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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 07:44am PT
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I think free climbing is the pinnacle and vastly superior
Yeah
And then you have insane mad man (Jardine) who chiseled, and modified the rock to force it free on purpose.
On the Salathe many bolts were added especially on the headwall roof pitch to facilitate free climbing protection.
What's ironic is how all the focus on safety by adding bolts on the Salathe and then they tie off a loose boulder for anchor at the summit ......
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:14am PT
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El cap,
That is the post I wanted to make in rebuttal to the Dr.s' post but didn't want to spend the time. Thanks for that
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brotherbbock
Trad climber
Alta Loma, CA
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:27am PT
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Yeah, Skinner was a total D#@&%e. But he died doing what he loved, adding bolt's to established routes
That's fukn brutal...
EDIT:
You guys need to get back to bashing Sloan.
WOOT!!
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patrick compton
Trad climber
van
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:45am PT
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Yeah, Skinner was a total D#@&%e. But he died doing what he loved, adding bolt's to established routes
know what else? he didn't die a washed-up has-been weak troll on the Taco!
Skinner made huge contributions to all aspects of the sport: bouldering, sport, big wall and alpine. He was ahead of his time.
Sorry he added a few bolts that made you cry troll tears.
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patrick compton
Trad climber
van
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:53am PT
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I knew Todd well, and he was a lot of things, but not a dick.
Maybe you are the dick?
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:55am PT
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Yeah I never saw Tod as a dick ever.
I worked with him and helped carried his body down from the base in the end ....
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Rockies Obscure
Trad climber
rockiesobscure.com....Canada
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Dec 17, 2015 - 08:58am PT
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Yeah, Skinner was a total D#@&%e. But he died doing what he loved, adding bolt's to established routes
He certainly WAS NOT.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 09:05am PT
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He had some issue with my partner, and extended that feud to me.
I did nothing, and was psyched to meet him at first.
This happens all the time due to various circumstances beyond our control.
I'm also sorry this happened to you.
We ARE NOT saints ....
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'Pass the Pitons' Pete
Big Wall climber
like Ontario, Canada, eh?
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Dec 17, 2015 - 09:28am PT
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I never met Todd. I never heard anything about what he was like either? Nice guy or dick. Irrelevant. We are discussion behaviour, not identity.
My point in mentioning Dihedral Wall is pretty simple, really:
Compared to the very many bolts that Todd Skinner added to Dihedral Wall - some of them amazingly and astonishingly right next to perfectly useable cracks! - the bolts Erik Sloan added to Ten Days After PALE by comparison.
You guys get all bent out of shape by two bolts on pitch 8? Well, you guys oughta go climb Dihedral Wall then.
Which begs the question:
Why no response to Dihedral Wall in the past when I have raised this issue? Is it more fashionable to attack Erik than Todd? No. It's because Church Bowl is right next to the road, and anyone can go look. On Dihedral Wall, you would actually have to climb El Cap.
Aside: the first pitch of Wings of Steel is clearly visible from the ground. You can see it's not a bolt ladder, far from it. Yet did anyone ever bother to make the less-than-forty-five-minute hike from their car to go look at it?
I had taken a number of pictures on Dihedral Wall, and I seem to have lost half of them in a laptop meltdown earlier this year. Cybele probably has them. Quite clear in my mind is the photo I took of Todd's bolt about a foot right of a PERFECT blue/green Alien I had placed. Of course, if you put a cam in the crack, you mess up a perfectly good fingerlock, don't you. If someone searches Dihedral Wall here on this website, they might find them somewhere under my posting. Or somewhere else on the web.
The anonymous but well reasoned Elcapinyourass raises some valid points, especially concerning the pitch above The Ledge, the famous one you see in the photos with Tommy liebacking the pods, and with the added bolts next to the crack. It would indeed be very hard to climb that pitch free without the added bolts, although I certainly didn't find it hard to aid climb.
But consider this: Alex and Thomas Huber have climbed rather a large number of free ascents on El Cap, and so far as I am aware, they did not add a single bolt to an existing aid pitch. [They may have added bolts on previously unclimbed sections] So one assumes that Alex and Thomas have climbed around many such difficult situations without adding a bolt.
For those of you unaware of this style of climbing, it is called climbing with balls. If you have balls, then you can run it out.
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 09:34am PT
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It is called free climbing...you should try it again.
so there is really 800 + post thread about a guy who just put two extra bolts on one route?
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brotherbbock
Trad climber
Alta Loma, CA
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Dec 17, 2015 - 09:35am PT
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Is it more fashionable to attack Erik than Todd?
Yes.
It seems so...
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 09:57am PT
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Erik -- "Folks like me and Scott Stowe ...."
Whoa .... I wanna hear it straight from Scott before I believe any of it ....
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 10:42am PT
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Pretty crazy since he must know that others know them as well
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Moof
Big Wall climber
Orygun
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Dec 17, 2015 - 11:10am PT
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There does seem to be a warped ethic that turns a blind eye to free climbers adding bolts to aid climbs. I don't know why. I don't agree with it. I especially get irked when bolts are added to sections of an aid climb that have almost no chance of becoming even an occasionally repeated pitch. Often it feels like sponsored climbers are desperately looking for something notable for the rags to keep the sponsorship dollars going.
Overwatch, this thread got hijacked to cover a litany of sins committed, it goes way beyond Ten Days After. I personally have never touched Ten Days After, so I have kept my comments to mostly Mideast Crisis and the Great Slab Route which is right next door.
We have yet to see any coherent comments from Erik regarding his actions on GSR or MEC other than "Woot". GSR had an entire pitch bypassed by a bolt ladder, and Erik even documented himself smiling mid-atrocity. MEC suffered from aggressive ledge clearing in the middle of Pitch 7, way more than was necessary. One loose block posed a danger to being kicked loose, but a whole lot more got pried loose changing the look and feel of the pitch. Also no comments to justify from Erik.
Most of the climbers I know do their best to respect the routes and leave them alone as much as possible. For aid climbers this means avoiding the chisel or drill as much as possible, and embracing some risk as needed to proceed unless very necessary. Erik takes a proactive approach time and again, much more so than anyone else in recent history.
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 11:14am PT
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thanks for the response Moof. I was being facetious or sarcastic or whatever it would be. I know damn well that all these people wouldn't be up in arms over two bolts on one route.
I guess it is some kind of tactic by Dr. Piton to deflect from the big picture
Edit;
On reflection I realized that people did just that with WOS
One big difference that I see is that the WOS guys defended themselves and their actions with diligence, not just trying to brush it off with a Woot!
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Dec 17, 2015 - 12:07pm PT
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Why no response to Dihedral Wall in the past when I have raised this issue?
The devil's in the details. And more details are needed at least for me to form an opinion on the bolts added to DW. IMO the main travesty of retrobolting is diminishing the challenge of the route for future climbers. Not that there's simply a few more holes or bolts on a route. Chicken bolts affect the seriousness and challenge of the climb, it's not fair to future climbers to change the challenge that the FA left. Adding bolts which are necessary to allow free climbing are much different IMO than chicken bolts. necessary of course is subjective: could it be done as an R or X free climb without the bolts? What's the rating of that section vs. the crux/rest of the free climbing. If that section is NOT getting free climbed without those bolts at least for the foreseeable future, then that's certainly a big plus in their favor. Again I don't know the details, but to me they are not automatically wrong since that section can be aid climbed without them. While if bolts were added there simply to make the aid climbing easier they probably would be wrong.
It's almost like there are two routes there: the old aid route and the new free route. You can still do the old aid route, yes this is kind of the "if you don't like them, don't clip them" argument, but if there's enough info about the route, potentially someone could make that distinction.
But as DMT mentions you can put bolts in and you can chop them. That is perhaps a better measure of if the community thinks those bolts are acceptable, than opinions on a web page.
Add: also keep in mind Skinner's attempt was really near the beginning of big wall FFAs. As time goes on we develop more of a consensus of what is acceptable. As people realize these big walls can be free climbed, then naturally the desire will arise to do them in better style by not adding bolts.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Dec 17, 2015 - 12:16pm PT
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Another big difference is that we didn't do what we were accused of doing, while ES happily chortles (and Woots!) that he IS doing what everybody knows he's doing.
Another difference is that we were accused of "ignoring local ethics," while we actually cared VERY much for local ethics and conformed to them. We took the Bird and his approach very seriously. We were very aware and very concerned to adopt tactics that would be generally well-regarded as they became (truly) known.
By stark contrast, ES is adopting tactics that have NEVER been generally well-regarded. By NO mainstream ethic in Yosemite is the SUBSTANTIVE altering of the character of a pitch or route well-regarded or considered even "okay".
We can dicker 'till the cows come home about "if you drill, you fill" and those sorts of TACTICAL details. But there is really no STRATEGIC debate about the fact that what ES gleefully admits he is doing entirely pussifies the very nature of what climbing IS!
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 12:43pm PT
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awesome posts you guys. saying the things that I didn't want to take the time or probably have the eloquence to say myself
I will do my best to help keep it bumped from here, the land of frost, Mesa, Arizona.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Dec 17, 2015 - 01:09pm PT
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From the sounds of what everyone was talking about here, you would think there had been a bolt ladder drilled next to a crack.
There is a retrobolted ladder, of this description, on the Great Slab Route.
Earlier in this thread, that route was shown to have significant retrobolting, including at least one bolt ladder to bypass an aid crack. Erik Sloan's new topo apparently describes the bolt ladder as a "variation".
What Todd Skinner did on the Dihedral Wall is equally reprehensible, and it possibly contributed to Erik Sloan's self-conferred right to drill all over the Park.
Discussing What Todd Skinner did isn't bashing him, any more than discussing how the Nose was first climbed would be bashing Warren Harding.
Getting Erik Sloan to stop is just the beginning. We need to also impress upon other climbers that drilling new holes on existing routes is not acceptable. If this nascent trend isn't stopped now, there will be a veritable pandemic of new bolts throughout Yosemite, and elsewhere.
When people see that other people are doing something wrong, and getting away with it, it makes it easier to rationalize that it's OK for them to do it, too.
As an example of this type copycat behavior, just look at all the spray paint graffiti in cites, and on railroad cars. Graffiti is so prevalent, some idiot thought it was appropriate to deface some rocks in Joshua Tree.
And, in Ring Number Three .. . . ..
It is truly astonishing that Erik Sloan continually claims that other, highly respected climbers (YMS, YOSAR, Tom Frost, Scott Stowe, etc.) are applauding what he is doing. This is like Jeffery Dahmer saying that Julia Childs and Wolfgang Puck applaud his Young Man's Thigh Roast recipe.
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overwatch
climber
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Dec 17, 2015 - 01:27pm PT
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God damn man, good little belly laugh on that one. You are on a roll, sir
vvvvvvvvv MB1,
I did not mean to leave it unsaid in my post that you guys were vindicated in your claims as far as pretty much everyone is concerned
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