The essence of traditional climbing is the onsight attempt? Is that right? Once you have knowledge of the gear, the moves, and the direction of the route it ceases to be a traditional climb? [..]So basically when Stennard first decided to hang on the rope after falling and not lower is when the traditional style started breaking down? I have to admit, dude is my hero, and any style he climbed in is one I aspire to.

at the very essence of climbing is the voluntary restraint of available means

if the cure for cancer were on the summit of Cerro Torre, any means would be allowed

Essentialy, trad climbing is when Stannard first decided to hang on the rope after falling, he most have bail the route, try easier route to improve there knowledge and come back later to understand why he understand after the first time and getting better. Trad climbing is a step father in commiting yourself in a chalenging environment.

Trad climbing is not one think, it is many criteria. Some cimber prefer to second and also trad climb. They are for ever in top rope. A team is more a trad concept than in sport where each climber is in charge of his style of climbing.

Sport climbing is great too. Look at martial arts, gymnastique, diving from a 10 meter tower or 1 meter...they repeate the move ten's of time in a way that the body remember the position instinctively. That is why Stennard try the moves many times. He is a good 5.12 sport climber, but never a 5.8 trad climber.

Is Stennard proud of that distinction. I think that if his friends understand that sport and trad are different, Stennard will willingly learn to trad as a second sport. He can be as good as a trad climber trying to climb a 5.12 in a gym.

Anyone who doubted my claim that without such discussions, trad climbing will just turn into sport climbing has only to read the responses in this thread to see truth of the assertion.

I think Gabe gives an excellent description of the current state of trad. I can't say I personally agree with every part of it, but it seems close to what most people (who aren't clueless---and there are plenty of those too) believe.

The tricky part for me is the idea that an ascent made by virtue of hangdogging, top-roping, and previewing is still a trad ascent:


I don't argue that such techniques aren't accepted by today's best climbers, and that they aren't necessary in order to manage the fantastic difficulty levels these climbers are achieving. And I've already made it clear that each generation refines the rules in order to advance the difficulty standards. All that said, these ascents are sport climbing with gear and simply do not fit in the traditional mold. Period. I think Joe has explained this with great clarity already and won't try to improve on it.

As I've said before, the real problem is that such "exceptional" techniques, which may well be necessary for the extreme climbs they are used on, almost immediately percolate down the difficulty scale and end up eroding the large spectrum of traditional climbs that are still fully amenable to traditional approaches.

Here is an example from my personal experience. A year or two ago I did a route in the Gunks with someone I didn't know but who said he climbed 5.12 in the gym. I have no idea what that meant, but we did a Gunks 5.9. I led the 5.9 part and he got a 5.8 pitch that is long, vertical, and pumpy (for 5.8). (The climber's name and the route are suppressed to protect the perhaps not so innocent.)

Here's what happened: Mr. 5.12 put in a piece every 10-12 feet or so and took a nice long rest on it, exclaiming that it was steep above, he couldn't tell where the route went and whether or when he'd get in another piece, and he needed to be as fresh as possible for whatever he might encounter.

He correctly perceived precisely the challenges of trad climbing but most emphatically declined to meet any of them. 5.12 in the gym or not, this lead was completely over his head. And it took forever to boot.

Eventually, he got up. He was enthusiastic about the pitch, and mentioned he was eager to go back and "get it clean." At this point he knows all the moves, knows where the route goes, knows the gear he used, and where he placed it. The anxiety he had about actually venturing more than a few feet into unknown territory has been replaced by a detailed knowledge of all the route's features. When he does go back, his now complete knowledge of the route may indeed allow him to do it without resting on his gear.

A traditional ascent? Not even close in my book. The route in its original state was completely beyond his abilities. After what he did to get up it the first time, no subsequent ascent undoes the sport climbing methods required to get him up the route.

Now don't get me wrong; he didn't do anything to alter the rock and, given that he has left the climb in the same state he found it in, has every "right" to climb it in whatever style suits him. But sorry, it ain't traditional climbing when you do that, and I think it is worth understanding that it isn't traditional climbing, and that, to use Gabe's language, his original ascent and any subsequent ascent, from the traditional point of view, are forever tainted by the methods employed.

Readers may note I have repeatedly used "traditional" rather than "trad." This is because trad climbing, in spite of all the discussion, means more and more sport climbing on gear, and there really is something else, an increasingly endangered species, that people might aspire to.

I'm well aware of the "who cares" responses we've already had and will continue to see. If you don't care, well then: you don't care; not much more to be said. But I think you should care, because at the very essence of climbing is the voluntary restraint of available means, and once one stops caring about that, the homogenization of all climbing into the Plaisir Climbing model seems inevitable, and trad climbing will be nothing more than a curious historical footnote about a period when people seemed to care inordinately about how they succeeded as much as whether they succeeded.

[Edited to eliminate typos.]

Jacques, I'm not quite sure you know who Stannard actually is, and what his contributions were to traditional climbing. Aside from pushing the standards of American free climbing, he also was a driving force in the clean climbing revolution. I'm pretty sure onsighting 5.8 with a few nuts and a hex or two was WELL within his capabilities.

RR

Is jstan lurking out there somewhere????

Jacques, I'm not quite sure you know who Stannard actually is, and what his contributions were to traditional climbing. Aside from pushing the standards of American free climbing, he also was a driving force in the clean climbing revolution. I'm pretty sure onsighting 5.8 with a few nuts and a hex or two was WELL within his capabilities.
RR
Is jstan lurking out there somewhere????

Terribly sorry, my mistake, I red the text of rgoldt, two post before your post that I quote and the story about someone hanging on the rope was similar. I think that it was his name, but it is an other climber.

I will correct it.

How much of this really has to do with the fact that gear, knowledge, and techniques have improved safety vs. what kind of balls a climber had back in the 1950s (decade chosen out of pure example)?

I get it, traditional climbing is about not weighting the rope, or at the very least not hang-dogging, and I generally accept that definition as my own, but how much of not weighting the rope back in the 1950s had to do with the leader's choice of wanting to climb in a "better style" as opposed to his or her knowledge that falling was dangerous (assume that I mean more dangerous than today with my assumption above)? And, to further the question, if the answer is "style" over safety, how much did safety play a role in choosing style in general?

Sorry if that is a plain question that could have easily been answered by me reading a few books about climbing back in the day, but your post left me wondering that.

Rob and Guangzhou both misread my remarks, extracting the knowledge-of-the-route piece while ignoring the proviso about how the knowledge was obtained.

They also mistook an attempt to give an example of non-traditional gear climbing, in response to a specific comment by Gabe, as somehow constituting a comprehensive definition of traditional climbing. Saying what something is not isn't equivalent to saying what it is.

"Bottom line, a route is either a trad line or it isn't. Regardless of how the person climbing it figures it out. Onsite or red point, lowering on every fall or not. Hanging on a route might not be a traditional "attitude" about climbing, but it doesn't change the trad nature of the route."

I could not agree more Guangzhou!

some people may be lousy or "clueless" Trad climbers (hang on every piece) but they are still Trad climbing.

all gear = Trad
some gear some bolts = mixed
all bolts = Sport
it's really that simple...

A traditional ascent? Not even close in my book. The route in its original state was completely beyond his abilities. After what he did to get up it the first time, no subsequent ascent undoes the sport climbing methods required to get him up the route.

Now don't get me wrong; he didn't do anything to alter the rock and, given that he has left the climb in the same state he found it in, has every "right" to climb it in whatever style suits him. But sorry, it ain't traditional climbing when you do that, and I think it is worth understanding that it isn't traditional climbing, and that, to use Gabe's language, his original ascent and any subsequent ascent, from the traditional point of view, are forever tainted by the methods employed.

"Bottom line, a route is either a trad line or it isn't. Regardless of how the person climbing it figures it out. Onsite or red point, lowering on every fall or not. Hanging on a route might not be a traditional "attitude" about climbing, but it doesn't change the trad nature of the route."

I could not agree more Guangzhou!

some people may be lousy or "clueless" Trad climbers (hang on every piece) but they are still Trad climbing.

all gear = Trad
some gear some bolts = mixed
all bolts = Sport
it's really that simple...

I'm confused. Is the Bachar-Yerian a "mixed" climb, even if the second pitch is all bolts? If that is the crux pitch and its obviously a "Sport" pitch, what does that mean for the whole climb?

Can you answer me?

Whether you "claim" an ascent or not, the ascent occurred; it just wasn't a free ascent.

This thread contains a remarkable amount of entropy, considering that most of the participants are above the 90th percentile in articulateness around here. There seem to be at least five conversations taking place simultaneously:

1. What is an ascent vs. what is not.
2. What is a free ascent vs. what is not.
3. What is a trad ascent vs. what is not.
4. What is sport climbing vs. what is not.
5. What is a redpoint ascent.

I intended to stay out of this discussion, but I find myself compelled to jump in, since I have been under the impression that these issues were settled decades ago.

An ascent is starting at the bottom of a route and getting to the top of it. If you do so without weighting the protection, then it is a free ascent; otherwise, it is not.

In this post, Cracklover has done about the best job imaginable defining what a trad lead is. I have little to add, except that, especially on a multi-pitch route, trad climbing usually also involves someone seconding the route.

A hangdog ascent means that at some point on the route, you continued to the top of the route after having weighted the rope. It doesn't matter whether you weighted the rope only once, after having fallen, or did so repeatedly to work out various moves.

A redpoint ascent means that you free climbed a route following a previous non-free ascent. It doesn't matter whether you previously hangdogged the route, lowered off after a fall, or outright aid climbed it. Although the term is more often used in a sport climbing context than a trad climbing context, it applies to both types of climbing. It doesn't matter that the term did not exist before the inception of sport climbing; the term is now defined as stated in this paragraph's first sentence, which makes no reference to "sport" or "trad."

It is debatable whether a hangdog ascent or subsequent redpoint qualify as trad climbing. Almost surely, at some previous time they did not; climbers were expected to lower to the ground after a fall. However, today, almost no climbers do this. The practice has all but died out, I suspect, because it is a patently inefficient method of attaining a free ascent, learning new moves, or improving at climbing. Besides, you want to get your gear back, a goal that is not facilitated by lowering off your gear and coming back when you have somehow become a better a climber.

Sport climbing is climbing routes protected with bolts, placed in a manner to permit the leader to concentrate on performing difficult moves with minimal physical risk. Routes protected mainly with removable gear are not sport routes, and cannot be sport climbed. This implies that if you define "trad climbing" narrowly enough (such as to exclude redpoints following a hangdog ascent), some free ascents will be neither sport nor trad ascents. Some people call such ascents "sprad."

Jay

Great discussion and questions. Before I take a stab at answering some of them let me clarify a couple of points:


People have heard about bolt wars and clean vs. bolts for so long that's what lots of people assume it's about - the style of protection. But it's not, bolting was an entirely secondary debate/conflict that simply overtook the conversation in bolt wars such that a lot of folks today mistakenly think that's what it's about - gear v. bolts. The real heart of the trad v. sport debate and the difference that got tempers going was over dogging and the free ethic / style.

In that regard, jt512 provides another great and simple explanation of what, at its root, trad climbing is all about:


Again, trad is about not using the rope for anything but fall protection - you don't rest on it at any point during a free [trad] ascent. You may get lucking and get it first time in an onsight, it might take you thirty goes, it might be the hundredth time you've climbed it - but you don't dog and hang your way up a route.


How pumped you might be, and how capable you are of figuring out the move where you fell while pumped is the distinction. As is the difference between resting and then getting back after it versus having to reclimb the b/pitch back up to the point you fell and then try to figure it out again - while climbing, not resting.

In trad climbing, it's when you scope out from the core tenet of not resting on the rope that you encounter the various secondary ideals and practices involved in trad climbing. Those include a reverence for onsight, ground-up, no pre-cleaning, no previewing or beta, and of course as climbing as cleanly (gear) as is humanly possible resorting to fixed pro only as a last resort.


Good question, that sparked a lot of debate in trad climbing and in the end I think came to symbolize where the group ethic / style started to become an individual matter of adherence or 'purity' to the ideal. I run on the purer side of the house and pull the rope and re-clip.



It would still be trad, it would just be less than 'ideal' and there are not many routes where I would want to know anything in advance.

The level of preview/beta certainly ended up falling under a similar personal rubric with the widespread adoption of guidebooks. My personal ideal and practice has always been to just walk up to a new crag, eyeball it to see what lines jump out at me and draw me in, and then jump on one of them. Doing that takes developing an eye for mapping your abilities to lines (and you'll still epic big sometimes regardless) That eyeballing / mapping ability will likely take much, much longer to develop in the face of an [over-] reliance on guidebooks. Personally I don't really get guidebooks; they have all the information I can figure out for myself (line, difficulty, gear) and none of the stuff I can't - the story of the FA. Who were those guys (or gals)? Why that name? What were the circumstances and the exprience like? We're going to lose a lot of those FA stories soon and I think it's a bummer they aren't what we've been writing down in the guidebooks.

The root tenets of not resting on the rope and fixed gear as a last resort are about the only absolutes in trad climbing; most all the other aspects of it are more subject to personal commitment, 'purity', and adoption.



I couldn't disagree more. I have never in thirty seven year of climbing tried to climb harder for the sake of climbing harder. I did go through a long progression of increasingly difficult FA's when I was younger, but the difficulty never once inspired me to put up a route. Something else about the line did; the potential for interesting or unique movement, just being able to finally see there was a line there (a challenge in some places), or sometimes I would just get obsessed over a line and I couldn't tell you why. But it was never difficulty - I find chasing difficulty inane and boring at best, mindless at worst.


There is no "new trad", it's simply sport climbing on gear and/or headpointing. And let's get real - at a certain level of difficulty it should be obvious you ain't gonna do pure trad climbing if you want to get up stuff - you're going to be sprad climbing. Simple enough, but personally I'd like to think that break lies somewhere significantly north of 5.7.


Always a good thing.


Hmmm, I consider rock rock and alpine alpine - apples and oranges to me. In rock climbing the risks are largely subjective with a very small element of objective risk. Alpine is a whole other deal and the level of objective risk is way, way above what you encounter in rock climbing. I've always considered alpine to have a very high gambling element involved in it and generally an activity where falling is suboptimal. In rockclimbing I don't consider pulling on gear better than falling and don't consider hanging safer than falling.

Why the latter? Because hanging on gear is most cases is just a bad idea that will bite you in the ass sooner or later unless you're smart enough to constantly check and recheck/reset it everytime you come out of a rest on a piece. Precisely that sort of accident has been on the rise along with sprad climbing - gear ain't bolts and it's unwise in many if not most instances to treat it as such.



Well, I live in the Pacific NW and we know all about moss, choss, bramble, and muck. Putting up routes runs the gamut here. Sometimes it's folks doing wholesale new crag development digging out tons of dirt, trundling more tons of loose rock, and building trails without climbing a given section of lines until the excavation work is basically done. Other times it's about putting up individual lines and that can still happen in either a group frenzy or a more individual approach - usually with less terraforming. In long established areas people are in general way, way more circumspect about how new lines go up.

For me personally, it also depends on the quality of a potential line and my intent in putting it up. I've have trundled and cleaned parts of some short routes at an area I consider a new alternate 'practice area' while our main crag is closed for Pergrine nesting. One was a matter of removing an existing anchor on an existing aid line and digging out the slot above it to extend the route an additional 30 feet or so (I onsighted to the anchor and then rapped into the slot to clean). The other had a couple of large precariously balanced (3') rocks on the last move of the climb which I removed coming in from the top. While both may be relatively short (80'), they turned out to be superb, demanding, and somewhat spicy trad lines (actually the second one has highly technical moves and protection and easily could maim or kill you if you screwed it up). I have no qualms about having done what was necessary to free either from its native circumstances, though that latter one I named 'Hollow Victory' due to the trade-offs involved.

But there are other lines which stand entirely apart in terms of the technicality, challenge, uniqueness, elegance, danger, and/or the audacity involved. I've been using our short fall windows to attempt to put up a six pitch line for a couple of years now - yeah, a couple of years - but around here that still means a handful of goes at it. It's comprised of a series of seven or eight roofs and an unclimbed three-pitch headwall for six pitches of climbing that I've walked under for two decades and only wondered at. It's a caliber of climb that takes me back to my core beliefs - onsight, groundup, any cleaning or trundling on lead from free stance, pulling the rope after falls. Previous attempts had been made on the line, but were turned back by moderately-sized, very detached panel of sharp rock that would rain down on you and your belayer if it cut. After a few stymied attempts with a partner I ended up spotting a path through it and came back, roped-soloed to a free stance above it and trundled it. It cut my lead line which left me glad I didn't have belayer and that I did have a tag line for just that eventuality.

That opened the line. With a lot of marginal pro and falls pushed it up through the first two small roofs on up to a high anchor underneath the third thirty foot roof. We then did the seventy feet of r/x climbing to the base of the roof (and finally some good pro) and took our best shot at it; but out at the lip we encountered a microwave-size block in our chest/face that moved an inch. It was immediately clear it would likely kill you outright - up to that point all cleaning had be done free on lead, but with this we either had to abandon the line or stop and remove the block. In the end We did the latter - I sent my more 'modern'-minded partner up and he sunk a piece and removed the block so I wouldn't have the luxury of hanging there checking it all out. We've taken four more shots at it since, with one 40-50 footer from the lip, and that's where it stands today. I'm gearing up for another (probably last shot at it this coming season).

I hoped the FA would follow the yellow line, but the crack in the top of that roof ended up being a stain rather than a crack so now it's going up the red line:

[image]http://cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/500/medium/Menopause_Roofs.jpg[/image]
[ Looking up from above the first roof on the first FA attempt after clearing the loose panel of rocks. ]

No, he's not saying it, but there is some implication in the discussion that confuses the matter and I'm asking for clarification. Why are you getting argumentative and demeaning?

"Bottom line, a route is either a trad line or it isn't. Regardless of how the person climbing it figures it out. Onsite or red point, lowering on every fall or not. Hanging on a route might not be a traditional "attitude" about climbing, but it doesn't change the trad nature of the route."

I could not agree more Guangzhou!

all gear = Trad
some gear some bolts = mixed
all bolts = Sport
it's really that simple...

from cracklover
"I'm confused. Is the Bachar-Yerian a "mixed" climb, even if the second pitch is all bolts? If that is the crux pitch and its obviously a "Sport" pitch, what does that mean for the whole climb?"
CL---see above definition--

you are right about one thing "your confused"

People love to trot out the B-Y as proof that bolts are not equal to sport. After all isn't it one of the most sought after (or at least fantasized about) bad a$$ed trad climbs? wasn't it established by one of the most anti-sport bad A$$ed trad climbers of all time? Yet it obviously isn't a pure trad route either. The route has been altered - the vast majority of aspirants are completely dependent and relying on those bolts being there (there was almost a clean ascent a few years ago but I don't think it ever was complete).

"Bottom line, a route is either a trad line or it isn't. Regardless of how the person climbing it figures it out. Onsite or red point, lowering on every fall or not. Hanging on a route might not be a traditional "attitude" about climbing, but it doesn't change the trad nature of the route."

I could not agree more Guangzhou!

all gear = Trad
some gear some bolts = mixed
all bolts = Sport
it's really that simple...

from cracklover
"I'm confused. Is the Bachar-Yerian a "mixed" climb, even if the second pitch is all bolts? If that is the crux pitch and its obviously a "Sport" pitch, what does that mean for the whole climb?"
CL---see above definition--

you are right about one thing "your confused"