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Sonnie Trotter Goes Down on Tasmania 18-Feb-2016 At 9:44:02 PM johny

Message

On 15/02/2016 Goshen wrote:
>The purest style of roped climbing is onsight trad, placing gear, without
>pre-inspection. Anything after this is a grey area; and can always be
>done in a better style, although hard trad is almost never done in this
>pure style anyway. He could have top roped it, and claimed the first top
>rope ascent. As it is, he claimed the first lead ascent with preplaced
>and preclipped wires at the crux.
>
>IMO, if it's a well established ethic in Tas to only claim a proper FA
>placing gear, then I guess his ascent could be ignored once the climb is
>done in a better style.

I agree with your first sentence obviously. But I am not sure about the rest. How many top rope ascents of sport climbs (outside of the super nerdy thecrag.com) ever get mentioned? I derisively refer to them as Brown Points. Its kind of a mark of shame. I think climbing a trad route with preplaced gear is the same as toproping a sport climb. They both do not count for shit. Its pretty simple. If he had said "I top-roped it but couldnt send it on my trip but it goes! Good luck!" great wonderful! We already knew this but thanks for trying. He didnt say this. He renamed it and called it FFA. I would have called the same BS if he had toproped one of the bolted projects and tried to rename it and say it was ffa.

I am glad that you chimed in because I really respect your opinion on this. I think its important for people to sort this thing out. There are still people who should know better pre-placing gear on new routes on supposedly dangerous routes. Writing up a scary route that you couldnt even lead properly by placing the gear is in my opinion very low and potentially dangerous to repeat ascents.