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General Climbing Discussion

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Compare gyms in Melbourne to Europe 30-Jan-2008 At 1:50:48 PM dreamingof8a

Message

On 30/01/2008 nmonteith wrote:
>On 30/01/2008 devlin66 wrote:
>>Once the shift to full time route setters is accepted here and
>>their value recognised, we will start to get some quality routes indoor.
>
>A free 3 month membership for route setting doesn't quite cut the mustard
>for professional route-setters!

In the gym I used to set routes in Germany (Kletterwerk Radolfzell, a new gym near Lake Constance in the south) there were 10 of us route setters who all got free entry to the gym for setting at least two routes a month each. More routes allowed for negotiating discounts on hardware etc.

It was a lot of fun and I'm really missing this activity. A lot of discussions with climbers helped to improve our setting habits; the routes had a life cycle of usually 3 to 4 months, depending on the popularity. There is also a computer system that allows visitors to leave comments and a star ranking for the routes as well as suggested up- or downgrades.
As people mentioned earlier, the focus on setting high quality routes is much greater. Many routes here in the gyms would fail the "quality control" over there due to reachy moves, lack of footholds (a problem here imho) and so on.