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General Climbing Discussion

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Fixed gear guidelines in the Grampians 20-May-2018 At 7:40:01 AM Wendy

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Latest thoughts for the morning:

I realise there is a demand for easy sport climbing. I don’t mind the concept in theory. The problem I have in practice is that easy sport climbing is actually rare. There just isn’t a lot of rock screaming out for it. If people find some decent rock with easy climbing and no gear that hasn’t been done before and the location is suitable to survive an onslaught of climbers with manageable environmental and cultural impacts, then I’m fine with people developing easy sport crags. However, there aren’t, and that is why I continue to state (somewhat more politely but within the same realm as Damo) that those people clamouring for easy sport climbing have 2 choices – learn to place gear and open up a world of easy climbing, or get better, and open up a world of decent rock without gear that is suitable for sport climbing.

Next thoughts are about the VCC bolting policy. It’s long. Most people aren’t going to read through 4 pages plus some references before they go develop something. So if we can’t convey a whole policy concisely, we need a “quick reference” summary to get out there for people to refer to. But I do think the policy is unnecessarily verbose and could be tightened up a lot.

Some points on it sound as if participants in the discussion were getting caught up in a few personal bug bears. For example, bolts should be placed to ensure a safe fall, not to minimise fall. Sport climbing always involves more bolts than just ensuring a safe fall. Otherwise, you’d barely put any bolts in the top half of a route. We aren’t creating sport head points here. In fact, it sort of doesn’t really consider sport crags at all, eg not having lower offs at the top of every route, using trad anchors where possible. These are really only considerations at trad/mixed crags.

Carrot equivalents! Argh! Can we not use best modern equipment for the job/rocktype? This applies to any reference to replacing gear or placing gear. EG, replacing fixed hanger with a fixed hanger is inappropriate on a lot of Grampians rock, where glue ins are the best equipment for the job/rocktype.

I love point 5.10., can someone show that to Malcolm re the fixed thread on Monkey Puzzle? Jokes aside, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable example of replacing fixed gear with best equipment available. It also raises questions about what to do when the first ascensionist has not used best equipment available – this doesn’t just apply to older routes, there are some people using poor practices on new routes still. Do the choices of the first ascensionist have more weight than best practice recommendations?

Also worth noting is this is a bolting policy, not a route/crag development policy. So there’s a lot of stuff discussed in this thread that is extra to this policy.

Maybe we need several documents – say one of technical recommendations, one of principles of bolting at sport crags, one of principles of bolting at trad crags, one on crag development, one on rebolting/retrobolting. I’m not sure if that ends up being easier for people to digest than one long document covering all or not, but it does offer an opportunity for clear delineation.