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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Apr 23, 2010 - 04:08pm PT
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We have a problem here with trash talk. The Chief says:
I insist...
It is true that the wilderness law requires packing it out.
We failed to do that, and again I apologize.
We have paid our fines and offered direct apologies to Jesse and to the crew who actually carried down our trash.
We have long since owned our behavior on this very forum.
Again I offer humble apologies to my fellow wilderness lovers everywhere.
But, you sir have no right to insist anything of me.
This place is not -- not yet, anyway -- a totalitarian state run by landlocked ex-Navy.
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Gene
Social climber
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Apr 23, 2010 - 04:24pm PT
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I insist that everyone that treks into the wilderness act accordingly and responsibly each and every time. Regardless who you they may be.
The full quote is posted for context.
Thank God it's Friday. i hope all have a great weekend in the hills.
I hate family fights. Everyone have a good one and bring back the joys of the hills with you.
g
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Apr 23, 2010 - 08:34pm PT
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Trash talk did me a favor. By bringing up the rap bolting issue again, it reminded me that I had written a response to all the debate about it in this thread, but never shared it here.
After digesting the best of our dialog during the six weeks this thread was hot and daily -- and thanks to, well...most of you (Coz and Bachar were especially worthy opponents), for colorful opinions pro and con -- I spent a month writing a second piece incorporating new thoughts brought up by it. It was published in the American Alpine Journal in 2008. I figured everybody would see it there, but no. So here it is.
By the way, I didn't make a dime on this; I did it because I care.
Growing Up
On the South Face of Half Dome
By Doug Robinson
Scaling an icon is tricky. You have to climb through legend to grasp the stone itself. It took me years to see beyond the in-your-face northwest wall of Yosemite’s greatest icon, Half Dome. Sean Jones, though, is so over it he calls the northwest face the dark side.
This is really Sean’s story, his stellar new route. But I got deeply involved, maybe over my head. I certainly don’t climb that hard. We had both noticed the potential, and been drawn to a new free climb. I set out to film Sean on it, and even before my film ran out of support I had come under the spell of this bright wall and couldn’t walk away. A lot of ink has been spilled over this already, if you count more words than War and Peace on the internet (www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=566859). The controversy hinged on our decision to rap in from the summit to find a climbable line on the upper wall, and then put in protection bolts from our rap line. Some climbers got very offended, since Yosemite has always had a staunchly ground-up tradition.
Here in the American Alpine Journal climbers usually write their own spray. Even though Sean led the climbing, I’ll lay down a few words. For one thing, it gives me a chance to brag about my friend, since Sean flies under the radar in this Valley. Yet he has a remarkable eye for a good line, and more first ascents here (91) than anyone, ever. And I’d like to explain why we bent the Valley’s traditional rules along our way up Half Dome’s south face.
Over on the dark side, the Regular Northwest Face route, even though streaked with black, still shines. In 1957 it became the first Grade VI in America. “Never had the slightest doubt we’d make it,” Jerry Gallwas said last summer to mark the fiftieth anniversary of that ascent. He and Mike Sherrick stood shoulder to shoulder with Royal Robbins at the Yosemite Lodge celebration. Jerry showed off part of their secret, a rack of hand made hard steel pins. Fun-loving guys and robust, they had all moved on to big lives beyond climbing.
How many of us have romped up the Northwest Face in their footsteps? Maybe ten thousand -- we’re the lucky ones. Along the way came all the big-wall firsts. In-a-day, 1966. Solo, same year. All free in ’76. And Dean Potter dropped our jaws by soloing with the rope coiled on his back in 2003 (hope I have the date right.). I got to join that parade in 1973, for the first hammerless ascent. At the time it was shocking to climb with just Stoppers and Hexes, but it’s boringly normal now (with cams); our first clean ascent slam-dunked a revolution. Environmental action has often been sparked by climbers. John Muir’s impetus to make Yosemite a park is an outstanding example. The movement to preserve the rock by climbing clean was interesting because it appealed to climbers not so much as a moral imperative but as an intriguing challenge. It was just plain fun.
Like most of us, it was my first Grade VI. Always more of a free climber than a wall guy, I felt most proud of leading the Robbins Chimney, flaring and runout and scary. Climbing itself is always more core than whatever gets done about protecting it. And free climbing already loomed as the future of our stony practice.
Come around into the light; the backside glows. A very different wall, the South Face is a mile wide, smooth and blank. A few dikes crawl down but don’t reach the ground. Two arches crack the mirror front and center, hook left and vanish into glass.
Warren Harding attacked the main arch in 1966, but the eventual FA took five tries over half a decade, a trial for the tenacity of even Harding and the sorcerer’s most eager apprentice, Galen Rowell. (Galen loved being “a former second of Warren Harding and Fred Beckey.”) Rowell’s beginner’s camera caught Harding struggling to escape the arch out a double-overhanging corner. He called it, “my most strenuous lead.” Faced with undulating blankness above, Harding came up with the innovation of bat-hooking, balancing on a hook in a shallow drilled hole. On one of their attempts the October surprise of a fierce snowstorm led to the first-ever big wall rescue, when Royal Robbins spun down out of the clouds with a hot thermos and a rope off the iced-up face.
In the end their climb left a trail of drilled holes to the summit. Was big-wall climbing growing up or losing its innocence? The drill has, for half a century and more, been the hinge of doubt in climbing. Certainly there would be more drilling, and more ropes from above.
The bright wall’s big promise was free climbing, as one generation’s blank face became a playground for the next. It was well into the 1980s before free climbing made serious inroads on the main south face. Still, it was way into the eighties before free climbing made serious inroads onto the main South Face. Autobahn (5.11+R, Charles Cole and John Middendorf, 1985) was the opening move. Like the half dozen climbs that soon followed, it was a bold statement on exceptional stone.
“Playground,” however, turned out to be way too optimistic. Every one of the new free routes was hard, sketchy, and serious – R-rated at least. And even now, they are rarely repeated.
Crowning the development, Karma, and the queen of the South Face lines Southern Belle, both crossed the final frontier of boldness to become X-rated. Karma (Jim Campbell, Dave Schultz, and Ken Yager, 1986) has not attracted a second attempt, and the trickle of interest in Southern Belle (established in 1986 by Dave Schultz and Walt Shipley, freed by Schultz and Scott Cosgrove in 1988) has only built its fearsome reputation.
By the time Sean stepped up to the South Face last year, a deathly calm had settled over the wall; free climbing on it had essentially stopped in 1994. Here was one of the biggest and most beautiful stretches of stone in all of the Valley, and it was wasting away ignored. Sure it was a long walk, and half hidden. But “out of sight, out of mind” was not the main reason for the quiet. Blame it on the runouts.
You could say that the story of free climbing on the backside of Half Dome hinged not on the boldness of its FAs, but on a July day in 1994. The day Hank Caylor took his sick fall. He dropped 70-80 feet off Southern Belle’s eighth pitch. Such a long fall might be OK on steeper rock. Chris Sharma, for instance, has taken many plummets that long on his limestone cave project out in the Mojave. But he falls into space. Even El Cap is steep enough for clean drops. But this face is only 75 degrees. That’s pretty stout for smearing, but hideously slabby to fall on. Somewhere on his descent Hank’s foot caught on the wall and stopped. When his leg kept going, something had to give. Other foot, other leg too. Imagine rapping out of there on your knees, dangling ankles that crackled. He touched the ground gingerly and started to crawl.
Had boldness on the south face crossed a line and become plain stupid? The guys who put up Karma say there is no way they would ever go back. Dave Schultz, forging the FA of Southern Belle with Walt Shipley, led that infamous runout 8th pitch. Returning to free it with Scott Cosgrove, he didn’t want that lead again. Cosgrove stepped up to his proudest lead, but says he’ll never go back. John Bachar and Peter Croft both turned around below there. The Belle waited 18 years for a second ascent by Leo Houlding and Dean Potter. Potter later told me he had been scared. Certainly no offense to any of them, then, if I find it kind of a waste of a big swath of lovely stone. Maybe there’s another way…
Boldness is something I’ve always admired and often pushed. Just the other day in Bishop I heard that someone had backing off my runout lead on a 1970 line, the Smokestack on the Wheeler Crest. Sean too, had put up a 5.11 slab with a scrape-off-all-your-skin, 100-foot runout -- on a slab across the San Joaquin from Balloon Dome. But then he thought better of it and went back to retro-drill a few more bolts onto it for the benefit of future climbers.
But we’re getting ahead of the story here, talking about the golden headwall. Go back to the ground, back to early spring, back to crunching over a ribbon of snow along the base of the wall. Back to Sean’s vision of an all-new, all-free line up the south face. Back to searching for a first step up onto the Dome. It wasn’t obvious where to start. First try, he got sixty feet up slabs and then shut down. Sean’s second try freed five beautiful pitches up Harding and Rowell’s classic aid line before hitting a pitch that was grainy and way harder -- if it could be freed at all.
Pause to glance at the guidebook. A route line on a photo turns out to be misplaced. Walk in under that main arch. It’s huge in there, and complex with three major crack systems. Southern Belle starts up the right one. The central cracks are the original South Face. The left system, in spite of being fingered by the misplaced ink, was unclimbed. What a gift. Sean headed up that line of stark and wonderful cracks, where the giant arch meets the main wall of the Dome.
The climbing is as clean as it gets. No munge, no grass, no grit. Just polished, flinty, square-cut corners that gradually leaned left, pressing harder on his right shoulder the higher he went. This was the business; the climbing seemed to run about 5.12 on every pitch. Finally, with the crack closing down to tips lieback, the corner leaning terminally outward at it’s arched top, and the slab dropping oddly away underfoot, it cruxed on the tenth pitch at 5.13a.
With the arch now a looming overhang and the crack pinched out, serendipity struck. A few feet down an easy ramp led to a dike. The dike was burly at 5.11+, but kept going for two pitches (and a spot of A0), clear out past the end of the arch. Three months into the South Face, Sean was finally poised on the brink of the upper wall. It was both a celebration and a problem.
Spending so long up there, Sean ran through many loyal partners. Robbie Borchard, Jake Jones and Ben Montoya all worked hard on the wall before being recalled to their lives below. I had my own problems. By the time summer rolled around my movie project had fizzled and tendonitis in an elbow reduced my wall time to drill-monkey status. Now we were squarely confronted, not only by the golden wall itself, its stone more scalloped into dishes than sporting discrete edges, but by the beyond-bold standard that had a stranglehold on the whole South Face.
Our next move has been debated hotly and endlessly. Partly because Half Dome is an icon; it’s history matters. Partly because we were up-front about it. Ropes have been dropping in from above on Valley walls for decades, especially on El Cap since the free-climbing gold rush began there in the 1990s. A handy tactic, after all, for spying on the free climbing potential and maybe slipping in some pro that would be useful later. Something you might find darn useful, sketching your way up from the ground on desperate moves. In many ways, Growing Up just became a lightning rod for a lot of half-hidden behavior that had actually been skulking around our beloved gulch for decades.
We poked at the campfire, squirmed in our beach chairs, popped another beer and dove back into our thorny predicament. First of all, we didn’t have a clue which way to head. Crack systems lead you boldly, but on hard slabs sometimes you can’t see the next move in front of your face. We had already been confronted by the potential of this wall for blanking out – right from Sean’s first foray off the ground. Seen it so often we were starting to call it “the fortress effect.” So we hesitated to simply forge out onto the upper slabs, which risked putting up a route that blanked out in a sea of porcelain, bolts to nowhere.
If you could even get in a bolt. As slab climbing goes, this wall is way steep and way slippery. It’s hard to find a stance to drill from, and even hook placements to aid the drilling (which were considered acceptable style ever since the Bachar-Yerian) were rare on this scalloped terrain lacking edges. All that was highlighted by the existing routes – and by how few routes actually existed. : R-rated every one, except the last two, the best and the boldest, which had crossed the line into X-rated.
We flatly rejecting putting up another near-death runout, like every other route on the wall to date. That’s a dead end. With no one willing to accept such a mortal gauntlet, climbing on the wall would continue to wither away to nothing. Sean Jones had a better idea, one that has opened up the beauty of the South Face to be climbed a little more often, as it deserves. But it would require a change in ethos, an evolution in style, which is a bitter pill in a Valley steeped in tradition. Including a thousand feet of it, freshly climbed beneath our heels.
Finally we sighed and loaded our packs with fixed rope, hiked to the top, dropped in to find the line, and then to drill the bolts. And what a sweet line we found! At times there were barely a scattering of holds weaving through the porcelain. Especially traversing right, above the lip of the arch, where sometimes a divot broken out of mirrored polish formed the tenuous line onward. That stretch came in at 5.11c. Even so, it demanded another 60 feet of A0. We were thankful that we explored because it saved us from bolting our original vision of where the route would go, one that fizzled out after two pitches. That would have left the pollution of a line of bolts to nowhere.
On a wall loaded with dikes, we found only one on this upper slab, but it’s such a beauty we started calling that pitch the ”Mini-Snake Dike.” It was surprisingly moderate at 5.10c. The climbing stayed consistently good, and consistently hard at 5.10 and 5.11, leading to a 5.11d move that turned out to be the crux of the upper slabs. There’s more noticeable texture up high, but it’s hard to grasp, and would have been daunting to try to drill from stances.
Sarah Watson became Sean’s final partner on the route. Sarah had only been climbing two years, but the former gymnast went hard-core desert rat and hung out for weeks at a time in Indian Creek, honing her jamming skills. Her first day on Half Dome, Sarah led hard 5.11 pitches down under the arch. Then a sprained ankle confined her to couch surfing while Sean and I hand drilled on the upper wall. But with the ankle fully taped, she joined Sean for the final send on July 28.
This Valley has a staunch trad history. I like that, have loudly upheld it, and contributed my share. But it’s also a tradition that has been breached many times over recent decades, first by sport climbs on short cliffs, and lately on nearly every newly freed line on El Cap. Done, but not much talked about. Somehow, by just plainly saying what we were up to, we became the whipping boys for shadowy behavior by most of the leading activists. Suddenly I went from the father of clean climbing to an evil rap bolter. I don’t mind drawing the heat, but a lot of folks see only black and white. Growing Up is not an ideological repudiation of ground-up style, not open season to grid-bolt the Valley. Rather, it came from listening to the stone itself, and taking a cue from the can’t-stance, can’t-even-hook nature of this particular piece of terrain.
Did I mention that it’s drop-dead gorgeous up there? Even hanging out in the ponderosa forest at the base. A mile east, hundreds of people a day went up to the cables. Half a mile west they were cueing up for the Snake Dike. Here, not one visitor in four months. Except for cougar eyes glinting in the firelight. Up on the wall is better, with a spreadeagle view of the high country. The rock is oh so clean. Squeaky clean. Slippery polished crystalline. A brilliant surface to be poised upon, and it had been locked away from the common enjoyment for too long.
I’m sorry to take up so much of this good community’s time and attention talking about ropes from above and how bolts get placed. It distracts our attention from the climb itself, which in the end is what really matters. This whole dispute over how bolts are placed is badly skewed, as if the experience of the FA party matters more than how it feels for the thousands who come along after. But Sean and I would rather focus on them. Take the proud and wonderful Snake Dike around the corner. No counting how many have romped up its unlikely dike, generously littered with holds and cutting upward through seriously harder rock. Come to think of it, it’s the only popularly accessible climbing on the whole monolith of Half Dome. Surely hundreds of thousands have climbed it by now. My life is richer for it, and I spew about how cool the moves are to hundreds more. Does it really matter much any more how it was for those guys who put it up back in the Iron Age? Growing Up opens up a similar experience to a lot of climbers. Sure, it’s way harder, but times change. Evolution happens.
I get increasingly anti-elitist about climbing. It is such profound experience – changing my life over and over -- that more climbers climbing more will help tilt our troubled planet in a better direction. In that context, a bit of crowding is hardly worth whining about. We’re not going to have a planet to quibble about saving unless a few more people start having the experiences that motivate us to love this fragile skim of life clinging to our stony sphere, and to help preserve it. Maybe this is a way for climbing to actually become less of a selfish, elitist pastime. Not that selfish is bad. It’s actually essential. The pursuit of such intense personal experience is at the heart of our solitary transformations. And only by such growing up as individuals can we come together into more of a real environmental force.
Growing Up. The line speaks for itself. Go climb it. And then, if you feel slighted, tell us it’s not worth it. Out of 91 FAs in the Valley, more than anyone ever, Sean calls Growing Up the finest climb he’s ever established. I think even among the modern standards being forged on El Cap, that this is Yosemite’s climb of the year. It’s your turn. Climb it if you can, or even rap in from above to sample some of the final slabs. The climbing up there is not like anything else in the Valley or in Tuolumne. It’s hard, beautiful stone, And it’s accessible; runout beyond sport climbing, but definitely not a death route.
In the end, bucking tradition seemed worth it to us. But the resulting line is what matters. The route belongs to you now. You decide. As Dylan Thomas said, “The function of posterity is to look after itself.” The matter is out of our hands.
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Ihateplastic
Trad climber
It ain't El Cap, Oregon
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Apr 23, 2010 - 08:52pm PT
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Apr 23, 2010 - 09:02pm PT
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Doug- Will never forget skeezin up rock creek with you and others under a full moon. Truly one of my best memories.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 23, 2010 - 11:08pm PT
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The common good?
What is the/your definition of this so called common good?
What does this "common good" stand for?
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 23, 2010 - 11:15pm PT
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DR -- "Here was one of the biggest and most beautiful stretches of stone in all of the Valley, and it was wasting away ignored."
"and it was wasting away"?
That is a human mistake thinking like that.
The rock does not "wasting away" ever.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 23, 2010 - 11:31pm PT
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or even rap in from above to sample some of the final slabs. Sure, why not? It's definitely fair now. You can go top-rope the last pitch until you get it, and just slowly work your way down, over a period of months.
I really want to know Doug, what you would think, now that Pandora's Box is open, if over the next 15-20 years, a lot of similar work was done up there, but not with as much care to the final product. Botch jobs, dead ends, poor route selection, unfinished projects, trash camps at the base, you know, just visualize the possibilities.
Did you really usher in a greater era?
You wouldn't be able to call foul in any way would you?
"Yeah, we rap bolted......but we did it right!"
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 23, 2010 - 11:35pm PT
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It was not wasting away in any sense of the word.
Werner's right.
It just stood there in it's beautiful glory as it had for many millenia.
It doesn't need climbers to make it complete.
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ionlyski
Trad climber
Kalispell, Montana
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Apr 24, 2010 - 12:32am PT
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Well I think Werner and Survival just summed it all up. 2400 posts simplified to a concept.
What's really amazing to me is that LEB did not post a single interruption, unless I missed it under an alias.
Arne
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 24, 2010 - 12:37am PT
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I'm not so sure I thought through the consequences of bumping this thread...
It is easy to take what happened regarding the clean-up out of context; let me attempt to provide some, quoting from the Meyer's "Yellow Guide", Yosemite Climbs:
"From the standpoint of fighting litter, it is IMPERATIVE to carry down what is carried up. Old slings, wads of tape, and assorted wall trash found at the base of obscure and remote cliffs discredit the notion that climbers are respectful of the natural environment. Few issues threaten the climbers' freedom as seriously as littering." page 3.
This was written in 1982, which to remind you was roughly 28 years ago... describing a situation that was not new at the time.
Growing Up is not the only route which entailed illegal bivies (I'm assuming they were), and cached (interpreted as abandoned) gear for lengths of time, ultimately having to be cleaned up by the NPS. It is one of a long line of routes that were created so...
...regrettable, in this case, that the planned cleanup by agents of the FA didn't not happen.
I find the reaction to this incident to be somewhat over the top, however, given the history of Yosemite Valley. In that sweep of time since Meyers, the climbing community has managed not to provoke the NPS by the "littering issue" so severely that they have revoked our privileges. We should continue to clean up after ourselves, and try to not be overwhelmed by the logistics of completing the climb, which in this case (and others) includes recovering the detritus of our adventures.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 24, 2010 - 12:58am PT
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I get increasingly anti-elitist about climbing. It is such profound experience – changing my life over and over -- that more climbers climbing more will help tilt our troubled planet in a better direction. In that context, a bit of crowding is hardly worth whining about. We’re not going to have a planet to quibble about saving unless a few more people start having the experiences that motivate us to love this fragile skim of life clinging to our stony sphere, and to help preserve it. Maybe this is a way for climbing to actually become less of a selfish, elitist pastime. Not that selfish is bad. It’s actually essential. The pursuit of such intense personal experience is at the heart of our solitary transformations. And only by such growing up as individuals can we come together into more of a real environmental force.
So, it's actually an environmental step forward?
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Off White
climber
Tenino, WA
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Apr 24, 2010 - 02:14am PT
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Ed, I think the histrionics over the garbage clean up are really just sublimated opinions about the rap bolting. If the authorities and the perps are fine with the resolution, everything else is just posture. Really, I think it's just a bunch of gray men complaining that their talisman isn't as pure as the pedestal they put him on.
Completely off topic, I never got a chance to tell you how much I enjoyed your slander show at the Woodson Shindig. As my good friend John Wason once said, "Be there or be slandered."
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Matt
Trad climber
primordial soup
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Apr 24, 2010 - 04:46am PT
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ummm-
just double checkin:
anyone else ever climb this rig yet?
thanks in advance.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Apr 24, 2010 - 06:04am PT
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Apologies Off White, I did not mean to offend your senses. I just find this issue sort of 'funny', so to speak. As somebody mentioned earlier about throwing stones and glass houses, that is so true. I hardly know Doug but I always found him a decent chap.
Which one of us climbers can say that we are the 'perfect' thing when it comes to the outdoors. I am not going to judge these people for the route they put up, if it could have been done in better ‘style’, whatever that is, so be it. But some of the posters on this thread are so judgmental. Personally I think some of them are just mental for being obsessed with the route.
Is there a lesson to be learned? I do not know Off White. Do you have an answer?
If not then perhaps STFU might be appropriate. Goodbye mate. Ooops, I'm not your mate. Whew!
My advice (for what it is worth, probably not much)? Chill dude.
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deuce4
climber
Hobart, Australia
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Apr 24, 2010 - 07:17am PT
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Hi Off White-
How is that John Wason doing? I haven't heard news for a while.
cheers
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pa
climber
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Apr 24, 2010 - 01:02pm PT
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" We poked at the campfire, squirmed in our beach chairs, popped another beer and dove back into our horny predicament".
Well, at least they squirmed a bit...
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Apr 24, 2010 - 01:20pm PT
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Yeah, actually we agonized over the decision for weeks. Lots of evenings at the campfire and down in El Portal, even hours of talking hiking back and forth.
It wasn't an easy decision.
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pa
climber
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Apr 24, 2010 - 01:39pm PT
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" It wasn't an easy decision".
Why not, exactly?
And, who/what was "squirming"?
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Apr 24, 2010 - 02:35pm PT
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I'm gonna give some much deserved props to the GU crew for cleaning up a bunch of trash that was left over the years by previous groups of South Face climbers. Seems this is being overlooked.
And thanks for providing the details of how the mess got left behind, and what your intentions were for making it right when it became apparent your clean-up plans didn't pan out as intended. And yeah, you took full responsibility (here and with the NPS) and didn't whine about how it wasn't your fault.
Polighten up, that is classic.
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