Unfortunately, Kieran, this type of thing is happening at bouldering areas all over the place.
I got down on my hands and knees and cleared up cigarette butts and finger tape from Lindfield on Saturday morning and had a litter collection on the way out of the Frontline on Sunday morning.
Whereas in the past many boulderers had some sort of affinity with the outdoors, it now seems that this is no longer the case for many people. Symptoms associated with this new type of person include the plastering of holds with chalk, covering problems with tick marks, gang-banging problems with 5 of your mates (much easier than working it out for yourself), power-screaming, discarding rubbish, adapting the outdoors to suit your convenience, videoing yourself for upload to U-tube and spraying about 'crushing' or 'cruising' problems.
(Sorry, I'm in a bad mood this morning and I am old and grumpy at the best of times.)
Unfortunately, bouldering is accessible and guidebooks (complete with nice big white lines right down the centre of a photopgraph of the problem) have the effect of popularising bouldering and bouldering areas. Please don't anybody publish any more bouldering guides. Or if you have to, put it somewhere obscure on the web with hard-to-follow directions. |