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General Climbing Discussion

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euro ticking machine 5-May-2005 At 1:52:00 PM manacubus

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When I do a search on rc.com on +onsight +flash, I come back with 163 messages. No doubt it is a contentious issue.

Interestingly in the thread Did Yuji "onsight" or "flash" White Zombie it's claimed that 'Yuji has admitted that he belayed another climber on the route prior to his onsight, but says it is still an "onsight" instead of a "flash" because he looked away.' This is pretty funny. Note that I’m not passing judgement on Yuji, I just find the contrived nature of the situation amusing.

I remember hearing a story of a girl in Europe who was badly injured because her boyfriend who was belaying was choosing not to watch so as not to spoil his onsight. She fell clipping a low bolt and hit the ground due to his inattention.

Of course we have similar ‘definition’ issues particularly in Oz with the old redpoint versus pinkpoint chestnut. I think pinkpoint is a rather gay term, but I still find it useful to distinguish routes I was placing the draws on versus routes with pre-placed draws. Most climbers don’t care about this though and call everything a redpoint. This lends weight to the onsight-with-the-draws-insitu argument.

As long as you’re honest with your own achievements and the style in which you climb, that’s the main thing I reckon. But when you’re spraying with your friends, having terms with accepted definitions would help. Of course this’ll never happen – what would we have to bitch about then? Hmm, grades and bolting…