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General Climbing Discussion

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undersized carrots at the county 10-Jan-2011 At 5:12:22 PM spicelab

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On 10/01/2011 davidn wrote:

>
>This argument seems to be far too often used. No one even knows most
>cliffs around here exist, for example, let alone complains about bits of
>metal. How often have you actually encountered this issue?
>
>You'd have to gridbolt the everloving crap out of a cliff to merit the
>term 'large amounts of obvious metal'. Which is a big stretch from 'lets
>pop out those carrots and put in rings or ubolts'. Climbers spend all
>their time looking at cliffs for bits of metal to climb on. Other people
>look at the cliff, take a happy snap if they wish, and bugger off.
>
>I think the type who complain about too much metal on cliffs are the same
>type who complain about those young sorts playing loud music at 8 pm when
>they're trying to sleep...

I have had direct experience of this exact scenario, which strongly informed my current position on the issue.

I was Climbing at Upper Shipley very shortly after it was intensively retro-bolted with glue-in rings about 10 years ago. While hanging on the third bolt or so of something around the Hot Flyer area, five bushwalkers looking to be in their 60s stopped at the base and one of them said (I'm confident my recollection is about 80% accurate) "These climbers, they pretend to care about the environment but they don't. I've been walking along this path for more than 5 years and this is disgusting. Look at all this metal. It wasn't like this last time". I remember feeling acutely embarassed while the others voiced similar opinions.

You can argue that in the grand scheme of environemntal impact that rings are f*ck all and I wholeheartedly agree. But in justifying development of any sort the issue is the relative change from the existing condition. And I would strongly argue that the relative change in visual amenity from a carrot to a non-camouflaged ring is significant.