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4000 New Routes (Read 10192 times)

Pantontino

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#25 Re: 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 03:55:20 pm
Regardless of his faults his contribution to british climbing is huge and, to me, a net positive.

 I agree

I agree too.

Davo

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#26 Re: 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 03:56:29 pm
Davo - you were right to think what you originally did. It's not exactly controversial to say that Gary hasn't climbed every route he's claimed to have. What isn't in doubt is that he's equipped more routes than anyone. I've actually seen it in action at Craig Arthur - saw him bolting a couple of lines there, he said he hadn't climbed them but on checking his website when I got home he'd already named, graded and dated them. C'est la vie, his contribution is massive and generally I've got lots of respect for much of what he's done even with the odd white lie.

Maybe we should adopt the French view about routes - namely that the equipper/opener of the route gets the naming rights rather than the person that did the actual first ascent?? (I believe that is the system but maybe I am misunderstanding it?)

I personally am grateful for all the developing and equipping that he has done and think he is to be congratulated for that but I don't like the idea of bolting a route, stating that you have climbed it and then naming it etc as the first ascentionist. This seems to me to be a touch disingenuous and isn't what climbing should be about. I have always liked the black and white aspect of climbing - i.e. if you get to the top in one go - you have climbed it. If you don't - you haven't climbed it.

Dave

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#27 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 08:30:00 pm
What concerns me more than the naming/claiming business is that recently bolts pulled out on one or two of his routes, and if only a fraction of a percentage of the bolts he's placed over the years on those 4000 routes are dodgy then someone out there is in for a nasty shock one day. Lets face it nobody is perfect, but when we're in a game where bolts are implicitly trusted ( and rightly or wrongly they are trusted without question 99.99% of the time) then someone is going to be let down bigtime.

Of course an interesting discussion might be if those 4000 routes had been spread between say 50 other first ascentionists then statistically would there be more or fewer bad bolts out there? Argument of experience versus possible complacency.

psychomansam

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#28 Re: 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 09:59:47 pm
To me Gary's done a great job putting up routes in the 6's where there were none. They may not be the best in many cases, but a lot of the time owt's better 'an nowt.

For a man who's put in thousands of bolts, it's impressive how few have been duds. And you can't put up 4000 routes without ruffling some feathers, missing out some prior ascents and making lots of other mistakes along the way. There's also no way anyone could manage to achieve this without having the odd personality problem.

I think if you haven't contributed even 5% as many new routes as he has, you're not really in a position to criticize.

petejh

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#29 Re: 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 10:00:36 pm
I'd guesstimate 50 people would bring in a hell of a lot more potential for error.
4000 routes, the large majority of them involving bolts, say an average of 6 bolts per route. Do the maths - it's very impressive there have been so few occurrences of Gary's bolting going wrong - 3 routes involving a total of 5 or 6 bolts that I've heard about. Experienced climbers have placed 1/50th that number and messed up.

a dense loner

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#30 Re: 4000 New Routes
July 15, 2013, 10:35:56 pm
I don't really understand your post Sam, are you saying if you haven't put up/bolted 200 routes then you're not in a position to criticise someone for lying about first ascents or not in a position to criticise someone purely for the bolts theyve put in failing?

 

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