el jefe

more trad = more blood or the more you bleed, the tradder you are

bachar lived according to his rules, not yours, mark. give the judgmental shit a rest sometime, eh?

Dude, be grateful, a trad video is infinitely more interesting than some nerf herder clipping bolts or an endless Yngwie Malmstein video. gumby has spoken...

i've never been to the "mounties wall", but i'm guessing that it's artificial, so just get over it. i mean, why should anyone give a flying f__k?

it is certainly an interesting "ideology" that promotes both a "leave no trace" climbing ethic as well as mountain biking. i'm not sure how a few bolts is somehow a massive degradation of nature while ripping through the wilderness on a mountain bike somehow leaves things the way you found them. maybe pope isn't the only one posting while intoxicated.

PhoQ, grampa raindawg's intolerance of sport climbers is of course acceptable and justified, but your dislike of jehovah's witnesses is completely unacceptable and unjustifiable. anyone can see this is reasonable.

"the past year or so I find myself at this point where I don't really care about grades or even names of climbs" this is what happens as one grows older, joseph. you start forgetting things, little things at first, and pretty soon...

Big Jim is far more qualified to provide perspective than any a-hole who contributes to cc.com discussions, and that includes el jefe, peewee puget, and pope. "Men were manlier in my day?" Got news for you, jefe, this IS his day. Personally, I do believe generational differences account for sport grades which are, with few counterexamples, much easier than equivalent trad grades. By this I mean, most post-1985 climbs are so F-ing easy for the grade. At 5.12 and beyond, I can't comment because I've never been athletic enough to sample such climbs. But up to 5.11 and 5.12-, I suggest knocking a full letter grade or more off a typical sport climb to compute the trad equivalent, for climbs put up in the 80's. I suspect the reason for this is the same reason that popularized sport climbing in the first place. Climbers of low talent, impatient with the learning curve or working through the grades, when climbing harder also meant learning how to fiddle in #3 RP's, and feeling inferior because somebody in California was climbing harder than they were, decided that bolts placed on rap were legitimate. With this development, one could clip bolts on a climb that was technically as hard as some trad climb that he could only ascend via top-rope. With only top-rope ascents (and hangdog ascents) of difficult pitches for perspective, climbers graded their new sport climbs without the knowledge of the true difficulty involved in leading these routes. The second generation of sport climbers was even more lazy and pathetic, applying softer and softer grades so their names would appear in conjunction with the 5.12 grade in the next edition of the local guidebook. In hopes of getting a blow job. pope, you're like those japanese soldiers they found back in the 60s hiding on remote pacific islands, thinking ww2 was still going on 20 years after it ended...

"If you have some experience trad climbing, you should be able to hit your placements fairly quick" i think this point explains why most people describe a difference between the sport and trad grades they lead: not so quick to find the right piece of gear climbing trad as when climbing sport. donini's comment is just another one way of saying "men were manlier in my day." trad grades aren't harder than sport grades and it isn't harder to climb trad than sport, only different. as TimL says, the difference is in being tuned into the gear and the placements, not the climbing.

just think, dane, all these years climbing at index you've been getting it wrong. now get a 70m rope before disaster strikes!

Dude! Why is it that climbers seem to be the last ones to figure out that helmets are cool and helmet-less climbing is for dumb-asses? Biking, kayaking, skateboarding, football... they've all figured it out. If you don't cover your bean, your chances for death are significantly higher. There are so many light-weight helmets out there. You can still lather your tanned Adonis frame in olive oil, but get over your fear of helmet hair and protect your brain! I don't want to have to rescue your sorry ass when you get knocked unconscious in the name of looking good. ... oh... and I'd stick with 10mm+. 10.2 for me... cheapest one out there. shaoleung is on a crusade re: helmets these days...

obwan sticks his neck out and gets his ass handed to him...

broughton's would probably be your best bet for some local trad climbing, at least until beacon opens up. otherwise, i'd suggest making a trip to leavenworth. good rock and a scenic place, although admittedly a tough place to get oriented as the climbing is really scattered around. seems like most of the stuff in the gorge at smith is 5.10 or harder, which i'm guessing is more difficult than the "low grade" stuff you are looking for.

with the unreliability of aliens it is a good idea to have a lot of them around: you should have numerous replacements available for the ones that break.

no nut. nut or no not. there is no nut.

nice tick list.

route bandits...

pm sent

glad to hear you've made it back from injury, dane. we old climbers don't bounce as well as the young ones do. hope the leg starts coming around in time for your valley trip, bill.

it's all good, pete h, john is just pimpin' his shit like any other true believer. with a little love and nurturing he'll turn out all right in the end.

great trip! looks like the weather gods smiled on you.

i like to place a cam in that final little stembox bit to protect the mantle onto the ledge because i agree that a fall there would be "a ruinous pendulum back into the wall". thanks again in advance for replacing the pin.

wow.....if a route has gone free than whats the deal with placing a green alien, people clean up old mank iron all the time, if it didn't happen at places like el cap than it would just be a clip up. plus free insinuates that all gear is placed on lead. pulling out fixed gear and not replacing it is different from cleaning up old mank. some people climb superstition with no pro other than quickdraws and would be unpleasantly surprised to discover that someone had removed the last piece of pro they were expecting to have. "free insinuates all gear is placed on lead"? you need a 3 digit IQ to discuss complex issues like this one, powderhound.

aid goons vs sporto boyz = competition for a scarce resource? glad to hear you plan to replace the missing pin on superstition, ivan. the truth is that i don't care what style you use on a route as long as you respect the fact that if the route has gone free, then you should leave it the way you found it -- in other words, don't nail it and don't remove any fixed gear. in your trip report you merely said that the pin was gone so watch out if you go up there expecting to find the fixed pin that protected the awkward traverse to the anchor. if memory serves, falling off at that point without having clipped the pin would mean an ugly, slab-spanking fall and likely serious injury. it certainly wouldn't be fair to whoever goes up there unawares and without any pro to protect the traverse.

why don't you aid goons try a real aid climb rather than aiding up free climbs with fixed gear in situ? maybe that way fixed pins such as the one now gone from superstition will still be there for the sporto boyz who don't frequent this website and thus will be ignorant of the fact that the pin they were expecting to find is now gone.