ACCESS TO ROADSIDE - closed unttil further notice

[climb2core]

Oh lord help me, First I agreed with Clevis about something, and now I am agreeing with Dustonian...

[caribe]

Muir could be closed in sections like Art says..you know, close the Surf for 6 months, then Bruise brothers for six months..... then again, the real answer to Muir is smaller parking area.

Piggly you are cute. Think about the Surf. It is rugged. Impact there is minimal. I think your cycling idea optimizes very few of the areas in Muir. Perhaps Practice Wall at the upper left is showing signs of wear and tear.

Read the Graining Fork rules and you will see that the owners thought this through pretty well and paid good attention to the configuration of Roadside. People in general kept to the trails. The people habit of Roadside is a pretty thin line from the parking lot to the cliff and then along the cliff. People and lizards seem to play well together.

[toad857]

closing a crag for a year would be a nice opportunity to concentrate re-building efforts... like erosion walls, fence-in vegetation (e.g., torrent).... obviously the first ones to 'close' would be the ones that desperately need that kind of attention.

and it would solve the problem of 'how to educate the folks who don't visit this site'

you could 'close' a route by using lengths of rope and tying a big crazy knot around the first couple of bolts... cut em off after they are reopened.

[dustonian]

Such closures would do little but enable poison ivy and spiderwebs to take over again... you should have seen Dip Wall last weekend, yikes!! We can work on and fix problem areas while they are still open... with maybe a couple days of closure to rebuild an eroded area at most. If a crag is closed no one is going to give a damn and want to work on the place... it is essentially a lost cause.

[EGRoy]

I like the idea of getting Miguels on-board to help disseminate information. I presume if Miguel had a website it would get higher traffic from out-of-towners than RRC. A Miguels website could be a useful platform for forewarning the weekend crowd about rules, ethics, closures etc. and directing them to muir, pmrp and RRC websites. What could also be useful would be to show people is a timeline of what the cliffs looked like 40 years ago 20 years ago and now, and what the future could look like. Reading materials that don't sound like rules and regulations may be helpful too, like essays that cover topics from crag ethics, zen of climbing, and so forth... It would be best to get all this to visitors before they arrive, but having this sort of information out and visible at Miguels would be good too.

[aburgoon]

pink elephant appearing....are these Ed Mank's work?

I believe the draws on the Return of Chris Snyder and Way up Yonder were from Mank. He is def not going to get the msg from this board, I would just strip them if your headed that way and bring them by Miguel's.

I called Ed and emailed his number to the OP.

[Shamis]

Sad to hear this, but totally warranted.

The only way to thin the herd is to either strip the bolts and make it trad only, or start charging money to go there. Or just keep it closed.

Ultimately I think a lot of crags will need to have some kind of management fee associated with them to pay for maintenance and decrease demand to go there. Climbing is too popular, and the only way to control a limited resource is to raise the price, of course that means you need a way of enforcing it...

[pigsteak]

OP? Is that the onsight police?

[weber]

Muir could be closed in sections like Art says..you know, close the Surf for 6 months, then Bruise brothers for six months..... then again, the real answer to Muir is smaller parking area.

But wouldn't a smaller lot just turn folks away to overcrowd parking lots at other areas? And some of these lots, such as the The Sore Heel, are already in absurdly poor condition. Parking for many of the DBNF areas is almost non-existent.

I don't see anything on the horizon that will turn around the current growth trend in this sport. Gas prices go through the roof, and we see record numbers of visitors. Even if the end-of-days rapture does come about, darned near all us rock climbers will be left here.

The practical solution is to develop more climbing areas in and around the Red to spread out the hordes. There is an untapped wealth of rock walls out there.

So, go git 'em, Kipp!

Rick

[SCIN]

I had no idea fixed draws weren't allowed at Roadside. I don't even have it in the guidebook. I can see myself putting a perma-draw at Roadside and not thinking anything of it.

I find it hard to believe that if those permas were Ed's that they weren't safe for climbing. He seems to know his stuff. I also find it hard to believe that if those draws were put up by Ed that he did so knowing he wasn't supposed to.

Maybe now that this information is pretty evident (due to the internet storm which will eventually trickle to those without computers) Roadside should be reopened. It seems like there really was no warning or maybe I just missed it. Shouldn't there be a warning alarm first? People aren't always aware of the rules.

However, if the cliff is being closed also due to overcrowding I guess you'll have to keep it closed until a limit is put in place somehow.