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Chockstone Forum - Crag & Route Beta

Crag & Route Beta

Area	Location	Sub Location	Crag	Links
VIC Grampians	Halls Gap	The Watchtower	(General)	[ Watchtower Guide \| Images ]

Topic Date User

Watchtower new bolted line. 7-Mar-2014 At 11:16:25 AM Damien Gildea

Message

On 7/03/2014 Big G wrote:
>On 7/03/2014 uwhp510 wrote:
>
>
>Not trying to claim any moral superiority but every time I hear the that
>trad is more environmentally friendly than sport I get a bit of annoyed.
>It's a ridiculous argument. In most climbing areas the biggest impact on
>the environment is from access to the climbing.
>

If you honestly think your crack v. bolt comparison is a valid one, I can't think of much more to add. See my comments further above about people not wanting to get involved in pointless online argy-bargy. Cracks are original natural features that are part of the rock, and almost always will grow/fill back anything that might have been cleaned from them. Bolts are unnatural, added, visible and permanent blots on the rock.

If you're more worried about impact from access, then again, highly bolted areas are encouraging relatively larger numbers in smaller areas, e.g.. Shipley whereas nowadays many 'trad' areas are empty on weekends and routes and tracks are getting overgrown. Trad spreads the access-impact, bolts worsen it.