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THE AUSTRALIAN RE, RETRO-BOLTING OPEN FORUM 13-Apr-2004 At 9:05:33 AM Damietta

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Perhaps Bowie and Dylan weren't the best examples to use for the analogy for preserving death routes vs well judged retro-bolting - NBFB being th gold standard for the latter. I don't think that Bowie and Dylan were actually chart busters in their time, more a cult-like following decades later - to use your comparison with the current 'chart toppers'.I think in every era there are the good and the bad, sure we have 'pop stars' now, but you had the monkees and the mammas and pappas in your time. Your example is highly gamed to suit your argument.

I think a better example is the French - look how their sport moved forward as soon as they removed the shackles, the artificial constraints and self-imposed limits of the 'traditional' ethics. Compare that with the back-biting, whinging state of play in the US and UK, where everybody is a couple of nothces below, and the only way they catch up is to head to France and live there, joining in the pate.

And the ethics imposed are artificial, hypocritical and a double standard. Anyone who calls it 'clean climbing' - with any sort of reference to preserving the rock is pulling themselves. Climbers crawl all over the climbing area, throw their rubbish, trample the environment - put up banners on the organ pipes to assert themselves (a la MUMC at Araps on the weekend), chalk the place up - and then say that you shouldn't put a bolt in the rock....

Estey are you saying that you don't use chalk? That is what clean climbing is/was about. You can't chop and change and take this and that, take the best of the current technologies/ethics and wrap yourself in the cloak of traditional righteousness. It's too late for that, the crag is already covered in chalk and bolts. If that is sucha drama for you skip the bolts like Messner and Bonatti have claimed to doing in the Alps.

Another example I would like to proffer is the Middle East, where the ultra-religious espose their strict ethics on the general populous, with force I might add, and then head over the Bahrain on the weekend to take advantage of prostitutes and booze that they have outlawed in their own country.