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General Climbing Discussion

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Carrot failure @ Muline 30-Nov-2013 At 5:25:15 PM Jim Titt

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I´ve seen Australians come to the Oktoberfest and get so pissed they throw up, I guess this proves all Australians can´t hold their beer!

There are sandstone crags all over Europe but since sandstone doesn´t lend itself to really hard routes it doesn´t get in the news much and to be honest most climbers prefer other rock types anyway as a lot of sandstone needs techniques a bit different to limestone.
A good number of them are either in crap places or crap in themselves anyway so don´t attrack outside visitors and it doesn´t give particularly good sport routes most of the time anyway if you asked me. I´ve climbed on maybe 20 because I was there but wouldn´t make a trip specially to go sandstone bolt climbing.

The Euros went through this discussion way back and had already worked out a reliable way of bolting even the softest sandstone in the early 1900´s and started to go over to stainless glue-ins in the late 1960´s. There are maybe 50,000 bolts in the Elbe Sandstone and they don´t come loose or fall out.
The Americans have struggled through all the mechanical bolt systems more recently (apart from carrots!) as they have enormous numbers of sandstone cliffs as well and for the soft rock it´s either 5/8" x 4" or glue-ins these days. For Australians to ignore the experience gained on other continents strikes me as burying ones head in the sand but we then don´t have ostriches here either!