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caughtinside
Social climber
Davis, CA
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If you toprope, fall, lower to the ground, and try again, you are still hangdogging.
If you lead, fall, lower to the ground, and try again, you are still hangdogging.
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Mimi
climber
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Once a dog, always a dog. Many people like dogs or doggie style.
To quote Wally Berg: "Live like a dog and you will become a dog."
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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"If you toprope, fall, lower to the ground, and try again, you are still hangdogging.
If you lead, fall, lower to the ground, and try again, you are still hangdogging"
That's a reality distortion of fairly 'Rovian' proportions you've got going there. Neither of those comments is true and yes, Virgina, there are R and X rated top rope routes depending on how you view ground, trees, and cars approaching at high velocities from peculiar vectors both out and back again. One was so bad we simply dispensed with it and free soloed over a 15' high by 20'long row of leaves to put up a route called "Leaves of the Failing Faith". It finally went after twenty five flights protected solely by purple microdot back in the days before maxipads.
[ Note: will be out of commission until friday but do want to respond to a couple of these great and thoughtful posts. ]
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dang, Mimi! How do you REALLY feel about hang-doggers? In my earlier post, I didn't mean so much to denigrate sport climbing. Like Bob and most of the trad climbers on this forum, I sport climb fairly regularly because of the convenience... and it is pretty fun. But I always look at this stuff as practice for the real deal. I would have to say, however, that personally, the sport climbing mindset has detrimentally affected my trad leading. I seem to hang quite a bit more than I use to.
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bob d'antonio
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Mimi wrote: Bob, I have to take issue with your comments above about hangdogging. It wasn't stupidity that made people climb boldly and in excellent style. It was pride born of tradition, pure and simple. Somewhere along the way, that got eclipsed by something else for you.
Mimi...there nothing bold when you fall on a fixed piece 20 times and lower to the ground or a ledge 20 times. It called being ...stupid. LOL
What got "eclipsed" for me was fun. Plain and simple. Sport climbing is fun. Do you understand that?
Again...you just don't get it. Climb any fecking way you want...just don't think your way is better. Who is worse...a religious zealot, political zealot or a climbing zealot??
Mimi...and just who are you? I know most of the people on this thread. What is your full name??
John...great points and way to keep an open mind.
Hope your doing well, later, Bob
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bob d'antonio
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Mimi wrote: Once a dog, always a dog. Many people like dogs or doggie style.
To quote Wally Berg: "Live like a dog and you will become a dog."
Just how old are you?? Fifteen maybe sixteen???
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crunch
Social climber
CO
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Hey Steve G, nice pics of old gear.
Why exactly are the Eiger biners "infamous"?
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Becuase they were cheap, but crappy--the gates failed to work properly in the out of doors. Well maybe in the parking lot. I had tons of them. The first to go if I was leaving gear behind.
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Mimi
climber
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Bob, I'm at least as old as the number of bolts you've drilled over the years. My name is on my email address. I've been on here long enough, figure it out.
Were you in Indian Creek at the Cottonwoods in 2003 around a fire with Jay Smith, Martin Boysen, Rab Carrington and others? You invited us to visit in Taos. Perhaps that was the tequila talking. I guess my invite is shot now. Damn.
I do get it regarding sport climbing. Of course sport climbing is fun. It's a de-stressed environment. It's only when you call old guard folk and old ways dumb, and pretend to be more highly evolved, that gets you into trouble. You're willing to croak that adventure climbing is dead in the Gunks and elsewhere so you seem to desire the role of harbinger/agitator. The main problem I have is the attitude exhibited, especially here on a thread devoted to clean climbing and boldness. Tsk tsk.
Cheers,
Margaret deGravelle
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Eiger biners were known for gate failure because they were very flexible. You could stretch them with both hands until the pin contacted the gate. I thought that being named Eiger and all, that it was a good idea to not even lower off of these suckers. They did come in several pretty anodized colors and were a bit cheaper as I recall.
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bob d'antonio
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Mimi...It was a joke (the dumb comment) between two friends.
The invite still stands.
Hope all is well, later, Bob
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Well, since this thread was once following the history and development of nuts, maybe we can digress again. In 1971, Chouinard Equipment began selling the extruded Hexcentric nut. Initially, the extrusion was symetrical but it didn't take long to see that two sizes of placements were possible in an asymetrical shape. Tom Frost told me that the people doing the extruding were not happy with the sudden lopsided inspiration! Anyway, about two years later the modern Hexcentric shape replaced the original one. I used to carry a set of old and new Hexes because they overlapped slightly in size options.
The center one shown is the original symetrical shape. The newer Hexcentric also came in a larger size, the #11. Now the big Hex, slung on an over the shoulder length perlon sling had the heft of a medieval weapon and it wasn't long before the overkill in the extrusions became the focus of refinements in design.
Back then, the dealer was your friend and soon Chouinard made templates available to drill out your hexes and save weight. I thought that I had saved mine but no.
Rumors of extra wide (and heavy!) large hexes were abundant and soon the Tubechock was born. These spanned the 4 1/2" to 6" range and quickly replaced endwise Bongs on the wide mans rack. A small bite was removed from the top of the end taper to reduce tip rocking and one of the underside holes was enlarged to allow them to be racked upright. Whenever I climb wide cracks, I can still hear the tubular bells clanking! The bells, the bells, the bells of nostalgia!
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Crimpergirl
Social climber
St. Louis
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Really cool. (And pretty to look at as well). Thanks for the photos.
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thedogfather
climber
Midwest
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I remember some blue girder-like wide nuts I took to Devils Tower. Maybe CMI or something like that. Boy did they make a racket.
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Nice rug, Steve.
My tubes do not have the notch on the top radius. This must have been a later improvement.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Thanks Roger, the rug was bought in Turkey and is from Afghanistan before all the disruption there.
The tubechock fillet definitely happened on the second generation. Do you remember hearing a tale of a party on the right side of The Hourglass having several Tubechocks crimped and then spit out when the entire formation shifted slightly while they were on it?
Gogfather, those would be CMI I-beams by the blue color for sure. They never caught on for some reason. Must have been the lack of a pleasing tone......
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Jaybro
Social climber
The West
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Blue Girder = CMI I-beam they were available at least up to 18"!
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Rocky5000
Trad climber
Falls CHurch, VA
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I started leading just after Friends came out, and I didn't use them, because I was cheap, of course, and also because my simple monkey-mind trusts simple things more than complicated ones. I used hexes for a long time; I did the classic young, dumb lead up the overhanging parallel crack (Supercrack at Moore's Wall, NC) with mostly hexes, and when I started to belay my second and the rope went taut, most of the hexes fell right out. When Tricams came out I put the hexes in the closet and never touched them again, and Tricams are still the foundation of my rack.
Here's an excerpt from an old TR - May '94, Seneca Rocks, WV, that seems to fit this thread. It was and still is annoyingly crowded, but I still feel my own little adventure when I go there. Adventure is in our heads, after all - a personal thing. And in any case if I want solitude in climbing around here, in the swarming East, I just walk a few minutes farther into the bushes, off the trail.
...so I woke Gary from his nap and up the slope we trudged, to stare at the legions of the damned swarming around Westpole and environs. Finally I decided on Tomato, 5.8*, a two-pitch circus that became the comic masterpiece of the weekend. Esconced in the shade of a tiny tree, Gary rested, drank water and watched the shenanigans of a couple over on Pleasant Overhangs; the female, following the last pitch, was cursing a blue streak in French, hanging on the rope, sounding quite adorable.
The first pitch is a short, dramatic, overhanging flake, easy and well protected, looking a lot harder than it is. The last half, after the overhang, is easy but protected only by a sling loosely laid over a mild horn, after which one must chimney up a last move to the top of the flake, which looks at this point as if one could sit on the main cliff's edge and topple the whole thing with a good push with both legs. Gary followed with little difficulty, and I started up the second pitch, about 70 feet, with confidence, as it looked easy, with good jam cracks and plenty of features to work with. I noticed a helmeted girl above us at the Gunsight, waiting to follow the spectacular 5.3; there was some kind of procedural jam on the summit, and she had been waiting a good while, tied in. Tomato ends at a point about twenty feet up from the Gunsight, on the trade route; I figured she'd have climbed through by the time I got there, since I'm not the world's fastest leader by a fair margin.
About forty feet up it started getting steeper, sparser, more interesting, etc. I was depleting the fuel reserves hanging on the arms while putting in the pro, and I knew I was running a bit low when I got to the last crux. I came to a large flake on the main wall, forming a huge bucket with the crack down behind it, but the stance was overhanging, and footholds very scarce. My only decent option for pro was to stuff tricams blind down the crack, reaching high over my head and tugging to set them. I got a good #2, but I couldn't be sure just how good it was, not being able to see it, not having time and strength left to pull up and peer down in at it; so, foolishly, I tried and succeeded in setting a #5 farther out left, near the end of the flake, where, it occurred to me, greater leverage would have greater chance of snapping off the whole flake and dropping me ten more feet onto a medium-sized wire. Actual risk of such a break is quite low here, though; the rock is so very strong. Anyway, many modern rock climbers think nothing of these risks, nor mind such a fall one bit; in their clear-headed assessment, they might even deliberately fall, so as to avoid any dangerous awkwardness such as catching one's foot in a sling. I am still mired in a past century, saddled with the subconscious dictum: the leader must not fall! Or, to simplify still further: climbing: good! Falling: bad! I still allow my primitive fear free rein as a spur to a higher level of frenzy, but not to the extent of paralyzing my will, of course.
So all the while, as I put in the tricams, the girl at the belay, bored and nervous and stuck there, was talking to me, trying to get me to stop or retreat so as not to clog up her path to the summit. My mouth was now so dry I could barely speak at all, and nothing I said would convince her that it was not a problem. Distracted, I tugged on the #5 at an angle, thinking it might pull that way if I fell, and it popped out like a champagne cork and slugged me like brass knuckles just over the left eye. I put it back in and fiddled with it until it seemed well set, wiping the seeping blood away at intervals so that it wouldn't run into my eye. I started laughing, thinking that if it was a boxing match, the referee would have to stop it; but I knew I'd finish it out, then, especially since I saw that I could avoid the last few feet of thin crack by escaping left, with my feet on the famous flake.
At the belay, with an old piton and several good pieces, I couldn't convince the girl, now that her leader had called down to her to begin, that she could easily climb past me on the inside, the outside or any way she pleased. My tongue felt like an old sponge that's been forgotten under the kitchen sink for three years, and I felt like telling her she could climb up my ass and down my dick, but instead I was patient and kind, in between trying to get Gary to follow and trying to figure how to clean the pitch if he didn't without rapping on the one ancient piton. Finally I took apart my belay, went inside her rope and scrambled up the route 25 feet to a huge ledge, and she began climbing, and got past me at last. I downclimbed to the belay, wasted lots of time going over the to Gunsight and back with some cockeyed scheme in my head, and finally rapped on my anchors and the piton, cleaned the pitch, pulled the rope, walked back to the Gunsight on ledges to the north, soloed to the anchor to recover the pro, downclimbed to the Gunsight, walked back down to Gary, rapped to the packs, and fell into a dream, as the song goes; gradually getting more tired and dreamy as we packed up and drifted downhill in the golden afternoon light. A long sentence, but it was a long day; at the bridge we turned, as per irresistible tradition, to look at the salmon-colored cliffs. At the parking lot we were surprised that the time was past eight o'clock; I told the story of my bloody forehead to a fellow climber, who understood. This was pleasure, as I knew I'd have to tell some sort of story to a lot of people who really wouldn't understand just how it was, driving down Distraction Boulevard at a hundred miles an hour, at that overhung stance, in the powerful gold wash of the afternoon. How, in the end, the blood is nothing; the pain, the fear, the fatigue - they're nothing, inconsequential, weighed against the beauty, the burning beauty of the idea in the rock, as you wrestle it out and make it your own, a heavy vein of gold in the precious geology of existence. Overblown? Pompous twaddle, you say? Possibly so, seen from outside; but I was inside, experiencing my life immediately and directly. I have a small scar over my left eye, and memories more indelible than that.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Classic tale of old school terror at Seneca. You would certainly agree then that it takes nut to use em!
Jaybro got any I-beams for show and tell or have they all ended being used for furniture repair? I sold my giant Forrest Titon long ago speaking of weapons.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Shipped my I-Beams and a set of drilled hexs off ebay to Stephane's Nut Museum this past year. The I-Beams never did much for me. In fact, I can't say I liked a single piece of pro that came out of CMI to be honest, but for a bit there the I-Beams were better than nothing - sort of.
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