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Fully sick bolt wars at Araps 16-May-2016 At 4:46:14 PM Wendy

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On 16/05/2016 One Day Hero wrote:
>On 16/05/2016 The good Dr wrote:
>>What set of rules? There never was any and what you see as the current
>>rules are just a figment of personal and confirmation bias. There
>>were no rules. Same with the Blueys. etc etc.
>
>Bullcrap. I agree that things weren't cut and dried, but give me some
>examples of flat out retrobolting or squeezing sport routes up against
>existing trad routes prior to the mid 2000s.

I reckon that bolt in Trojan that you adore went in before then. Body Count had a line of bolts next to trad gear in the early 90s, Sting Like a bee not long after and Tryrants grasp and that other thing basically bolted all over CHinese water torture about the same time. I imagine there are others if I could be bothered thinking about it a bit more. YOu are living in a bit of a when I was a lad everything was much better world. And you not even as old as i am.

>
>>So when do you propose that the noobs, that you are so contemptuous of,
>>actually get a say.
>
>While Macca's proposal sounds a bit far out the way he stated it, do you
>actually think it's a good idea to have climbers who have been in the game
>less than 12 months running around the crag with a drill?
>
Even assuming noobs might make poor choices, who are these noobs supposedly running around wrecking araps with power drills then? As far as I'm aware, the main new routing, rebolting and retrobolting climbers at Araps have 25-40 years experience. Experienced climbers in a wide range of styles and settings with a long history at Araps being brought to decisions made about routes and bolt placement. Although Simey still uses a hand drill and pegs.

>>In some ways, the old cranks maybe should
>>not get a say. If they had ruled the roost in days gone by, or continued
>>to do so, climbing would have never progressed. You may not have noticed,
>>but the level of difficulty of routes is grades harder on 'spurt' routes
>>and this has allowed the skills of the headpointers to develop whereby
>>harder 'headpoint' routes can be established.
>
>Really? You're trotting out this tired old crap? I reckon that if you
>exclude about 10 climbers in the whole country, the rest of Australia's
>climbing population is not onsighting any harder on gear than they were
>in the 80s (which used to be one of the main measures of good climbers,
>right)

The majority of climbers world wide climb diddly squat on gear. Onsighting trad 18 is a great acheivement to the majority. Which gets back to my earlier discussion about crowding - relative to demand, you can easily run low of well protected easy routes at Araps. Sure, it has a lot, especially compared to most crags, because rock generally lends itself to harder routes. Even here, the most numerous grades are around 23. As you don't go out looking for routes below 18 that much and probably haven't been here on too many busy weekends, you probably haven't noticed the hoards on the easy routes. You could argue it's good to keep the crowds in a few places or that overcrowding is trashing those places and new moderate cliffs are actually good for spreading the load. Or you can totally selfishly (like me) be sick of climbing everything sub 22 with stars for the 42nd time and go out looking if there's anything else worthwhile. I did an awesome 19 at Campbells Kingdom yesterday. If anyone is sick of the usual 19s, Coeur de Lion is great and there's now a rap anchor at the top of the cliff as well.