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General Climbing Discussion

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Retrobolting at Bungonia 27-Jun-2012 At 11:40:40 AM jono_1

Message

On 27/06/2012 dmcg wrote:
>On 22/06/2012 widewetandslippery wrote:
>>Fants is liberal minded to bolting but imagine the newspaper headline
>of
>>him beating the retrobolter of jewlbox to death with the perfect hammer
>
>
>Jewel box probably wouldn’t have come into existence sans bolts without
>fants beating IT to death with the perfect Bungonia hammer (hold trimming
>head on one end, crack cleaning/nut setting pick on the other) in the first
>place. More than one subsequent ascent by others sans hammer resulted in
>serious ground falls (and subsequent rescues/carry outs) when weighted
>gear pulled from glass smooth placements high on the first pitch.
>
>I have a homemade perfect Bungonia hammer if anyone wants to borrow it?!
>– blow the rust and cobwebs off and it still might work okay (unlike its
>owner).
>
>PS I’m not bagging fants’ use of the hammer at the time, jewel box was
>a pretty extraordinary ground up, onsight effort (as were just about all
>his climbs) but it begged the question – did subsequent ascensionists have
>to carry a hammer to set crucial nuts on his climbs? My memory is pretty
>shot but I know john did the odd bit of retrobolting on a few of his own
>Bungonia routes, can’t remember if he ever added a bolt to any part of
>JB or not.
>
>

Pretty sure that after the first ascent of Wailing Coooockatoos Fantini went back and added a few bolts to avoid a ground fall from 30 m up. Would not have been that difficult to retrobolt considering the climb ends at the end of the second traverse pitch of strangeness and charm.

Apparently c--k is offensive to some people on this site hence the cooock.

In general most of the early routes at Bungonia were put up onsight, no inspection with no regard for the safety of repeat ascensionists. You could probably go and retrobolt the crap out of these routes and no one would know.

I have one of Fantini's Bungonia hammer if anyone wants to give Jewel Box a crack!