Sloan-ification of the Nose rap route

Where's your outrage at Jardines blatant chiseling and manufacturing of holds.

Real men use 50 meter ropes anyway.

Nose In A Day teams need extra belays

These new stations are going to go miles toward relieving the ever present Nasal Congestion...The best part is there are now stations at 60m and 120m from the ground, so you can haul to Sickle in three hauls, instead of four...Now the Niad teams can practice their Sickle and Dolt runs with one rope, which will really speed things up, and the hauling teams will get to Sickle easier, and will have less folks clogging up their scene...'Dolt runs' are super popular now (people hoping to do Nose in a day often climb once to Dolt Tower and rappel, to suss out the lower, slippery and strenuous sections), so getting dedicated, one-rope raps from there will seriously reduce congestion on the route itself, and will lead to people have more fun, and hopefully moving more smoothly, on the Nose!

It's a blank wall down that way basically and just a rappel line only far away from the climbing pitches.

This why I have asked if those commenting have done the Nose.

Just what are you people projecting?

Mine was finishing my custom non lethal shotgun mount for Bear management vehicle .....

Sep 3, 2016 - 10:56am PT
If you read the referenced MP thread, Sloan gives specific reasons for his handiwork.

These new stations are going to go miles toward relieving the ever present Nasal Congestion...The best part is there are now stations at 60m and 120m from the ground, so you can haul to Sickle in three hauls, instead of four...Now the Niad teams can practice their Sickle and Dolt runs with one rope, which will really speed things up, and the hauling teams will get to Sickle easier, and will have less folks clogging up their scene...'Dolt runs' are super popular now (people hoping to do Nose in a day often climb once to Dolt Tower and rappel, to suss out the lower, slippery and strenuous sections), so getting dedicated, one-rope raps from there will seriously reduce congestion on the route itself, and will lead to people have more fun, and hopefully moving more smoothly, on the Nose!

Discuss among yourselves---those of you who know what all this really means. I'm far too removed from the Yosemite scene to make an intelligent comment. Infer what you will about the fact that I'm commenting nonetheless.

Personally, I find it highly problematic when a single individual appoints themselves arbiter of safety or, in this case, traffic control, and then drills in order to realize their personal vision about what is best for the world.

My perhaps irrelevant experience with small crags in the East suggests that every even a well-intentioned bolting effort brings with it unintended consequences that diminish climbers experiences by increasing traffic both up and down the routes. (Note that I am not speaking here of the arcane so-called "ethical" discussions about the topic.) What I've seen is that every time you make something easier, you bring in people who wouldn't have been there when it was harder, and so the net effect, if you believe you are going to decrease congestion, is typically the very opposite of that goal.

When bolts are continually added to so-called trad routes, two things happen. First, the prevalence of fixed anchors continually eats away at climbers' former reluctance to carve up mountains for their own convenience. Like violence in the movies and on TV, climbers become more and more desensitized and so far more tolerant. "What the hell, its increasingly universal and this is the new reality" is a resigned (or polemical) sense of inevitability you can find in every discussion.

Second, the result is a climbing population that expects to have the same level of convenience everywhere they go, which means there is popular pressure for more of the same thing. The net effect is that the presence of ever more fixed anchors eventually creates a new population whose consensus favors...more fixed anchors!

Because the methods under debate eventually change the population, the debate can easily disappear as the potential for alternate perspectives disappears. This is one of the ways conservation fails in all areas. The drug addicts, if you will, get to run the show. And of course part of running the show is heaping scorn on those who would try to slow the march of "progress," so any efforts at conservation will always be met with irrelevant ad hominen attacks.

So uninformed, unintelligent or not, my comment is that Sloan's work is (most optimistically an unwitting) part of a trend that wants to rend the fabric of climbing as an activity that is part of the natural scene and is subject, for better or worse, to the vagaries of nature, and replace it with a Frankenstein-like monster, neither fully natural nor fully artificial, tailored ultimately to personal convenience, and offering a sanitized version of nature to a population that increasingly demands it. Is the Nose too far gone for this to matter? Perhaps, but as part of a bigger phenomenon that is accelerated by every "improvement" to the natural scene, there is still reason for climbers with all kinds of differing perspectives to be concerned.

LOL .... when are you gonna do the NOSE?

Did you really lose sleep over this, lol .......