Today Nat and I braved the crowds in the works (obviously lots of people made a weekend of it), the session was going well after a shaky start (confidence wise on Nat's part)... I won't bore people with details of problems but the new yellows were fun and soon enough I was trying the comp wall problems. Did the grey again 1st time in much better style (it's soft for 7a)...Then did a few more and was happy to finish by flashing the yellow comp wall up Percy's cluster of volumes (however it seems to circumnavigate the majority of them), spotted by Andy.
Walked past Travs and Mike Lea attempting the problem detailed in the last post, I muttered some words to Travs about my incident and right on cue Mike took the same nasty fall, Trav's did the same and they both moved on. I mentioned it to Sam and he looked horrified and vowed to fiddle with the foothold.
Recently Dave Macleod soloed a sport route that was reported as an 8c solo, firstly this doesn't sit comfortably with me, why does some one self engineer danger? especially in such a contrived manner, he needs a rope and harness to get down so why the f*ck doesn't he use one to get up? Secondly the clips are still in (ok so they're semi-permanent) but again he's wearing a harness so every meter or so there some kind of back up safety point so if you are going to make a point of soloing it, do it properly. His reasons for doing so didn't seem very sensible to me either: you can confident as you like soloing whatever at 50' overhanging that doesn't mean that you can solo something of similar difficulty on a slab, especially if said slab will not have semi permanent draws hanging every 1m. Lastly: Is it truly 8c? I hate to say it but I was cynical from the start.
Its very interesting when people are at their top level (not specifically this ascent I must add it just got me thinking) to see what they do re: grades, its very easy to take the big grade and this happens a lot (I've most definitely been guilty of this in the past), a lot of people also go down the other path of just pretending like everything is a path which leads to needless downgrading (...and this). Hopefully at the end the day a consensus leads to a good understanding of a given problem/route's difficulty, if this doesn't happen cutting edge ascents mean nothing as they could well already be history, the 'Next Level' may just be a crock of sh*t (like this post no doubt)...
Right now for something a bit more light hearted, this was published this week after Nat won a Road Safety quiz at her works. Oh the irony.
2 comments:
yo paul check doylos blog:
www.doylosblog.blogspot.com
Re the solo you are talking about, I wasn't wearing a harness and didn't need a rope to get down (I climbed to the top of the crag). I don't think looking at the type of terrain of the route will help understand the reasons for doing it - mental confidence is more subtle than that. Basically, whatever works for you in your own head to make you a more confident climber is the right thing to do. Same goes for enjoyment - what climbing isn't self-engineered to some degree?
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