UKBouldering.com

Franco's ground up ascent of The Young at Callaly (Read 28199 times)

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29220
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
Indeed. And if the bottom is indeed that straighforward, surely the best thing to do is to just go back and make good?

Sasquatch

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1984
  • Karma: +153/-1
  • www.akclimber.com
    • AkClimber
So if he goes back and does it, does it still count as "ground up"?   :worms: :worms:

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29220
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
I would say yes

andy popp

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
Yes, definitely.

monkoffunk

Offline
  • ****
  • forum abuser
  • Posts: 721
  • Karma: +60/-0
  • sponsored by 90% lindt and vitamin D
I would say definitely not.


I also don’t think he ‘should’ do anything.

andy popp

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
I would say definitely not.

Actually, on reflection, you're probably right.

Snoops

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 496
  • Karma: +20/-0
Indeed. And if the bottom is indeed that straighforward, surely the best thing to do is to just go back and make good?

That is the crux of the issue.
He should either of done what he's done and privately enjoyed it.

Or if he'd wanted to shout about something...waited til he was strong enough to go bottom to top.

Simple really

ferret

Offline
  • ****
  • forum abuser
  • Posts: 545
  • Karma: +40/-4
So if he goes back and does it, does it still count as "ground up"?   :worms: :worms:
No, but it would still be bloody impressive

Johnny Brown

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 11437
  • Karma: +690/-22
My ground-up ethic has always been that anything goes apart from artificial aid. So yeah I'd call that ground-up.

mrjonathanr

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5377
  • Karma: +242/-6
  • Getting fatter, not fitter.
If that isn't ground up, which is the bit which is abbed or top-roped?  :-\
Surely if it is climbed from the bottom it's ground up no matter how many goes/days it involves?

monkoffunk

Offline
  • ****
  • forum abuser
  • Posts: 721
  • Karma: +60/-0
  • sponsored by 90% lindt and vitamin D
He will have ground up climbed a bit of rock, but if that is the goal then he is already done that so why bother doing it again?

He won’t have ground upped ‘the young’ because he has already climbed the top via an alternate route. He has already practiced those moves so he can’t do the route ground up.

mrjonathanr

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5377
  • Karma: +242/-6
  • Getting fatter, not fitter.

He won’t have ground upped ‘the young’ because he has already climbed the top via an alternate route. He has already practiced those moves so he can’t do the route ground up.

Indulge me- I'm genuinely confused here.  Does it matter if he climbed part of the route previously? If the upper section was previously achieved ground up, it's still ground up now, surely? It's just ground up in a different order on different days.

That's a similar distinction to onsight vs flash, but it still retains the ethic of from the ground only. Or do you feel that ground up must be in the natural sequence from the ground on that day?



Johnny Brown

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 11437
  • Karma: +690/-22
He won’t have ground upped ‘the young’ because he has already climbed the top via an alternate route. He has already practiced those moves so he can’t do the route ground up.

Nah.

abarro81

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 4286
  • Karma: +341/-25
I'm with monkoffunk on this one

Johnny Brown

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 11437
  • Karma: +690/-22
So presumably you think having onsighted/ ground-upped Great Western invalidates your subsequent onsight/ ground-up of Western Front?

Nah.

Either you are 'practicing' - i.e. using aid to get on moves you couldn't climb to - or you're climbing. To suggest otherwise is to push the idea where you may not follow the logical progression of difficulty on a buttress or invalidate your subsequent ascents. Which is bullshit.

SA Chris

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 29220
  • Karma: +630/-11
    • http://groups.msn.com/ChrisClix
I'm with JB on this one.

reeve

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 435
  • Karma: +81/-1
To my mind, although an ascent from the ground would now be ground up in an aesthetic sense, but it would not be in a performance sense.

To elaborate, hypothetically imagine two routes of the same grade, with independent starts and finishes but a shared crux sequence in the middle. For the purpose of this example, both starts and finishes are much easier than the crux bit in the middle. So, I set off on route A, but fall off the crux. Having tried it once, I have now realised my mistake and know what I should have done. Having spent my youth reading High magazine, I know that onsighting is the only thing that really counts, so I don't bother trying it again. Instead, I'll try route B, but of course knowing what to do at the crux makes it easy, so I "on sight" it. But of course it isn't an onsight ascent, even though there was no pre-practice or abseiling involved.

If you call Franco's possible future ascent of The Young ground up, you fail to take into account the advantage he will have gained by practicing the top from the adjacent route. I remember trying a highball / mini-route (on the NYMs as it happens), but I didn't dare do the pop to the jug at the top as I wasn't sure if I could reach it, so I kept down climbing. After repeatedly failing to commit, I climbed an adjacent VS and hand traversed to the finishing jug, dangled my feet down to check I could stretch from the good footholds to the jug - which I could - then did it from the bottom the next go. Sure, I didn't top rope it or ab, but it's clearly a tainted ascent from a ground-up perspective, because it was pretty straight forward with my shenanigans, yet beyond my ability / boldness without them. Calling my effort "ground-up" would put it on a par with someone who followed the line without messing around on a VS, which it clearly wasn't.

For the avoidance of doubt, all of this is meant to serve a purpose of denigrating his ascent and attempts at gaining public notoriety (not really Franco  :) )

Johnny Brown

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 11437
  • Karma: +690/-22
The point of 'ground-up' to me is it embraces all this with the sole proviso that you start at the ground. Your example would invalidate an onsight - as you say - but not a ground-up. That's the point of the category.

Yes, going without would be better. If you think that should be a different category, what about traversing off - like Mickey did - should it invalidate a subsequent ascent by 'practicing the start'? If so, what about falling off? On purpose?
« Last Edit: April 09, 2019, 11:53:44 am by Johnny Brown »

36chambers

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1678
  • Karma: +154/-4
If you're allowed to traverse in from an adjacent route, are you allowed to place gear in that route to make working the real line safer?

Assuming you lead the real line properly from the start afterwards (without the off-piste gear), can you still claim GU?

Johnny Brown

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 11437
  • Karma: +690/-22
Going back to the Great Western/ Western Front example, I don't see why not. What would invalidate it is falling off Great Western then getting back on by top-roping up Western Front.

What Franco has done, whether intentionally or not, is create a new route/ variation on existing routes.

Ground-up has never been a standard to aspire to, it's what you default to after the onsight has failed. Done badly I think it's a fair argument that a swift headpoint might be better style, but (I'd argue) of a lesser challenge.

andy popp

Online
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 5525
  • Karma: +347/-5
Having gone back and forth on this I think if Franco went back now and climbed The Young cleanly from the ground he could claim a ground up, even though when he first climbed the top section he gained it from easier climbing to the right.

Ground-up has never been a standard to aspire to, it's what you default to after the onsight has failed.

Whilst this is certainly true it also obscures the fact that GU can be a very fine second best. Some of my best and most satisfying efforts have been GU ascents.

Will Hunt

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Superworm is super-long
  • Posts: 7976
  • Karma: +631/-115
    • Unknown Stones
The Great Western/Western Front example doesn't really work because all the difficulty on Western Front is independent from Great Western.
My view of a pure ground up ascent is of climbing a route with no top-rope inspection or abseil inspection and you have to pull rope and strip gear in between gos. In reality, this is very rarely going to happen because stripping kit between attempts is a momumental faff. It's not quite yo-yoing but on some routes it'll make a huge difference to the ultimate difficulty if most of the gear isn't placed on the final push.

If I was in any position to set the rules then I would define very broad criteria for onsight/flash/ground-up/redpoint/headpoint and any frigs within those categories must simply be declared to anybody who might give a shit.

I remember JB getting irked because I said I'd done Flame Arete "ground-up" after abbing down it and making sure it was clean. This to me seemed like the sensible way to do it as things at Hawkcliffe will generally want a dusting down. Anybody who might care (nobody) about this stylistic frig can see exactly what I did in my logbook. Because I worked the moves off the ledge, then calling it ground-up with caveats seemed like the right thing.

Similarly, I ticked Grand Illusion as onsight despite having done GW and the 5 star finish multiple times before, because the climbing either side of the three moves that is Grand Illusion is 5a and GI is 6a.


Then of course, there are those who don't care and have no scruples. My favourite UKC logbook entry is dunnyg' (of this Parish) entry for WYSIWYG:

26/Aug/09
TR dnf
Got to the big jug, before it goes off left,puddle in it, pinged off. Good up until then.

30/May/12
Lead dog
Bolt to bolt to start. Got it wired. One tricky move! 3 lead attempts.

01/Jun/12
Lead (flash)
yay. felt like poo. clipsticked up, then lead it. Easy for 7b.

reeve

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 435
  • Karma: +81/-1
Going back to the Great Western/ Western Front example, I don't see why not. What would invalidate it is falling off Great Western then getting back on by top-roping up Western Front.

That's a good counter-example and I intended to address it in my last post but forgot. I think it's different because the finish of Great Western isn't the crux of Western Front. The knowledge and familiarity you gain from doing Great Western isn't going to make a material difference to your onsight or GU of Western Front. But that's not the same with The Young, which (from my armchair understanding) is difficult to do GU because you've got to do a hard bit at the top and the hard bit at the top is at the top. Traversing-in to practice the top is a much easier proposition than having to work it out when tired and a bit stressed from having completed the starting boulder problem. [ah, I see now that Will beat me to it with this argument]
 
Quote
Ground-up has never been a standard to aspire to, it's what you default to after the onsight has failed. Done badly I think it's a fair argument that a swift headpoint might be better style, but (I'd argue) of a lesser challenge.

I slightly disagree, in that I think GU (as in, not resorting to top roping or inspection) can be a standard to aspire to, but I fully agree with your sentiment that there are a lot of grey areas and it's very difficult to compare across different situations. Having said that, I think that lumping the 'traversing-in then ground up' approach with the 'I only stayed on the line ground up' bundles together two very different approaches (one of which can be significantly harder than the other), to such a degree that the label of doing something GU becomes so broad that it loses meaning.

I'm not losing sleep over it however, because I think the same happens with other labels we use. It's like the difference between a flash with minimal knowledge (like knowing where the crux is and that there is a hidden rock 2 but you can't remember where you were told to look for it) versus a full spray down beta-fest and your mate racking the gear on your harness in order for you to place it. To give both of those ascents the same label is similarly too broad to be really helpful. Perhaps I'm getting round to saying that none of the terms for style of ascent can account for the whole range of devious tricks one might use, and this example goes to show that. The answer is probably to explain what you actually did. But personally I still wouldn't call traversing-in to practice the top first a ground up ascent.

Teaboy

Offline
  • *****
  • forum hero
  • Posts: 1176
  • Karma: +72/-2
If he goes back he will have improved in the style in which the route has previously been climbed. There will still be improvements to be made (proper ground up, on-sight, no chalk etc. etc.) but for me the most impressive but of any such ascent will always be commiting to those top moves not knowing what's up there and Franco has done that to a certain extent (no idea how much beta he had). Ethical improvements in how routes are climbed are often minor rather than a great leap forward and I think Franco has made a minor step forward, so fair play to him. The rest is just a semantics.

reeve

Offline
  • ***
  • obsessive maniac
  • Posts: 435
  • Karma: +81/-1
If he goes back he will have improved in the style in which the route has previously been climbed. There will still be improvements to be made (on-sight, no chalk etc. etc.) but for me the most impressive but of any such ascent will always be commuting to those top moves not knowing what's up there and Franco has done that to a certain extent (no idea how much beta he had). Ethical improvements in how routes are climbed are often minor rather than a great leap forward and I think Franco has made a minor step forward, so fair play to him. The rest is just a semantics.

That's a great yet apt autocorrect right there

 

SimplePortal 2.3.7 © 2008-2024, SimplePortal