Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

CliffCare Survey-Please help out 4-Jan-2019 At 7:05:27 PM One Day Hero

Message

I apologise for last nights comments, they were probably unclear as I'd had half a bottle of wine. Tonight I've had the other half a bottle and will attempt to straighten things out.

>I did read ODHs stuff pretty carefully.
>
>Essentially he's putting up a strawman scenario that neotiations are going
>to be on a transactional basis, that one area will be traded off against
>another : I'll give you this if you give me that. The scenario of trading
>Muline for some minor crag is complete rubbish of course.

No, that wasn't what I was trying to get at. The point I was trying to make was how can someone be trusted to negotiate access to crags if they have never climbed at those crags and don't know their value? Is there any formal acknowledgement within the VCC that not all crags are of equal worth to the climbing community? If a world class crag also has cultural heritage issues, then the job is to find a way to protect the site while maintaining climbing access.
>
>How are we going to deal with a major climbing site that has significant
>cultural heritage issues? They certainly exist and if it comes to a binary
>choice between cultural heritage and a first-world sport then I know which
>will win.

I don't know, Kieran, it's very complicated. There are significant cultural heritage issues at Arapiles. Should we give up climbing at all of fuching Arapiles because "cultural heritage trumps first-world sport every time"?

>
>As to what anyone's climbing ability has to do with their negotiating
>skills? It's just elitism. Makes me sick.

It's hard fuching facts which need to be faced. I don't trust bumblies to understand which crags in the Vic Range are world class and which aren't, because unless you climb in the mid 20s up, you've never climbed a world class route in the Vic Ranges.

>There are going to be some difficult issues to deal with before this is
>through and name-calling doesn't help.

Damn right there will be. If the VCC expect to conduct negotiations on behalf of all climbers, they need to establish some credibility. Frankly I think there needs to be a closed door meeting where the VCC lays out exactly what their objectives and priorities are here (and maybe let non-club people in on how screwed we are at this point). I'll happily drive down to hear about it.

I'm mostly on your side of the fence here. We don't want or need people scouring the Gramps for mediocre routes which add very little value. But you need to recognise that some of those Vic Ranges hard crags are globally unique and anything other than full effort to maintain access to them is a massive sell out of climbers best interests.