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Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
All NSW	(General)	(General)	(General)

Topic Date User

Rings on 14-Aug-2012 At 2:06:40 PM Nick Clow

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ODH, you are joking right?

Quite seriously, I would be far more impressed by a ground up ascent of this route - and that's either with the first bolt clipped or clipping the (now non-existent) 2 retro bolts - than by a 'headpoint' ascent without. You have to go above the gear, suss the line on lead, take falls on lead, find and place gear etc by going ground-up. You don't know if you can do the climb.

You avoid all these issues and take all the uncertainty out of the thing by toproping and sussing out the whole climb. You know what the moves are (intimately, probably) and that you can do them. In fact you could argue that headpointing is sport climbing without the bolts.

I don't deny that that UK-style headpoints can be super bold in themselves and highly-impressive - especially at the cutting edge, but that's not the question. The question is to do with comparing styles.