[petejh]

Mark, Jack, Alan (and cc many). So the truth is you're making a 'select' guide to n.wales, but you're including definitive coverage of all the main areas of n.wales limestone (see email to Alan below). Just to remind you - this is the area which is now 16 years without a definite guidebook, which has so much good, undocumented climbing that people don't know about, which has been subject to huge efforts of re-development supported by the bolt fund which the definitive guide is giving back to through all profits made, and for which the definitive guide is due out this year.
But your business plan shows that you aren't satisfied with just competing for a select guidebook market. You want to be the first to market with definitive information to mop up as many customers from NW Lime as possible. Thanks guys, that's really supportive of the area and not at all arrogant, cynical or parasitic of you. Bad faith isn't the word. Good business - but climbing isn't a business to 99% of people. This is not good.

You stated in 2011, when you decided to drop your selective NW Limestone guide in the face of people prepared to do a proper job, that 'the NW Lime area cannot support two guidebooks'.
It still can't.

It's very clear that this was your plan from the day you said the words above. Hence the very short notice between your announcement this week and publication this autumn. How very cynical.
 
Including virtually definitive coverage of the major areas on N.Wales Limestone shows a massive lack of good faith on your part towards the definitive guidebook authors who are donating the profits from the guide to the bolt-fund which enabled the area to be re-developed, and to the people who have bothered to put huge amounts of effort into re-developing this area - under the impression it will be showcased in a definitive guide. A reasonable approach by you would be selective coverage similar to that of Groundup's North Wales Rock.

I really don't know why I'd bother to finish my guide now. It has been 3 years in the making and it has been the driving force behind the re-development of Upper Pen Trwyn, LPT, The Diamond, Castell y Gwynt and many more good crags which warrant showcasing. If I'm correct (Alan you refuse to give a straight answer), your actions makes the whole environment so much harder and so much less worthwhile to produce anything of any real value.

Alan - you refused to answer me when I asked what coverage you're including in your guide because, as you show below, you're bitter and angry that I stood up to you in 2011 when I reported you to the Information Commissioner's Office for breaking multiple laws under the data protection act, and for which you were rightly formally cautioned. Because of a grudge, you're prepared to fuck over an entire climbing scene?

Alan. To what extent are you intending to cover North Wales Limestone? I ask for a few reasons. Reading the publicity you state 'the choice of what to included is based as much on the crag it is on as the route itself. If we include a crag then we tend to include a good selection of routes on that crag.'
The 'crags' (some are areas) you list for nw limestone are:
Upper Pen Trwyn, Lower Pen Trwyn, Lighthouse Area, Little Orme, Castle Inn Quarry, Penmaen Head.
Another reason I ask is because the route lists on the rockfax page showing what's going in the guide include every single route for the limestone areas, yet for all the other areas you list a selection of the better routes, i.e. -
Craig Pant Ifan lists 11 routes,
Clogwyn y Grochan - 17 routes,
Cloggy - 27 routes
Carreg Wastad - 11 routes
Dinas Mot area - 12 routes

In contrast, the route list for the NW Limestone section is:
LPT - 57 routes (every route)
Upper Pen Trwyn - 220 routes (every route, more or less)
Castell y Gwynt - 21 routes (every route)
The Diamond - 18 routes (every route)
Castle Inn Quarry - 14 (every route on the main wall)


Are you intending to include virtually definitive coverage for these limestone areas?
If you are, and I really hope you aren't, then this isn't a selective guide at all - it's a selective guide for 90% of the content but includes definitive coverage of all the main areas of north wales limestone - with a clear goal of beating to market the actual definitive guide for the area which has been three years in the making and which has been the driving force for the re-development of this area. And are you intending to cover any other limestone crags not listed?
 
If I'm correct, it shoes a level of cynicism and disregard for people which I thought was beyond even you.

I look forward to your response.


Pete

.......

After your action with the Information Commisionors Office I will not deal with you on any level, on any topic.

If you want to know what is in our guide, then you can wait for it to be published.

Alan
_________
Alan James, Director
UKClimbing - http://www.ukclimbing.com
UKHillwalking - http://www.ukhillwalking.com
Rockfax - http://www.rockfax.com

[James Malloch]

Ouch! I did think that it was short notice for a guide to be announced and then sold...

Pretty shitty of them and definitely the kind of reason that various shops have advised me to get other publications other than their's (where possible, of course)!

[biscuit]

There's only one way to sort this out.....



 


Seriously though, at face value this does seem shitty.

I wouldn't have replied to the e mail. It doesn't look good. "After you reported me for breaking some laws/rules, that i was found guilty of, i am not going to speak to you."
 

[Luke Owens]

Oh man that is low.

Trying to capitalise on un-fully documented area's when the definitive guide has been publicly in the making for 3 years, due out so soon and is actually giving everything back to the bolt fund...

Fairly obvious what they are trying to achieve with their quick to be released"selective" guide 

Hopefully people will buy the right one... I know I will.

[SA Chris]

+1 to all of the above.

Hopefully the masses will see this thread, seeing as UKB is the second most widely used non-UKC related website read by UKC readers (after the BMC's) the stats tell the truth.

Seems cynical, devious and underhanded to me. Unless he is prepared to justify his actions. Hope this isn't spiteful or vindictive due to the resons given above.

[slackline]

Not overly surprising, Rockfax have precedence for this behaviour on the continent and pissed-off of a lot of publishers of local guides in the South of France and other areas if I remember correctly.

Please don't give up on your guide Pete.

[Davo]

Yeah, don't give up on the guide please.

I for one am keen to purchase it and shan't be buying the rockfax one.

When is the NW Limestone guide coming out???

Cheers Dave

[csurfleet]

Watdafuck...

Will not be buying the cockfax!

[petejh]

It should be autumn but every deadline I've set with this thing has slipped, I'm doing the layout now and there's a couple of intro's left to write. The big thing about this area is we can't route-check most things until we've re-equipped them. And it makes no sense to write up large numbers of good routes as having rubbish fixed gear.  I've been doing lots of the re-equipping at the same time as the doing the guide, and it takes a long time to bring the amount of climbing that was littered with 80s and 90s non-stainless litter back to life.

[Jaspersharpe]

Stick with it Pete. You're doing a fantastic job with the re-equipping and I'm sure the guide will be great.

Words fail me for the depths those fuckers will sink to.

[Luke Owens]

It should be autumn but every deadline I've set with this thing has slipped, I'm doing the layout now and there's a couple of intro's left to write. The big thing about this area is we can't route-check most things until we've re-equipped them. And it makes no sense to write up large numbers of good routes as having rubbish fixed gear.  I've been doing lots of the re-equipping at the same time as the doing the guide, and it takes a long time to bring the amount of climbing that was littered with 80s and 90s non-stainless litter back to life.

Stick with it Pete, you are doing an amazing job with the re-equipping and the whole lot will be brought to life when your guide is out.

No matter what Alan and Co. end up publishing it isn't going to be a patch on the what you put in your guide.

You've got first hand experience and up to date extensive knowledge from the locals against what will probably be regurgitated unchanged info from the 1997 NWL Rockfax...

If anything this whole thing should spur you on!

[GCW]

Whilst I am in no way suggesting that there has been any underhandedness by RockFax, it's interesting to read this and think back to the publication of the bouldering in the Western Grit guide which strangely contained the same grade errors as some of my guides before I updated them.  Mysterious.

[tomtom]

Man, thats low... stick it out Pete.

I hope the masses vote with their feet and don't buy it. Is this on UKC... ah.. let me guess...

The big thing about this area is we can't route-check most things until we've re-equipped them. And it makes no sense to write up large numbers of good routes as having rubbish fixed gear.  I've been doing lots of the re-equipping at the same time as the doing the guide, and it takes a long time to bring the amount of climbing that was littered with 80s and 90s non-stainless litter back to life.

Thinking of the above - this must always be the case with guides - knowing when to stop writing up what is there (a census date if you like) and leave all other changes since alone. Maybe you could include the old description - but put an * next to it with a footnote that these routes are all due to be upgraded from the N.Wales bolt fund etc...? (or words to that effect) That way folk can make up their own mind - or even check online in the future etc..?

[Fiend]

I really don't know why I'd bother to finish my guide now.

Because I, like the other people in this thread, will buy it (if I move South of course). I certainly would not be buying the Rockfax North Wales select guide which I think is a ludicrously pointless idea given how good the Ground Up NWR select guide is.

Emotive issues aside, if those route numbers are correct, that is a shocking skew towards definitive Orme coverage and a complete imbalance in select guide focus and I would very much like to see Rockfax justification for that.

Edit:

I think Rockfax would do better to spend their time on another project that would be in the best interest of rock climbers rather than the bank balance. We already have a fantastic selective guide to North Wales in NWR and I think Rockfax would struggle to match its quality.

^^^ This quote from some guy on UKC sums it up well. Rockfax have, in the past, produced some useful guides, definitive and select, that have provided genuinely helpful coverage (e.g. Costa Blanca, first NWL RF, even Northern England (given how sketchy North East England and Northumberland definitives are)). They've also produced a lot of re-hashing, duplicating, honeypot guides that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, and this looks like the latter.

[Oldmanmatt]

I might check Rockfax for a down and dirty web search, or a "where shall I go" type thing, but I wouldn't swap it for a locally produced guide!
Would anyone?

[SA Chris]

Thousands do matt.

[petejh]

Thanks all for the encouragement, I am pretty despondent and wondering why I'm bothering but a hell of a lot of hard work has gone on by a lot of people and it does make sense to finish it off. Projects like this aren't commercially viable - definitive guides in the UK are basically subsidised either by club subs or voluntary effort and that's fine by me - I really appreciate that people are passionate enough about areas to want to spend the time chronicling fully the climbing in them. I'm doing this because I want to and luckily I don't need to make a living out of it.

[slackline]

Perhaps get a special edition printed with your avatart on the front and send it to Mr James.

[tomtom]

If you want a hand with any bits (I'm good at proof reading etc..) then give me a shout. Happy to help - and help stick a couple of fingers up at Borgfax

[Luke Owens]

If you want a hand with any bits (I'm good at proof reading etc..) then give me a shout. Happy to help - and help stick a couple of fingers up at Borgfax

Same here, if you need a hand just let me know Pete!

[remus]

Just to clarify, where does it say that all these routes will be included in the guide?

As far as I can see the details provided only link to the crags that will be included with no mention of which routes will be included. The sparsity of routes in the other areas could be explained by the fact that RF hasn't done a definitive guide to those areas thus they don't have database entries for most of the routes. Given that they've previously published a NW lime guide it makes sense that they would have lots of routes in their database, perhaps even more so depending on how far they got in documenting routes for their abandoned NW lime guide.

To offer another point of view, it seems very strange that they would produce a guide that is as unbalanced as what you are suggesting. Even your average punter would flick through and wonder why the fuck LPT gets as much space as every crag in the pass.

[slackline]

The sparsity of routes in the other areas could be explained by the fact that RF hasn't done a definitive guide to those areas thus they don't have database entries for most of the routes. Given that they've previously published a NW lime guide it makes sense that they would have lots of routes in their database, perhaps even more so depending on how far they got in documenting routes for their abandoned NW lime guide.

206 routes listed for Clogwyn Du'r Arrdu vs 27 routes indicated above
106 routes listed for Dinas Mot vs 12 routes indicated above
etc.

I very much doubt the lack of a database entries will be the reason for disparity in coverage.

[remus]

206 routes listed for Clogwyn Du'r Arrdu vs 27 routes indicated above
106 routes listed for Dinas Mot vs 12 routes indicated above
etc.

I very much doubt the lack of a database entries will be the reason for disparity in coverage.

I'm not convinced.

As far as I can tell RF have just chosen which crags they want to include then linked to the relevant RF database pages in the hope that people will comment, vote etc. on routes and make their job easier. UKC route entries are not duplicated on the RF database so I see no evidence that any selection of routes has been presented to us.

[butterworthtom]

Potentially they are shooting themselves in the foot, as climbing shops have an option about which guide they would prefer to stock. If I owned a shop after seeing this, I know which one I would go for.

[biscuit]

Whilst I am in no way suggesting that there has been any underhandedness by RockFax, it's interesting to read this and think back to the publication of the bouldering in the Western Grit guide which strangely contained the same grade errors as some of my guides before I updated them.  Mysterious.

Strangely the same happened with the David Munilla Andalucia guide where wrong grades (  6a+ but it's actually 7a for example ) ended up in the Rockfax.

Must be a coincidence.