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Bolting Ethics - Anchors 14-Dec-2007 At 1:00:53 PM tmarsh

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There is no single or simple answer to this. At some crags, the absence of a double bolt anchor/loweroff would be seen as an oversight. At other crags, it would be chopped within days. I would say that for the *most* part, adding a single bolt to a belay would be less controversial than adding a bolt to a pitch, but that's not to say that it would be without controversy. I'd take a guess that if you added a single bolt to a lot of belays, it wouldn't be long before it sprouted a fixed mallion and everyone decides that the route is only one pitch long now.

> I am just wondering where the practice of bolting becomes ethically wrong.

I'm not trying to have a go at you here, but you're making a fundamental mistake assuming that there is some kind of ethical rulebook out there that everyone agrees on. Almost everyone will have a different theoretical perspective on when and where bolting is appropriate, and those people will all implement their theories in different ways. If you're going to put bolts in existing climbs, you either have to be very sure of yourself, or prepared to cop sh1t from a lot of people for a very long time.