the popularity of climbing, 2017

My biggest beef is with the damn rappel routes that were installed 15-ish years ago. So many people rap routes now that the ridge trail is getting overgrown. It was common practice to climb to the top and walk off. I'd equate the rap routes with the advent of leashes in surfing. It creates crowds where no crowds used to be.

the addition of bolted stations 17-18 yr's ago has ruined the experience , or the purity of the experience, and droped the learning process to nil. Also with the advent of bolted ' Rap stations' Gudes and all others now top rope the crap out of everything , climbs I once felt totally secure on, are polished to a glassy finish.

one move wonders, where there is only one foot hold, ( C.C.K, ) are so polished that they could be considered a grade harder.
The idea that the top was being saved from erosion is and always was BS.

The (newer) installation of bolted anchors at the 'Gunks was essentially presented as a fait accompli, and it was a classic advertising campaign.

Create a need or exploit one - Don't you want to be safe while climbing? Doesn't everyone?

Add a sense of urgency - There are dozens of unsafe rappel stations out there, and someone is going to get hurt. Something needs to be done now.

Offer people a simplistic, binary choice - Either continue abseiling off these time bombs or let us install modern, safe anchors.

The situation has been unfortunate for a while and isn't going to get better any time soon. In fact, the Preserve has entered into a partnership with Petzl to train people in proper placement and removal of bolts, and training sessions are being arranged through the Preserve and the Gunks Climbers Coalition to train people from other areas in anchor construction, so the bolting of various local areas, including the Gunks, is only going to accelerate.

Considering the crowds and the way climbing has evolved, some bolting in the main Gunks crags is at this point inevitable. We are never going back to the days of walking back from climbs, partially because that isn't what the modern climber does, partially because a change in parking regulations years ago forced climbers to carry their gear to the base of routes (once you have a pack at the base, you ain't gonna walk back to the Uberfall and then back to your pack), and partially because power drill technology makes bolting possible on a scale that would have been unthinkable with hand drilling.

A problem is that, from the beginning as far as I can tell, the objectives of the bolting program were not clearly articulated and there was little sense of what the unintended side-effects might be. These problems were compounded by an inability to learn from mistakes, so that long after the unintended consequences of dangerous and disruptive two-way route traffic and top-rope hogging were noted, the Preserve continued to create anchors that promoted these outcomes, while studiously avoiding any attempt to regulate the climber behaviors that also created such anchors.

When new climbers arrive, they take the situation they find in place to be both normal and desirable, which creates a demand for ever more convenience anchors. So rather than fostering a minimally invasive appreciation of the outdoors, the Preserve has followed a good part of the rest of the climbing world in viewing the environment as something to be carved and shaped to promote human recreation. Admittedly, this is a somewhat facile criticism that ignores the fact that we humans build trails and other facilities that promote outdoor recreation all the time. So it becomes a matter of degree, and my position is that the Preserve, which claims to favor the benefits of quiet contemplation of nature, is far from its own principles.

Ironically, mere usage has its own carving effects, and the symptoms of overuse due to crowding have become the most recent Preserve rationale for bolted rap stations. Trees should be protected from rappel slings and soil compaction, and eroded areas should be quarantined and allowed to recover. All this makes perfect sense, but always the solution has been a bolted anchor rather than any attempt to shape climber behavior. In the absence of Preserve action, the Gunks Climbers Coalition has tried to span the breach by launching an education campaign targeting destructive practices. It is too soon to know whether this can be effective, but as the program of an independent entity without any type of enforcement authority or responsibility, there seem to me to be natural limits to how much the GCC can do.

What is sad about the way things have turned out is that the Preserve owns the land, and so has always had the unfettered authority to determine how it will be used or misused. But, ostensibly for liability reasons, the Preserve eschewed regulation of climbing practices, and instead embraced a reactive after-the-fact cleaning up of climber messes, putting it eternally behind the usage curve.

My current view (not that anyone listens to me), is that we should admit that the game has been lost (and maybe never could have been won) and try to implement a rational approach that returns a few classic climbs to as close to pristine shape as is possible given the high level of usage. This would mean identifying some bottom-to-top classics in a range of grades, totally eliminating installed anchors on those climbs, and (gasp) banning the placement of slings on rock formations and trees on these routes. (High Exposure, for example, already meets this criterion.) Such climbs would be available solely for bottom-to-top ascents, with whatever belay anchors can be arranged from the rock and surviving vegetation, and the descents would have to be made elsewhere so that no two-way traffic is possible. Of course, the modern climbing world being what it is, "elsewhere" cannot be too inconvenient, so a reasonably-spaced set of rappel highways back to the ground would have to be established (most of these are already in place).

A sticking point of this proposal for the Preserve seems to be the need to walk along the top of the cliff to the nearest rap highway, thereby increasing cliff top traffic. I think preserving the cliff-top at the expense of the face and bottom has been a devil's bargain that now impedes what seems to me to be the last hope for holding on to a few shreds of the genuine trad experience.

But there is the rub. I don't think the Preserve realizes that it presides over a vanishing resource, a trad climbing area that might have allowed many future generations to experience climbing as dictated by the rock, not the drill-powered architects of convenience and conservation. Taking a page from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and going for a bit of melodrama, it seems to me to be just a few minutes before midnight, and the clock is ticking.

As for walking along the top and back to a pack, it is actually faster than rappelling in many cases, depending on how close the route is to either the Uberfall, Radcliffe, or Roger's Escape Hatch. I've actually done the experiment, with one party rapping while I walk (not run!) back and around, and as I say, for routes that are relatively close to the descents, walking wins.