Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

Pioneers of Tassie's Best Climbs 23-Sep-2016 At 5:29:45 PM ajfclark

Message

On 23/09/2016 Tastrad wrote:
>and realized you've got a few runs on the board in terms of cliff development

This thought keeps popping up again and again and I don't understand why you think people who've never put up routes can never have any idea what makes a quality route?

Sure, they might not understand the effort that goes into them. Sure they might not understand that something that looked f---ing awesome from the ground turned out to be a grovelly, dirty shitpile, or why the bolts sometimes don't end up in the places people want them, etc but surely they can still tell whether or not a route is quality without having done an FA.

Here's an analogy for you:

I've never built a road. I've driven on roads in Australia, France, Italy, China, India, etc. I can tell you that most of the roads we have here are pretty reasonable and the roads in India are pretty shit (the one from Agra to Rathambore National Park is a standout in my memory). I can tell you that putting unmark 45 degree speedbumps on a 100kmph highway is shit, etc

Now if I'd built a road, I might have a better understanding of why some of those roads ended up being shit, but it wouldn't change the fact that they were shit or that someone who'd never built a road could tell they were shit.