DAVETHOMAS90
Don't die with your music still inside you ;)
remus said:grimer said:History, like this, is such a hard-to-define thing. This thread is looking back through today's eyes (via grades ascribed in 2021) to the achievements of the past. I keep thinking that things didn't work the way we see them today.
Cave Arete Direct on Laddow from like 1920 gets 'The First E1', but it's short and above heather and I wouldn't be surprised if there were harder leads about at the time.
The Rasp, today, gets E2. Goliath, E4/5. Steve Bancroft once told me that, in his day, Goliath was just the nest thing you did after The Rasp. So in the 1970s they were much the same. Grades put Goliath close to White Wand, but they were decades apart, and rightly so.
Surely the important thing is what were the big leaps in the era in question. And I guess for that you have to ask Ando Popp and his contemporaries, people climbing around when the first E7 onsights / flashes or whatever were happening. What felt like the new thing?
Patch on Raped; Bransby on Impact Day; Leo on Masters; Steve Mac on Nightmayer; James on everything?
What are today's breakthroughs?
I think this is an excellent point. I've had a few goes at putting together 'first of the grade' lists on climbing-history.org but it always seems to work out strangely: if you just go by the numbers you end up with things that have recently been upgraded going in, whereas at the time they were clearly not such a big thing.
All complicated by changes in technology and style too. I can imagine The Rasp and Goliath feel fairly similar if you've not got a phat rack of cams dangling off your harness and some sport fitness from your recent kalymnos trip. I bet they weren't milking the kneebars on the rasp back in the day!
The 'first 9a+' is a good example of this, with the answer spanning 4 routes and 5 years depending on who you ask and which routes you retrospectively upgrade.
.."if you just go by the numbers you end up with things that have recently been upgraded going in, whereas at the time they were clearly not such a big thing".
That's the point I was making. I hadn't seen Grimer's very un-grimer like post above. ;D
But surely that's the context in which we're really asking the question. What ascents were breaking new ground from what had gone before?
A slightly different point, is that from a historical perspective it's also worth thinking about practices at the time - what was the norm - what would have been considered no great deal at the time.
Re not having a rack of massive cams on Goliath - and perhaps related to current practices at the time, a funny incident occurred with Dave Pegg on the route.
He'd made the trip out to Burbage before the rest of us, and when we arrived, we all waved back to Dave, who was waving to us from the edge. We dived into the quarry to muck about for a while. When we came out and started walking up to the edge, Dave was still waving and yelling, hugging the chockstone on Goliath, having tried to solo it. We found it very funny :lol: He was definitely milking the knee-bar.