Re: PDs at Lode
Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:55 pm
cletuswilcox wrote:I will be at the lode within the week to remove the project draws from the undertow. Does anyone have a suggestion on a good place to leave them?
You are kind-of putting yourself in a no-win place, don't you think?
You took the draws off. People hung them back.
You will take the draws off again, yet until you do the draws are still hanging, like they have been before.
And when you do take them off you'll leave them in some agreed-on place, to avoid anyone calling you a draw thief. So what is the drawback for the guy who hung the draws and left them? He didn't have to clean them at the end of the day, you did the cleaning for him, and he'll get the draws back...
If I were the person who re-hung the draws, I'd be (hypothetically) saying: oh, no big deal! Next time I go to the Lode, I'll just stop at Miguel's first and ask, hey, are there draws labeled "taken off Ale8", b/c they are mine. And then I'd go and re-hang the draws, unless someone else hadn't done it already... And with luck they would be hanging there for a week or two, until you get around to taking them down again, but in the meantime I'll get a few days of climbing without having to hang the draws, whcih is all OI wanted in the first place... and if you take them down again, and leave them again at Miguel's (because you are not a thief, after all), I'll re-hang them again, in case I haven't sent yet, and really want to keep working on it...
... and the cycle will repeat itself, with the end result being-- what exactly? You didn't really force/inspire/shame me (hypothetical me in the example above) to clean my own draws, and it is not that big a deal for me to re-hang them and not take them down, if I really adamantly believe that the draws should be hanging, and want to be as stubborn about it as the draw-strippers, just to make a point.
And i wanted to add, I really do get the "let's do something to shake up the complacent people who are relying so much on fixed draws and make them think about how it got there, and whether it should be there in the first place". I do. I think the discussion needed to happen. But I think I would have respected the draw-stripping crew a LOT more if they/you had stripped the entire Lode. (AND Bob Marley. AND Darkside. AND Purgatory... but at the very least, if you started at the Lode, making it the entire Motherlode)
If the crew would have said publicly:"Look, we as climbers are currently working on these specific routes as our projects. These are overhanging routes, and a pain to clean. But we are committing to cleaning the draws off of them at the end of the day, every day we work on them. We are holding ourselves to this higher standard because we believe that the attitude at the Red has become unacceptably lax towards the project/fixed/abandoned/permanent draws, so we are committing ourselves to keeping the Lode free of draws, and that includes our own projects. And while we are at it, we will also clean the trash and the poop, and will make sure anyone who litters in our presence will not be allowed to get away with it" -- if this were the case, I think this debate would have shaped itself somewhat differently.
Instead there is this muddled reasoning that somehow cleaning draws half-way up the route, and PD's at the anchors are O.K., but not the entire route equipped with draws. If it really comes to that, WHY do we need cleaning draws or draws on the anchors? Why do we need all the draws hanging on really steep routes, even in the Madness cave? TR run at the end of the day will get them all. Who said that you have to clean while lowering? Surely it is only a small inconvenience to do a TR run at the end of the day?
If the problem is with people TRing through fixed draws and otherwise misusing fixed hardware, and these people are truly as prevalent at the Lode as some make it sound (even though I personally have not seen very many examples), then leaving a cleaning draw half-way up is pretty much a guarantee that this draw will become a dedicated "escape-without-leaving-gear" bail draw. And what's to stop "those" people from toproping through the fixed draws at the anchors after dogging their way up on their own draws, instead of perma-draws?