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Carrot failure @ Muline 18-Nov-2013 At 9:43:56 AM nmonteith

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On 17/11/2013 Dave J wrote:
>What did Malcolm actually have say about the Muline Carrot incident?

I have yet to receive a reply (it was a lengthy email with photos).

>I guess there's 2 factors here in his hesitance.
>1.Not wanting to see a mess made of his routes. I think the Contra Arms
>Pump rebolt debacle was a PR blunder by Nathan at a point where Malcolm
>was almost ready to see other people rebolt his routes (are the old bolts
>still in there next to the new ones or have they been cleaned up?).

Sadly, as of two weeks ago there is a still a double bolt belay every 2m up the cliff. What surprises me about this is that Malcolm hasn't removed one or the other. It must be 10 years since they got put in?

>Whatever happens those bolts on Taipan it needs to not be a mess. What
>eventually replaces the old bolts should go in the old hole and whatever
>it is should be something that can ultimately be easily be removed and
>replaced without any more holes needing to be drilled. I'm less bothered
>about the absolute safety of the route than I am about the gradually deterioration
>of the rock through repeated rebolting. Ive always like expansion bolts
>over rings for that reason (interesting to hear about your Anaconda experience
>though).

I totally agree with respecting the aesthetics of the rock. The lovely Grampians smoothness scars easily. The less hacking and re-drilling the better. One of the major problems with many of these classic routes is that rebolting has been put off and put off, and now the bolts are in the state that removal will not be easy or even possible. Certainly most of the expansions I replaced on Spurt about 10 years ago were very hard to remove and many of them were just patched over. One of the naughty things I did was to actually drill a parallel hole right next to the rusty remains, scrape the mush out into the bigger hole, then place a glue-in so it filled up both holes. That generally fixed the visual pollution but did leave a reasonably big patch of glue on the surface.