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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 24, 2015 - 02:39pm PT
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I would really like to have that pint with you sometime, too.
Ditto, work ever bring you to PDX?
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cat t.
climber
california
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Aug 24, 2015 - 03:16pm PT
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maybe you're not competing to be the most strong, but perhaps the most 'pure' or whatever? be honest now.
Nooo I was gonna say this and you beat me to it ;)
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The Chief
climber
Lurkerville east of Goldenville
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Aug 24, 2015 - 04:16pm PT
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Thus is never happened. Got it. Thanks Kevin.
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patrick compton
Trad climber
van
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Aug 24, 2015 - 04:27pm PT
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Chick's a buffed out sport climber. In case you haven't noticed it takes more than that to climb with no pro and ground fall potential.
wait, lemme guess what that more is...
...is it balls aka sac?
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overwatch
climber
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Aug 24, 2015 - 04:30pm PT
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yeah a big old ball sack with Harry prickly chicken skin stretched thin from the enormity.
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patrick compton
Trad climber
van
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Aug 24, 2015 - 05:27pm PT
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or was it 'the time of the month' that made her scared?
or are you butthurt cuz she had better abs than you and can climb 5.14? or maybe your man boobs are bigger than hers before she got a boob job?
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viv.r.e
climber
Sacramento
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Aug 24, 2015 - 07:11pm PT
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Ladies, don’t worry—it’s been scientifically proven if you chop enough bolts you will drop a pair of testicles and your chest hair will finally come in…
Now that I got that out of my system…there’s no doubt that women are different from men. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. However, the variance between different women is huge, as is the variance between different men. That’s why the fact we’re talking about 1-2% of the population matters.
You can look at the papers on risk-adversity, but at the same time, that doesn’t really get to the why of the question. I really doubt we’re going to solve the centuries old problem of nature versus nurture in a ST thread.
There was a really interesting study about competiveness by an economics professor—another allegedly “masculine” trait (John List). He looked at two tribes, the Maassai, a hyper patriarchal society that would make BB look progressive, and the Khasi, a matriarchal society where women make all major business decisions. Not only were the women more competitive than the men in the Khasi culture, they were actually more competitive than the men of the Maassai.
People used to use phrenology to make “scientific” claims that women and people of color were inferior. Context matters, and is incredibly hard to study. So, really, all I’m try to say is be thoughtful about how you use science to make broad generalizations about groups of people.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 24, 2015 - 07:17pm PT
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The "discussion" seems to have settled on first ascents as defining climbing, which is interesting in the context of the OP title:
"maturing of climbing as a sport & the rise of gyms"
where I have emphasized the qualification. Climbing as a sport is not so much about first ascents, or adventure, or boldness or seeking risks. For the most part "sports" are about athletic performance, and usually sporting competition minimizes the risk of injury for the athletes who are participating.
The issue of managing risk and minimizing it has a lot of publicity lately in the concussion injuries that many sports are coming to terms with, football and soccer to name two. One could claim a lack of "boldness" in the participants, but then what does that mean? playing football without a helmet? Probably not at the level the game is played now, and probably with many more career ending injuries... can football players who wear helmets be accused of being "wimps"? They are undeniably athletes.
The Voge guide 1954 guide described 75 routes in the Valley, Roper 1964 has 273, and Roper's 1971 guide had 479, which is about the time Kevin was hitting the Valley. Meyers' 1982 guide was a "Select" and had 808 routes... and was about the time that Kevin was moving on. By 1994 the Reid guide had 1538 routes, and in 2015 we are looking at about 3000 routes.
It is possible that route production will taper off, but it remains a major activity for a relatively few climbers. First Ascents are not an "athletic endeavor" per se, and FA teams have many, diverse reasons for seeking out and producing new routes. During Kevin's time in the Valley it probably defined what "climbing" was: putting up new routes. And many of those routes also broke through to new heights of athletic performance.
FA's are probably the aspect of climbing most prone to objective dangers in rock climbing. Exploring new places subjects the FA team to physical risk, loose rock, dirty, vegetated cracks and ledges, unstable formations incapable of providing secure anchors, exposure to storms, and all that. On top of that, there is the real possibility that the intended line may not be possible once the FA team arrives on the route, the risk of expending time and energy and resources to a lost cause.
Many new route possibilities require a great deal of "research," as is the case in Yosemite Valley today. This means familiarizing yourself with all the areas in the Valley and assessing the route possibilities. This takes time out of "climbing."
Then there are the real risks of injury in falls, situations which are difficult to assess because the route is unknown, and the risks difficult (or impossible) to guess.
This describes the activity of "climbing" in very different terms than "a sport," it is an adventure activity with the very real risk of injury or death for the participants. This activity is incomparable to the "sport" that gym climbers participate in... while many of the athletic aspects are similar, a gym climber has a lot more to learn going outside and participating in the adventure aspects of climbing. A gym climber may concentrate on perfecting their athletic performance to a higher degree than an outdoor adventure climber.
This has nothing to do with gender, at least in my experience. I know a lot of women who lead FA teams, who do seek out the adventure and who accept the risks that are inherent in putting up new routes. They may have started out as gym climbers, or they may have found a mentor and/or learned more like what Kevin described as his climbing education.
A lot of climbs, even reported, are not repeated, there are still climbs in the 1994 Reid's guide that have seen few or no repeats. There are climbs that have become classics (and Kevin has many in the Valley). The bar is raised as an area is developed, the technical difficulties increase, and the comparison to other "classics" define a type of climb for the area that may be a limited resource.
I think that the gender issue is probably a diversion from the actual issue of the difference between climbing as a sport and climbing as an adventure (as I have narrowly defined it here as an activity with inherent risk of failing to have a successful outcome, including the possibility of injury or death).
What we recognize as "climbing" today is larger than climbing as defined by Kevin circa 1970s in Yosemite Valley.
There are still legitimate issues regarding gender specificity in risk taking, and in motivations, and in tendencies to "spray" about accomplishments. What is a bit refreshing in this thread is the participation of both men and women, as opposed to Kevin's youth when men made up the definitions and judged worthiness on their terms.
why am I posting to this thread? because my name showed up in a post that was also quoted...
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 24, 2015 - 07:21pm PT
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Todd Eastman
climber
Bellingham, WA
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Aug 24, 2015 - 08:17pm PT
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It is OK for climbing to be fun...
... and not always some deep character building near dance with death!
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 24, 2015 - 08:20pm PT
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Yeah ^^^^
Warbler .... WTF are you doing in that garage?
:-)
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viv.r.e
climber
Sacramento
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Aug 24, 2015 - 08:28pm PT
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@Jim, it was a super simple measure of competitiveness. I didn't go detailed with it, because I wasn't sure anyone would really be that interested. Pretty much what they did was they had a bucket and ping pong balls. You could either get $1 dollor per ball you got into the bucket playing by yourself or you could go $3 per ball if you competed against another person and won. If you lost while competing with someone, then you got no money.
A lot of the studies that are cited are super simplistic, including John List's, but what you're trying study isn't and it's also hard to define. That's part and parcel of the point I was trying to make, which is that context matters and it's dangerous to use research to make generalizations about people. Just look at the entire sh!t show that was the field of eugenics.
My grandmother decided in her 40's that she was going to learn how to climb, so she took her entire family to the Dolomites. That's where my mom learned to hammer pitons--she was the only one of her four brothers/sisters who took to leading and stuck with it.
It's really clear from the thread and any number of articles that climbing is changing, but it's always been changing. Just picture Norman Clyde posting on super topo...
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 24, 2015 - 08:38pm PT
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Didn't you know that US surveillance satellites can read license plates from way up there.
I just pointed the lens onto your property and eureka !!! saw everything ......
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overwatch
climber
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Aug 24, 2015 - 09:49pm PT
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thank you for the work you've done and the time and money you have put in over the years to give us climbs to do. I appreciate it.
Edit:
Agree about Mr. Hartouni, as always
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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Aug 24, 2015 - 09:57pm PT
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I find Ed's comments to be the most insightful so far. Climbing is becoming more and more of a conventional sport, with performance emphasized and risk avoided. Surely bolted sport climbs are the primary ingredient in this change, and pre-teens may be the primary beneficiaries.
One peculiar thing about the argument here is that if Kevin were right about women being in some way more risk-averse, then it would follow that the new lower-risk sporting aspect of climbing would attract women in greater numbers, which would then make him wrong about women as a taming influence; their increased numbers would simply testify to the appeal of an already-established new genre.
Anyway, I'm from the East Coast where women have been kicking ass since before WWII. Here's a quote I'm guessing Kevin would like, from an accomplished leader of the prewar years:
"Where there is a genuine penalty for failure, you have to be a real man to play at all. You must have experience, skill, strength, courage and, above all, those moral qualities of self-knowledge and self-control."
The leader: Miriam Underhill, who was perhaps better at coping with small holds than the proper deployment of pronouns.
Those prewar climbers, men and women, were up to some pretty damn raw adventures too. Hassler Whitney and Bradley Gillman climbed the still-impressive Whitney-Gillman without placing anything for protection or anchors. Looping the rope over flakes was their only method of "safeguarding" the leader. Whitney subsequently climbed down the route that way as well. With floppy rope-soled shoes (sticky manila-yeah!) and short hemp ropes that would break in a leader fall, they needed 11 pitches for a route now graded 5.7. (It might have been 5.6 when they did it; some holds have broken.)
In addition to Miriam Underhill ("When I began climbing, we knew about pitons but didn't think nice people used them"), we got Betty Woolsey, Krist Raubenhiemer, Bonnie Prudden, Gerd Thuestad, Cherry Merrit, Barbara Devine, Rosie Andrews, Alison Osius, and Lynne Hill for a while, showin' over and over again, that "it goes, boys." I've climbed a bit with Rosie, as well as a number of famous persons from the Golden Age of Testosterone, and I'm here to testify (testicle-ify?) that no one had it together on hard scary runouts more than than Rosie.
Getting back to first ascents, I think that perhaps an item missed in the kerfluffle over women's role is that a major tenet of trad climbing, in the sixties especially, was the preservation of the first-ascent experience. For example, Chouinard, having no idea what the popularity of climbing would wreak, trumpeted the development of chrome-molly pitons, which, being removable and reusable, would enable every big-wall party to have the same experience as the first ascenders.
The combination of that preservation ethic, low climber density, little if any chalk on free pitches, and far less detailed information in general made many repeats of routes much more like first ascents than is the case now. And so, both men and women making subsequent ascents, especially early ones, were arguably involved in a more adventurous endeavor, one much closer to the first-ascent experience, than is the case today, and women's apparent low participation in first ascents ought to be viewed in that context.
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tripmind
Boulder climber
San Diego
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Aug 24, 2015 - 11:02pm PT
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I don't think the NYT article is accurate in that gyms are maturing the sport. All gyms are doing in my view is opening up a different sport that many people would never take up in favor of hard granite. There is nothing wrong with that to be honest.
However this argument is surprisingly similar to the argument of "people that play shovelware games on their smartphones are gamers and should be considered in the overall headcount of people who play video games" when anyone who is passionate about that hobby will tell you its just a clickbait headline. Passionate gamers are not going to trade good videogames for shitty iphone apps.
In my town there are like 5 gyms, all within a 20-30 minute drive from one another, 2 of which have been opened in the past 2 years. It is a growing place for gyms, and the competition is definitely appreciated because for the few people like me who climb outside as much as possible, cheap daypasses is what I'm hounding for.
For the most part, everyone I've talked to in the gym has either had no experience climbing at the local spots, or have only sampled them, where gyms have provided the majority of their practice to that point. The part that scares me is that most of these people are kids from universities, not very different from my age, but they seem to have a mindset somewhere along the lines of "gym climbing is it, that's the best that climbing has to offer", or at the very least they come to gyms because it relieves them from committing to any form of time or money investment that is involved with doing a weekend trip which requires gas, time, food, and gear.
What I'm predicting here is that very few gym regulars are ever going to make a serious effort outside because it doesn't fit their lifestyle or they just aren't interested in adventure to begin with. It just seems like what gyms are doing for land preservation and access is totally marginal compared to what they're doing for gear companies and their own pockets. I could be wildly wrong, but I'm a pessimist by nature.
I appreciate gyms for what they've given me, but honestly gyms do not deliver even a single ounce of what real rock does without even trying. If I could trade every hour I've spent in a gym for a single awesome weekend trip with some buddies I'd do it in a heartbeat, but my friends are all growing up, getting married and getting tied down, that sort of crap.
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overwatch
climber
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Aug 24, 2015 - 11:14pm PT
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so you're saying Gym climbers are big pussies that will never go outdoors because they don't have enough time money gear and gas?
Just kidding thanks for playing
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viv.r.e
climber
Sacramento
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Aug 24, 2015 - 11:25pm PT
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Jim, when I read your post I laughed so hard, and I think you would be laughing with me if you realized I was actually just being too sincere for supertopo (probably why I've always been a lurker, not a poster)--except for the obvious troll about chopping bolts to grow testicles and few other comments that were meant playful/serious earlier in the thread.
I'm not even sure who is trolling who at this point. All I know is that Ed Hartouni is an adult in the room--his posts have a way of tying people and things together.
Here is a link to where I first heard about the study I mentioned, even though I know that it sounds like a drinking game and not research, but that's why it's good to question behavioral scientists:
http://freakonomics.com/2013/02/24/women-are-not-men-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
The story about my grandmother and my mother both climbing is also true. I just love mountains, dislike the misuse of research and don't have any hard feelings to anyone on this thread. (That includes you Kevin!)
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cat t.
climber
california
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Aug 24, 2015 - 11:35pm PT
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The combination of that preservation ethic, low climber density, little if any chalk on free pitches, and far less detailed information in general made many repeats of routes much more like first ascents than is the case now. And so, both men and women making subsequent ascents, especially early ones, were arguably involved in a more adventurous endeavor, one much closer to the first-ascent experience, than is the case today, and women's apparent low participation in first ascents ought to be viewed in that context.
What a wonderfully articulated summary of the change! Thanks for a couple thoughtful posts, Ed & rgold.
It seems the availability of more information and technology development can both push forward the discipline and and also seriously constrain one's thinking about it. Once an activity becomes large enough, with a lot of readily available information, I think the idea of adding to that knowledge base becomes much more formidable to the average participant.
I have always found the notion that women are equal to men to be preposterous. Not trying to harp endlessly on you, man, I promise! Just wanted to say that, at least from the perspective of this female human, the goal is to achieve equal treatment and equal opportunities for men and women, not to assert that they are exactly the same.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 24, 2015 - 11:48pm PT
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