Scott burke did in fact TOP ROPE the roof pitch. that is not an FA and everybody knows it. he called it a small blemish but the climbing world does not accept a top rope as an FA. (with the exception of the fly :roll) I guess if you stick clip the first 2 bolts on a 20 ft. rout you can still pretend you didn't top rope it.

Surely there have been other female climbers with small hands and fingers who've made attempts at at least parts of the climb where it has been said Lynn's fingers made the difference, no?

Are you off your meds? If someone TR's a 15a but can't lead a 14b does that mean that they are a 15 climber. I can climb at least two grades harder when on top rope. I don't care what school of thought you come from, but a if a line needs to be FIXED in order to climb the line then there is nothing free about it.

What new route has steph done on El Cap? I actually don't know of any of her FFA's or FA's in Yosemite (not to say that there aren't any, of course. I just haven't heard about them.) I always see her name associated with hard repeats.

Freed Free Rider in a day http://climbing.com/news/davisfeciad/.

Davis' ascent of Freerider is unarguably a repeat, and certainly hard by most climbers' standards, so if you were trying to prove thewallress wrong, it kinda backfired. Perhaps you were simply trying to back up her claim; if so, my mistake.

Is anyone aware of any other athletic accomplishment by a woman, in any other sport, that no man has been able to replicate?

He says himself that he isn't satisfied with the style in which he did it (he wants to do it in a day, in better weather, not TR'ing a pitch). Lynn Hill's ascent is obviously light years beyond Scott's ascent in terms of style - redpointing every pitch in a one push, one day effort (and requiring only a fraction of the time to work on it that Scott has put in)...

Is anyone aware of any other athletic accomplishment by a woman, in any other sport, that no man has been able to replicate?

Kinda strike anyone as funny that Yosemite only has one or two 5.14 pitches?

Yosemite has a lot more rock right off the ground than most climbing areas that team with 5.14s. We don't even need to talk about 30 pitches up. In fact, the vast majority of Yosemite 5.13 is many pitches up rather than right off the ground.

Is it that granite is just sandbagged, or just easy?

Point.


Methinks perhaps it doesn't generally lend itself to super-difficulty in the same way as other types of rock.

For example, at my local granite crag (Enchanted Rock), the hardest route is a 5.13a/b. There is simply no realistic potential for routes significantly harder than that anywhere in the park, unless you were to chip them into some of the blank overhangs (which there aren't even very many of).

For that matter, how many 5.13 and up free climbs in Yosemite are unchipped? All these aid routes going free on El Cap are chipped, either through repeated scarring with pitons or deliberately (the nose). I've heard a rumor of deliberate scarring to make holds at the bottom of Phoenix (you'll probably know more about the veracity of this than I). Does natural granite even get as difficult as the difficult free climbs in Yosemite?

I believe the well-known open water swimmer, Lynne Cox, has a few accomplishments of this nature to her credit. She has set a few English Channel records man or woman, and is the only person ever to swim one-mile in Antarctic waters wearing only a standard bathing suit.

Lynne is the purist of marathon swimmers. She does not wear a wet suit in frigid water and does not use a cage in shark infested waters. Her swims in Iceland’s 40 degree F Lake Myzvtan and Alaska’s 38 degree F Glacier Bay, where the lead boat had to break a path in the one quarter inch ice, were done wearing only a swim suit, cap and goggles. She wanted to do more than just achieve times and set records. And she did. But in the process, she became the fastest person to swim the English Channel (1972 and again in 1973), the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan (Chile) 4-1/2 miles, 42 degree F (1976), Norway to Sweden, 15 miles 44 degree F (1976), three bodies of water in the Aleutian Islands (USA) 8 miles total, 44 degree F (1977) and around the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) 10 miles, 70 degree F which attracted sharks, jellyfish and sea snakes (1978). Many other swims included Lake Biakal in the Soviet Union (1988), the Beagle Channel of Argentina and Chile (1990) and around the Japanese Island of Joga Shima. In 1994 at the age of 37 years, she swam the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea joining the 15 miles of 80-degree water between Egypt, Israel and Jordan. She has swum Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains, the world’s highest navigable lake.

The one 14b in Yosemite, Magic Line, has zero repeats although several 5.14 climbers have tried. Hardest pitch in Yosemite. You'd think somebody would want the second ascent.