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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Still not clear on what you ARE interested in based on your postings. Are you really willing to take the position that those other climbers claiming adequate backup protection on the Needles Eye are mistaken or lying? You seem to be the one short on experience and judgement here despite your age. Again- go ahead and drill fool, and face the music. Myself or someone else will clean up your mess. Otherwise leave the route as it is and avoid it if it scares you or you find the climbing too taxing.
Solomcq stands for what name in full?
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bob d'antonio
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Steve...name calling doesn't add anything to the discussion. Hammer has pit-bull like grip on this and he not going to let go anytime soon.
Knowing the crowd in that neck of woods the bolts would be gone in days.
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jstan
climber
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Discussions like this have gone on for more than 30 years with no sign whatsoever of any resolution. When there is no chance of resolution at present, as I believe may be the case here, those of us who feel other opportunities for progress are far larger, might consider just putting this question aside. No value is gained by continuing.
I think the climbing organizations in each area can gain great value by assisting those responsible for management of the land in dealing with many of the problems they face. Facelift tells us this as does the work many such organizations have already been carrying out. In both the Northeast and in the Southeast some 35 years ago we took this path and many other problems were solved subsequently as a result of the common effort that developed. Real answers came out.
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Hammer
Social climber
Custer, SD
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Let me get this right Steve, you will come from Seattle and chop bolts put in to replace old pitons requested by the FA?
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Trad climber
San Francisco, Ca
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Hammer, there is a secret super taco team that's deployed if anyone touches an historical relic. They'll parachute in and re-install the 40 to 50 year old pitons you replace. Better someone die than the historical nature of a rock climb be minimally altered.
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scuffy b
climber
The deck above the 5
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Hammer, you are being devious when you say replacing the piton
with a bolt is requested by the FA.
You know full well that rgold, who actually led the first ascent,
has expressed opposition to your plan.
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426
Sport climber
Buzzard Point, TN
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most unfortunate: a bolt is a bolt is a bolt (in the avg. land manager's perspective/EIS report)
In the land of banana pudding, everyone's king.
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bob d'antonio
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Wes wrote: Unfortunately you are butting heads with elitists who value their own opinions over anyone else's.
Bullshit Wes...Hammer stated his case...people have spoken seems and it seems Hammer doesn't like what he is hearing...who's Ego??
This is a historical route!
Wes wrote: Bob, I have absolutely no problem with leaving some classic routes as they are. In fact, I have stated that routes like that should be preserved MANY times. I'm talking about the insignificant routes that never get done because they are X or R.
Change your tune real quick...didn't you?????
Go here: http://www.bhclimbers.com/ROUTE%20REPAIR.html
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Hammer
Social climber
Custer, SD
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Actually, Rich backed off the route before even getting to the horizontal seam (where the pins are) and his partner Don Storjohann got the first ascent. Don is in favor of the route maintainance in question. Lets keep the comments accurate.
Look at your link again Bob, 99% of the routes mentioned are in the Rushmore climbing area, a sportclimbing mecca. Once again, those guys don't climb in the Needles anymore, maybe the best routes are too runout for them.
The only Needles routes mentoned are proposed repair and proposed repair takes those guys a year or more to get around to. They spend their time bolting with the Bosch from the top down 'repairing' sport routes.
The 'new locals' who climb in the Needles every year have done more route and anchor repair in the Needles in the last 4 or 5 years than the coalition has ever done in the Needles. (also established over a hundred moderate new routes, the kind that get climbed, opened up one new area and re-established a long forgotten area). With more climbers visiting the Needles every year the new areas were needed.
Also once again, the best placement for pro to back up the two pins on the Needles Eye is around behind the arete left of the first pin. The only reason there is a nut placement there is because broken rock left a perfect medium nut placement but, it is still broken rock, not good in my book. And, once again, if the route can be protected so easily by your 'more experienced' climbers why leave the pins there at all?
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scuffy b
climber
The deck above the 5
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Hammer, here is the source material I based my comments on.
Please tell me where I went wrong.
"He's more interested in her boobs than in me."
When a guy has this thought about another guy, the observation itself would seem to be a no-brainer. But the circumstances here, even if they did not alter the truth of the observation, nonetheless distorted my reaction to it.
"Pay attention, dammit," I shrieked, failing to note that Don could have perceived this as a hearty approval of his current focus rather than a plea to change it. How, I wondered miserably, did I ever get myself into this mess?
It wasn't hard. The year was 1964. I had come across some articles in Appalachia by Fritz Wiessner, articles with spectacular photos of a forest of slender pinnacles. The Needles in South Dakota! I headed out with almost no information about what I would find.
What I found was Don Storjohann, a strapping farm boy from Minden, Iowa with a booming voice, a twinkle in his eye that made women melt on the spot (why can't I do that, I wondered hopelessly), and a passion for teetering precariously on the sometimes breakable crystals of the spires of Custer State Park. Don suggested that we try to make the first ascent of the Needle's Eye.
OK, ok, it wasn't a first ascent, but it was, by Needles standards. A line of 14 aid bolts on the West face, placed in 1953, led to the summit---if you could find appropriate hangers and screws. There was a rumor that Layton Kor had chimneyed to the top of the Needle's Eye and then aided out. But no one had free-climbed the pinnacle. Herb and Jan Conn, who had rediscovered the Needles in 1947 and established amazing classics nearing 5.9 in difficulty, using a single 60 foot rope (requiring them to downclimb every pitch) and $1.95 tennis shoes, set the Needles ethics agenda by declaring free ascents to be the only ascents. So the Needles Eye was unclimbed.
Don had picked out a possible route that started in a gulley at the lowest point of one face of the eye, traversed out to a belay at a flake on the face, then followed the left edge of the face to a fold or crack delineating a kind of "cap" of the pinnacle. From there, a traverse right led to a bulge guarding the lower angle rock to the top.
Hmm. The face above the flake was unprotected. We'd be in groundfall range at or before the fold. If we could get a piton in the fold, we'd have some protection for the bulge. Otherwise...we were young enough not to think about otherwise.
At least not right away.
The Needle's Eye is located at a turnout on the Needles Highway, a sinuous track snaking through the heart of the spires and ducking through a narrow single-lane tunnel at one edge of the turnout. In order to avoid the tourists, we started up at 6 in the morning, Don quickly led the short pitch to the flake belay, and I sallied forth on the unprotected face above.
Well, sallied isn't quite right---dilly-dallied would be more like it. Hours went by as I traversed back and forth and climbed up and down. In truth, the climbing wasn't especially hard, but the thought of making even one irreversible move and then arriving at the "fold," only to find no protection available, brought the hitherto distant thoughts of "othewise" sharply to the foreground. My attempts were nothing more than an elaborate dance of defeat, which I had the bad grace to prolong until the conclusion was inevitable. I turned over the lead to Don.
Bursting with Midwestern corn-fed enthusiasm, exuding the "right stuff" that got us to the moon, and utterly oblivious to my gloomy procrastinations, Don launched up the unprotected face with hardly a pause and rocketed on up to the fold.
A pause.
The sound of a piton being driven, a hollow sound, lacking the musical confirmation of solid pro, and abruptly terminated by the lugubrious vibrating note of a bottoming placement. Some more attempts to place pitons to no avail, and suddenly Don became fully aware of just how bad his situation was, especially since he could see that the bulge was going to be much harder than anything he had done so far. Unlike me, who had been battered by doubt, Don was decisive. No hours of delaying tactics for him. He announced that the pin he had placed was highly suspect and he didn't trust it to lower off of, so he would climb down with a belay through the pin, realizing fully that it might not hold his weight if he slipped, and that the consequences in that case would be an almost certainly fatal fall to the ground.
I held my breath. He made it back to the belay.
It would have made perfect sense to give up at this point, but rationality is not a strong suit of the young. I had on me a very distinctive gold Charlet-Moser piton that I had failed to pass over to Don. It had a thicker blade than he had with him, and he thought it might go in where his gear had failed. And so, armed with the hoped-for magic bullet and comforted by the knowledge that Don had climbed up and down the face below the fold, I headed up to see if more progress could be made.
Now all this had taken a lot of time, and the road was now choked with tourists and backed up for almost the entire length of the Needles Highway. Our 6 AM start had been wasted, and we had become the gladiators in the arena, battling a ferocious nubbin-encrusted beast while the hoards waited, not always patiently, for some a catastrophe to enliven their day. They had no idea how close we were to satisfying their morbid craving for a moment of entertainment.
Locked inextricably into the traffic jam was a convertible with a young woman in a peasant blouse as a passenger. The blouse was revealing enough at eye level, but from the vantage of the belay flake directly above, little was left to the imagination. Don almost immediately engaged his moltenizing twinkle beam in an effort to...well, you know what guys do.
And so it was that I found myself up at the fold with my belayer locked in a mammaric trance below.
The first thing I did was to test the piton Don had placed. A single blow of the hammer knocked it out of the crack and sent it on its way down the rope to Don, who, in an admirable display of concentration, barely acknowledged its arrival. So now I'm up at the fold with nothing in, having lost the only one of Don's pitons that he had been able to place, staring wildly at the spot where my gold Charlet-Moser special was going to go. First some delicate loving light taps---we don't want this baby to bounce out---then some harder blows, and finally all-out pounding, mercilessly overdriving that sucker for whatever extra security it might acquire.
I traversed right, yelled ineffectively at Don, and started up the bulge, which was indeed much harder than the climbing below. (The 5.8 rating of these moves does not convey the cumulative psychic distess I was laboring under as I advanced.) Pinching two crystals, I high-stepped onto a small blackish blob and started to pull through.
I think my nervous system registered the departure of my foothold before I heard the cracking sound, certainly before the the loud thunk from below announced the impact on the hood of the Breastmobile. The bad news: the boyfriend of the Peasant Fantasy was shrieking obscenities at us for damaging his car and I was suspended from two pinch-grips with my feet flaying about ineffectively and one piton between me and oblivion. The good news: I finally had Don's undivided attention.
An adrenaline infusion coursed through my veins and I suddenly found myself several feet higher with no memory of what I had done to get there. With the apoplectic tones of the offended boyfriend wafting up from below, I floated ecstatically up the ever-lessening angle of the final summit slope.
The Needle's Eye had seen its first ascent.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Trad climber
San Francisco, Ca
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Anyone who thinks ancient rusting gear should be left on a route to be relied upon by generations of future climbers is a self-important moron, whose opinion should be disregarded.
Find a way to fix the route such that the character is preserved. It seems something like those pin bolts would do the trick.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Hammer wrote,
Actually, Rich backed off the route before even getting to the horizontal seam (where the pins are) and his partner Don Storjohann got the first ascent. Don is in favor of the route maintainance in question. Lets keep the comments accurate.
Which reminded me of my earlier comment,
You're spinning, not listening.
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randomtask
climber
North fork, CA
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Hammer,
If "broken rock" is not good to you, leave the pins in place since they are going to break the rock on removal, no?
If you have the FAist in your corner, why are you still debating? Go do what you feel you should do.
There's bullshit on both sides of this argument. I'm blessed with LOTS of rock around here so if i see a climb that is too dangerous for me i climb another one (but i leave it for someone else). I understand that at other places this might not be the case and in this instance, consulting the FA party and voicing your concerns is the right decision. His/her/their opinions about the route should be final (IMO) since you have spoken with them, who cares what anyone else thinks on this site (whether for or against it). Go Cubs
-JR
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scuffy b
climber
The deck above the 5
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randomtask, what makes you think that Hammer has the
FAist in his corner?
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scuffy b
climber
The deck above the 5
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CUBS WIN
I thought it hadn't started yet?
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Hammer- Please try to comprehend that those pitons are part of the story of the FA and have some value for historical reasons even if clearly not to you. The question of adequate protection on this 5.8 climbing assumes a leader climbing at that grade. Don't be so blithe as to take the position that a 5.8 leader wouldn't like to have those pitons (or pinbolts) to clip into while arranging other gear. Have it your way on your own routes. You have little support for carrying out your plans on the Needles Eye.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Replacing pins with bolts is always a tough call, especially when the route is as historic as the Eye.
[ed] What if you removed the pins and found a good nut placement? Would you still replace the pro?
What Warbler said...
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randomtask
climber
North fork, CA
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Scuffy B:
I am just going by what he claims in his posts...and yes it is over the cubs just haven't won it YET!! :)
-JR
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scuffy b
climber
The deck above the 5
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got it, randomtask.
What I posted above (on this page) is Rich Goldstone's account
of the first ascent.
It was the initial post of the First Ascent of the Needle's Eye
thread.
In that thread, Hammer brought up the opinion of Don S who
thought a bolt would be appropriate.
Rich (rgold) responded that he was opposed to Hammer's proposal
to place a bolt, and he requested that Hammer keep that in mind.
Hammer has continued to stress Don's opinion while ignoring
Rich's.
He has also stated that he considers Don the true first ascentionist.
I want to make it clear that I am not offering an opinion on what
should be done with this climb.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Well then, let's cut to the tiebreaker. Would either Rich or Don have any objection to the installation of pinbolts to replace the existing fixed pitons in the absence of reliable gear nearby? The pinbolt entered the discussion well along on the Needles Eye thread. Again, I would be happy to provide them and assist in the installation. It would be much less depressing than pulling and patching.
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