they showed courage in the moment and managed their fear and (so far) stayed alive. so they learned a lot about climbing through danger, things you will never learn leading sport routes or putting up sport routes, things that might keep you alive some day when a situation gets weird. and while some of those routes turned out to be good routes with decent gear that get repeated, others turned out to be scary and sketchy routes that are now destined for obscurity. so it depends what you're looking for: are you looking to leave behind a legacy of routes that are safe that others will want to do? or are you looking for those few and intense moments of survival, and to hell with the route you leave behind? i think it's great that there are scary sketchy routes out there to marvel at. it's not at all "selfish" to leave behind a route like that. it's also cheaper! just understand that you might never want to repeat your own route, that's all.

first off, it's pretty arrogant and ignorant to say there's no unclimbed rock within 2 hours of portland. right, like all 150 routes that went in at the drop zone and ozone between 2005 and 2010 had been toproped and/or led before? yeah, i'm sure the 5.11s and 5.12s were being soloed groundup back in the 1970s or whatever since there wasn't a pin, tat or bolt to be found on them. and that's just 30 miles from downtown portland, 50-100 feet off of highway 14! and in my few misguided months out at the lost wall i put up 2 new routes and saw 2 more go up. if that place wasn't now closed to climbing we'd have been able to put up another 10, or 20 or 30 if we wanted to keep on cleaning. and that crag is about 2 miles from carver, hardly the boonies. and don't say they were already done, i brought gary rall's topo, with all 8 mid 1990s routes listed on it (the same one in olson't guide) the first day i looked at the wall. so, no, the baby boomers did not climb every chunk of climbable rock within a 100 mile radius of portland. (or did i just get trolled?)

I missed this thread while on a road trip with my family. It sure seems like the same 6 or 7 guys yelling right past each other. Allow me to be the 8th, then. I think the main reason people wanted DZ/FS routes to be published is so that bolts would not be added to routes that have already been led without them. We may not agree on the name, but we do seem to agree on that. Publicly proving the existence of these routes is critical because probably 50-75% of the routes are already growing moss as Bill and his crew of farsiders have turned their attention to the Clackamas crag they post about elsewhere. I bet that in 5 years no more than 30 of the routes will even be recognizable as such, even assuming they get published in olson's guide. One stroll through Broughton's 12 walls shows just how many routes have disappeared under moss after a couple years of neglect. If the crag gets published, odds are much better that the routes stay in their current condition and don't slowly morph into Ozone routes (which i think are great by themselves, but have brought so many sport climbers that i never reallly climb there anymore. then again, we all knew this would happen at ozone and we have no cause for complaint) Go to www.mountainproject.com and you can see Adam Winslow posted 67 routes under the name "the far side." The photos prove what a chosspile it is, so don't bother, right?

i don't know what arent did once the pin pulled. i just know he said he retreated back to the anchor, and i think that was because there wasn't any gear there. has anyone reading this led "blood sweat and smears" in the past 2-3 years?

this whole thread is a little ridiculous. with all due respect, mr. time-traveler. winter delight has like 5 bolts on it, and a bomber yellow tcu between the first and second bolt. it was always considered a slightly runout sport climb, as far as i know. i led it a couple times and was spooked, and wouldn't be excited to lead it again, but how could that be R or X? there's no ledges to hit, just some long (15-20 foot) falls if you blow a non-crux move. if winter delight is that far out of someone's comfort zone, they have no business doing bluebird. furthermore, there's no reason to ever lead winter delight because "sufficiently breathless" eats up gear. and is easier than winter delight in ever way. there is no reason to do winter delight if it scares you. if anything, we should be discussing "reasonable richard" as a scary and truly sparsely protected approach to "blood sweat and smears (BSS)" and speaking of BSS, my friend arent pulled out a pin with his bare hands on it a few years back (at the very start of the climb) so joe, you'd better make it "four" pins that have pulled out with bare hands. and to my knowledge that pin has not been replaced, leaving some very marginal placements behind. can anyone update that?

...and beyond "natural" or "climber-caused" rockfall, people toss glass bottles and other garbage from above these two crags. when we first got to ozone in 2005 (and the drop zone a couple years later - why do you think it became known as "the drop zone") both places were absolutely littered with broken glass. you have no idea. and as far as we dug down to excavate the top layer of glass, we kept uncovering even older broken glass. and it didn't sprout there from seeds. so that's yet another reason to wear your helmet when you are climbing right under highway 14.

i think tom scales and others did the same on this line and others at broughton like bloodline back in 2003/2003??? it's always inspiring to see bolted lines get headpointed on marginal gear.

i think i placed 2 cams and maybe 1 nut in a 100 foot pitch from the saddle. and slung a horn. that was the only pitch we roped up for. i remember thinking the gear was mainly for appearance's sake. so one hand, i don't think it matters what you carry because you are absolutely not going to trust any of the gear. in my my humble opinion. but it's possible others have gone a different way than i went.... also, the west ridge is a way better adventure on usually better rock, for what it's worth. but you'd need to be solid at 5.8 in the mountains.

wth my permission, joe re-located one of my anchors at the drop zone and it took me whole minutes to find the two patches he stuck over the old boltholes. i literally couldn't see them from 3 feet away and finally settled on two dots i assumed must be the patches. and kev, you know i love you, but joseph is actually contributing something to rock climbing. meanwhile, you are just a terrier dog yapping at his heels. so what does that make me...to be taking the time to say...this...

is there supposed to be a picture here?

that or a web cam

and this didn't happen in the columbia gorge, but the clackamas river drainage, so i picked this forum for it.