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Chockstone Photography
Australian Landscape Photography by Michael Boniwell
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Chockstone Forum - Crag & Route Beta

Crag & Route Beta

 Page 4 of 5. Messages 1 to 20 | 21 to 40 | 41 to 60 | 61 to 80 | 81 to 85
Area Location Sub Location Crag Links
VIC Grampians Halls Gap The Watchtower (General) [ Watchtower Guide | Images ] 

Author
Watchtower new bolted line.
White Trash
7-Mar-2014
9:07:18 PM
On 7/03/2014 Big G wrote:
>On 7/03/2014 Macciza wrote
>>
>>So it seems that you must rate all the different climbing disciplines
>>equally then?
>>
>>If so then I would really have to question not only your logic but whether
>>you have even given the topic any critical thought at all . . . It sounds
>>like you actually have no real opinion on this matter whatsoever apart
>>from not agreeing with any side of the argument . . .
>>
>>Throughout the history of climbing it has generally been recognised by
>>most people that there are substantive differences between the various
>>disciplines, and ethics of them . . . What have we been doing inventing
>>free climbing and then freeing aid from climbs, and bothering with the
>>whole 'gotta climb it without falling' thing . . .? Does climbing a bolted
>>route on trad gear fit in somewhere there?? Or is it really just all
>the
>>same?
>>
>>So I gotta wonder what you would think about a rehearsed ascent of a
>chipped
>>6m grade 4 sport route with pre-clipped rings every 600 mm compared to
>>say an onsight gear-only ascent of say Serpentine ?? Am I correct in
>assuming
>>you think they are equal?? Or am I wrong in thinking that one or the
>other
>>is a 'better' style/ethic/?? of ascent?
>
>You see macciza you are falling in to the same trap
>as DD; letting yourself extrapolate a statement out into a whole philosophy.
>Although at least you are doing it with a civilised response.
>
>No I don't think all accents are equal but neither do I think sport climbing
>is inherently bad. Neil was chastised for bolting choss in the Grampians
>and I felt compelled to point out a few (possibly perceived) flaws in the
>argument as to why he shouldn't do it. That's all.

just wasted my time reading this thread.
am not a lover of dd but his (her?) simple posts dont confuse me cause they are straight to the point unlike the bg ones as i only see simple rebuttals in those. where did bg point out the flaws again?

Macciza
7-Mar-2014
9:13:17 PM
On 7/03/2014 White Trash wrote:
>just wasted my time reading this thread.
>am not a lover of dd but his (her?) simple posts dont confuse me cause
>they are straight to the point unlike the bg ones as i only see simple
>rebuttals in those. where did bg point out the flaws again?

And so you reply with a waste of time post full of words but meaning nothing . . . .Cheers
Krumpit
7-Mar-2014
9:59:56 PM
Look, I kicked this bee hive...n clearly a lot is being said...I'm not going to speculate on every possibly freaking argument, but I will state some realities...whenever a new sport crag is put out there, it is slammed the very next long weekend...the same cant be said about a new trad area...I don't care to speculate why, I can draw my own conclusions, but no matter the motivation, impacts are impacts... My problem lies when a new climb is put up just because it can be with no consideration... And I can tell u now this sort of behaviour WILL cost us all dearly, so all I'm asking for is some more thought...n for those who haven't given enough thought, I will do my best to clean up your mess....
White Trash
8-Mar-2014
11:06:56 AM
On 7/03/2014 Macciza wrote:
>And so you reply with a waste of time post full of words but meaning nothing
>. . . .Cheers

a new page of thread macciza, so left full qoute of bg as it was him i was replying to.
White Trash
8-Mar-2014
11:10:00 AM
On 7/03/2014 Krumpit wrote:
>Look, I kicked this bee hive...n clearly a lot is being said...I'm not
>going to speculate on every possibly freaking argument, but I will state
>some realities...whenever a new sport crag is put out there, it is slammed
>the very next long weekend...the same cant be said about a new trad area...I
>don't care to speculate why, I can draw my own conclusions, but no matter
>the motivation, impacts are impacts... My problem lies when a new climb
>is put up just because it can be with no consideration... And I can tell
>u now this sort of behaviour WILL cost us all dearly, so all I'm asking
>for is some more thought...n for those who haven't given enough thought,
>I will do my best to clean up your mess....

i think you are right and will have support in that.

JamesMc
8-Mar-2014
8:37:56 PM
I quite enjoyed Flat Tack!
drdeviousii
8-Mar-2014
9:53:46 PM
On 8/03/2014 JamesMc wrote:
>I quite enjoyed Flat Tack!

what would u know? you actually climbed it! this is a forum topic for hypotheticals

IdratherbeclimbingM9
9-Mar-2014
12:48:53 AM
On 8/03/2014 drdeviousii wrote:
>On 8/03/2014 JamesMc wrote:
>>I quite enjoyed Flat Tack!
>
>what would u know? you actually climbed it! this is a forum topic for hypotheticals

I tend to agree with White Trash, as I don't think Krumpit is going to 'hypothetically' clean up others mess.
anthonycuskelly
9-Mar-2014
7:57:43 AM
I'm going to agree with James, Flat Tack was fun. It's also prey solid and there not a lot of gear options, so I don't see why the fuss on it. The left variant of Jugular Pulse is a bit average but it is a distinct line as much as the original.

I'm not convinced that Grampians bolting is out of control.
One Day Hero
9-Mar-2014
7:04:57 PM
On 9/03/2014 anthonycuskelly wrote:
>I'm not convinced that Grampians bolting is out of control.

The bolting at Lower Tribute and Amnesty is right out of control. Some pretty embarrassing shit at those places.
How far out of control do you reckon it should get before someone steps in?


rodw
9-Mar-2014
9:29:38 PM
On 9/03/2014 One Day Hero wrote:

>How far out of control do you reckon it should get before someone steps
>in?

I'm sure you will tell us oh wise one.
anthonycuskelly
10-Mar-2014
8:26:57 AM
What exactly do you find embarrassing about them? That someone bolted a 15? I'm not climbing hard enough to comment on the Amnesty retros.

I'd say the time for action is when your rage outweighs your desire to actually go climbing. A bolt on a Bundaleer classic would do it for me.
One Day Hero
10-Mar-2014
11:48:41 PM
On 10/03/2014 anthonycuskelly wrote:
>What exactly do you find embarrassing about them? That someone bolted a
>15?

More that someone bolted a bunch of totally shit easy routes just so that there can be bolted easy routes in the Grampians. Why do there need to be bad bolted easy routes? So that people can learn to lead, apparently.......because no one ever learned to lead ever on the hundreds of really high quality easy naturally protected routes which are frigging everywhere down that way!


>I'd say the time for action is when your rage outweighs your desire to actually go climbing.

You have to think a bit laterally, it doesn't have to be one or the other. Rain days can become chopping days. That month you take off over summer to let the tendons heal.....chopping month. If you're climbing in threes, there's probably time to ping a couple of bolts out before your turn comes round again :)
Wendy
11-Mar-2014
9:30:31 AM
somehow, 4 pages of classic pointless chockstone debate went by and I didn't even know about it.

All this holier than thou "silent majority" and "climbers are environmentally caring" stuff annoys me though. I used to think that climbers cared about the environment, but I have sadly come to the conclusion that I was wrong. Climbers leave rubbish, poo, and scraps of tape, drive cars around barriers and gates, ignore environmental closures, closed roads, camp outside of site boundaries, make short cut tracks, collect firewood, clear vegetation, cover the rock in chalk, chip holds, "clean" new routes as well as bolt or just enjoy the bolting and cleaning that other people have done for them. This evidence suggests to me that a large proportion of climbers, trad, sport or otherwise are not caring for the environment and have not been concerned about questions about how the crag came to be as it is presented to them. Can we just get over this environmentally sensitive nonsense or actually start practicing what we imagine we are pls?

And claims about a silent majority are just bollocks. If they are silent, well, how do you know what they think then??? It's just a line to make unsubstantiated claims that some large number of unidentified people support your view. From my experience, the vast majority of people don't care either which way, which is why they are for the most part, silent about it. And if they did care about indiscriminate bolting of choss that needed shitloads of cleaning, well, my opinion on Dreamtime would be a little more widespread then. But if you want to, develop an unbiassed survey, go and find a representative sample of climbers and let us know what it suggests the "silent majority" actually thinks.

In the meanwhile, I think the Watchtower is a scrappy crag that I wouldn't bother climbing at again, so I have no idea about the routes in question.
anthonycuskelly
12-Mar-2014
9:34:32 AM
I suppose at least with crap trad FAs you can slink off into the undergrowth and pretend it never happened... I quite enjoyed most of Lower Tribute though.

So ODH, what's your preferred debolting rack for those quick missions?
Wendy
12-Mar-2014
10:03:27 AM
On 9/03/2014 One Day Hero wrote:
>On 9/03/2014 anthonycuskelly wrote:
>>I'm not convinced that Grampians bolting is out of control.
>
>The bolting at Lower Tribute and Amnesty is right out of control. Some
>pretty embarrassing shit at those places.
>How far out of control do you reckon it should get before someone steps
>in?
>
I reckon the routes at LT are ok for what they are. The rock is good, the lines are separate. So they are short things in a gully. Meh. And you are about 23 years to late to complain about Amnesty, which is when Chinese water torture was effectively retrobolted by Tyrants Grasp. Steve Monks was fine with the retro on Good fight, although I'm not sure he was with CWT, possibly because he wasn't consulted and that 2 "new" bolted routes were claimed within mm of it. The 2 20s on the left wall are kinda dumb, in that no one who does them seems to know which bits are which route because they are so contrived to have separate. And all the link ups, well, link ups are a bit dumb, but you can start complaining about them when you complain about them at Taipan, Gallery, Boronia Pt etc etc.

You really should go into Dreamtime if you want something to complain about. Lots of cleaning with a jimmy bar and liberal bolting used to create lots of routes that still feel like holds are going to come off everywhere, erosion prone cliff base getting trashed by even the small amount of traffic when I when in there, closed, eroded roads that people drive down to get there. Really not somewhere to try and make the a popular sport crag out of.
krumpit
12-Mar-2014
12:18:37 PM
Totally get what you are saying about Dreamtime Wendy...it is a disaster out there in terms of climbing....a 3 star "classic" doesn't usually involve flexing holds on shattered rock that could kill anyone below...
As for the holier than though stuff...I get what you are saying about this too...I see the same things as you when i am out at the crag...but it doesn't mean I am ok with it. It may seem ideological, but I think that as a user group, we have been able to minimize impacts in some ways, but have become more and more apathetic to other impacts...so things have got progressively worse, which isn't good enough. One of these issues is bolting, in particular the bolting of chossy shit routes..
.

sbm
12-Mar-2014
1:58:46 PM
> I used to think that climbers cared about the environment, but I have sadly come to the conclusion that I was wrong.

Agreed, I came to the same realisation. But then, very few people actually want land managed for the environment's best interest. They want land managed for their best interest, everyone has an agenda and just wants to hear that their activities are totally green.
One Day Hero
12-Mar-2014
2:51:18 PM
On 12/03/2014 Wendy wrote:

>I reckon the routes at LT are ok for what they are. The rock is good,
>the lines are separate.

Once you're ok with bolting incredibly easy sport routes up arbitrary lines on mediocre rock, there's no end to where that stuff can go in. You could put up 50 000 sport routes in the Gramps of that quality, all it takes is for someone to come along with a drill and low enough standards. Some of the arseclowns who are "learning to climb" at lower tribute will eventually acquire a drill and a sense of entitlement.

>And you
>are about 23 years to late to complain about Amnesty, which is when Chinese
>water torture was effectively retrobolted by Tyrants Grasp.

It's never too late. There's no statute of limitations on pulling bullshit retrobolts.

>Steve Monks
>was fine with the retro on Good fight.

So what? That doesn't mean that everyone else has to be fine with it. I don't know what it was like as a gear route, but it surely would have been totally safe (and pretty interesting) with a maximum of one or two retrobolts. Why was the default setting to sport bolt it? Amnesty (the route) looks great as is. Are you going to be ok with it if that one gets retroed as well?

>And all the link ups, well, link
>ups are a bit dumb, but you can start complaining about them when you complain
>about them at Taipan, Gallery, Boronia Pt etc etc.

That's an odd piece of logic. You need to revisit Chouinard's famous quote regarding the difference between ethics and style.

>You really should go into Dreamtime if you want something to complain
>about.

Been having problems with birds raiding your fruit trees? That straw man you just built should help. Sounds like Dreamtime is fuching awful, and I don't drive to Victoria to climb on utter shit so I'll never go there. Maybe that'd be a good one for you to go and chop?
Damien Gildea
12-Mar-2014
2:54:46 PM
On 12/03/2014 sbm wrote:
>>...very few people actually
>want land managed for the environment's best interest. They want land managed
>for their best interest, everyone has an agenda and just wants to hear
>that their activities are totally green.

That's a bit of a generalisation, and thus teetering toward being at least partly wrong, though in general I would agree. But in Australia, unlike many places, we have the luxury of being able to set aside areas because their environmental protection is the top priority and still have somewhere to pursue our personal 'agenda'. Many countries do not, particularly when it comes to climbing rock - the UK being a prime example.

It's easier for us to compromise than it is for many others, to act in the best interests of the land. Does EVERY crag have to be 'developed' here? Just climb somewhere else. Does EVERY crag that gets climbed need bolts and rap stations and tracks and guides and hype?

Nobodies activity is totally green, not if they're reading this on a computer, sitting in a building, having got there by an automobile, wearing clothes. So I think that accusation is a bit of a straw man.

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There are 85 messages in this topic.

 

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