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General Climbing Discussion

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Classic Climbs of Australia 16-Jan-2013 At 7:13:25 PM Cam McKenzie

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hey Simon,
I agree that crappy old pegs aren't all that inspiring. Having said that though, I clipped a hell of a lot of them (of varying degrees of age and dodginess) in the Dolomites and kind of got used to it. Different situation to Frenchman's though.

Degaulle's direct certainly looks amazing (though I'm positive it's well beyond my meagre talents), and from my understanding was established ground up, with a hand drill.

While I can see that the idea of adventurous bolted routes is appealing, it seems that once there's a precedent set, standards drop pretty quickly. I don't know if the euro's are more restrained in bolting their alpine rock routes, or if we just don't hear about the crappy clip ups that get bolted, but it seems like over here (Australia, not Tassie specifically) that as soon as there are bolts placed then it's a slippery slope before squeezed in clip ups start appearing.

While I find it unlikely that something like that would happen at Frenchman's, you never know. Additionally, as someone else pointed out, it's a world heritage area, and it would be very easy for parks to ban climbing there if they got pissed off with climbers antics.

I think that it's much clearer if these wilderness crags have an ethic of 'ground up, minimal if any bolts, hand drilled on lead'. Then there's no (less) room for interpretation.