[Fiend]

Good posts, glad I posted it here as well as UKC .

So the thoughts seem to vary from such ascents requiring a wise head and loads of experienced, to requiring a young gutsy hotshot, to requiring euro-style sport fitness.

Well, to put it in perspective, consider the following routes, what would be required for them and who would be most likely to onsight them:

Welcome To The Cruel World - hard brutal climbing with good protection.

Alchemie - hard climbing with a long runout about good protection.

Harder Faster - not so hard climbing but obtuse rock and possibly a very serious fall.

Indian Face - easy climbing but totally committing and fatal.

???

[Houdini]

Well - I've had a little more time to think about this extremely interesting question.

I think it was JBrown who noted just how important a healthy "scene" is - in terms of the competition than can arise when evenly matched arrogant and talented young men & women are crammed into the same jar.

A handful of years ago, before they began to sort their lives out a little more using the time-honoured formula of injecting a little love into their personal equation......

                                                                                     ("What is Love?   The most natural painkiller there is."    William S Burroughs)

                                                       .......and found themselves girlfriends;  I can name two friends friends from the N. Wales scene who were intensely, intensely competetive with each other.  This ferocitiy of competition between them spurred them into a dangerous game of one-upmanship.  Ultimately resulting in some extremely worthy on-sights.

Again it was JB who noted just how one's priorities in life change when we begin to grow up a bit, settle down, find other avenues of expression - or that our balls shrink with time:  Bang on the money.

Twenty-something years ago; when N. Wales was still a new router's paradise, climbers flocked to Wales in their droves to take advantage of the wealth of unclimbed rock at Gogarth and in the Dinorwig Quarries.  One look in either of those early guidebooks will show you just how important a time this was for development.  Competition for the 'plum lines' was fierce.  That has now faded as the available lines have mostly been climbed.   People moved away, found other areas to climb in.  It's a shame that we have such little unclimbed rock left; because when it was still there, competition was rife amongst the hones - and great things happened.

This desire:  The need to be 'the one' to do it first - to stamp one's authority on the rock and in the process immortalise oneself, may not be so strong ever again: fresh rock can drive a man to madness.  And it's just not there anymore.

It's also extremely difficult in these times to actually - truly - onsight.  There is just so much information available to us all that genuine onsights are becoming increasingly hard to perform.