Mountain Project - The End of Booty?

Hank Caylor wrote:I remember, Derek used to show up in Eldo after the typical Summer showers and solo everything that had shiny gear on it after the owners had bailed. I'm pretty sure he didn't return shit.

...and I am pretty sure Derek didn't use any of the gear he found, either Hank! ;)

Hank Caylor wrote:If you leave gear(cams, biners and such) it belongs to the person who finds it, PERIOD.

Hank, Avery is not a butthole. He was simply arguing against the comment you posted.

Hank, lighten up! That wasn't a personal attack, and I apologize if that's how it was interpreted. I'll buy pints if I ever run into you at the Sun. I never suspected you'd treat anyone like that.

However, I was just restating what came across in your post, and besides -- it shows some persons (above) clearly agree that the scenario I portrayed is perfectly okay. In my book, that's an unfortunate situation within our small community.

-Avery

Easy fellas. Its all about personal karma. You climb your gonna forget or leave behind gear. Its part of the game. I'd be pissed at myself for leaving behind half a rack, camera or whatever before being pissed at the guy who picked it up. If he wants to do his best to give it back he would get plenty o'beers and good times. If I had to bail whether for safety or for rescue well thats part of climbing and I wouldn't have bad feelings toward the guy who so politely cleaned my gear for me. Hell if you get down safely it is well worth the cost. Booty is booty. What you do with it is up too you.

Mark Nelson wrote:I left an ex-girl"friend" at the crag a few years back; if found, you can keep her.

Bwa ha ha ha!

Oh man.

Look, even with the Itardnet we still don't usually get in touch with the owner of every cam, biner, and errant sling we find out there. Nor do we get the ice axes we dropped in the front yard (duh-oh!). Just try your best to let others know you have something you found. If you get a response, great. If not, well, it's yours.

Here is an interesting twist on the booty thing...
In like 92 or 93, just after the Wall came down, we got our first influx of East Germans in Thailand... it was a family taking their first ever vacation. They of course had no money so they slept under the newly created Tonsai Crag... strung up clothes lines from bolts, cooked in a pit... it was cool to see but also humbling as they could have had a bungallow for like $5 a night. Anyway, while they were there they found sooooo much booty. THye could not understand why there was always two perfectly good biners at the top of the routes. They left with totally new racks of Chounard ovals and light d's.

Mark Nelson wrote:I left an ex-girl"friend" at the crag a few years back; if found, you can keep her.

Don't worry, I cleaned that booty ;-)

Ok, Start the flames.. Karma my man, Karma.. I always try to treat others the way I want to be treated. I promise that the friendship and satisfaction of returning someone items is always better then keeping that old beat up cam you don't need anyway. In my book, taking booty without trying to find the rightful owner is theft . What if someone takes a cam out of your car because the windows were down, is that booty? some people think so.. If Someone picks your pack while your 10 pitches up, is that booty? Some people think so. (Look what happen at Eldo earlier this year) What if you bail to help someone that is injured and before you can return, someone takes your gear, is that booty? Helping out a fellow climber and creating community in our small sport is the right thing to do. With all this being said, in the many years of my climbing I have re-covered a lot more than I have lost. I have always tried to return found gear but most of the time I can't find the owner and end up with the gear anyway..

rockdude wrote:Ok, Start the flames.. Karma my man, Karma.. I always try to treat others the way I want to be treated. I promise that the friendship and satisfaction of returning someone items is always better then keeping that old beat up cam you don't need anyway. In my book, taking booty without trying to find the rightful owner is theft . What if someone takes a cam out of your car because the windows were down, is that booty? some people think so.. If Someone picks your pack while your 10 pitches up, is that booty? Some people think so. (Look what happen at Eldo earlier this year) What if you bail to help someone that is injured and before you can return, someone takes your gear, is that booty? Helping out a fellow climber and creating community in our small sport is the right thing to do. With all this being said, in the many years of my climbing I have re-covered a lot more than I have lost. I have always tried to return found gear but most of the time I can't find the owner and end up with the gear anyway..

I think we have lost our way here. I think the OP was commenting on the recent post about a party getting a new C3 stuck on Touch and Go. Then that party asking for it back. The person who gets it out, well He or she did the Work. I think is it theirs. For that party to ask for it back is weak. They could not get it out. So it is there for the taking for the one who can get it out. The law of the land.

Now if said person gets it out and wants to get it back to Weak Ass party. Then that is their choice. But they are in no way obligated to do so.

Now for all the examples you posted above, NO F-ING way is that Booty.

Booty story:
I remember many, many moons ago, my rookie partner and I got our new rope stuck in very popular route, in an area with a ton of foot traffic. We tried for hours to get that damn thing out. We even went so far as to back his Celica up through plants and wildlife to tie the loose end and try and yank it out. All it did was stretch. Again we tried for hours, well into the night. In the meantime, word got out around the campground (less than a hundred yards away) and we were being swarmed with vultures, dudes that knew how to get a rope out of bad places, but at the same time were telling us to give it up! Heck we even asked to borrow a knife from a few folks, and all we got were (intentionally?) butter knifes. Well, we finally yielded and decided to drive into town (19 miles from said "intersection rock") to buy a hack saw to at least salvage a piece of our rope for TR's. I think we got back around 11pm and guess what? There wasn't one fiber's evidence that a rope was ever there. It was gone. I remember one particularly aggressive vulture, whom came around a dozen times, probably got it. I was pissed, but what was I too do? Interogate the whole campground? The only thing I could do was learn a lesson about careless rope handling, which at the time, was quite costly.
Anyway, I can imagine our noobie look back then and our puppydog pleas for aid. I laugh about it nowadays, and love to tell the story.

ATS wrote:Booty story: We even went so far as to back his Celica up through plants and wildlife to tie the loose end and try and yank it out.

What a dick. . .

J/K

;-)

Mark Nelson wrote:I left an ex-girl"friend" at the crag a few years back; if found, you can keep her.

Gotta wonder: did you leave her there or did she leave you???

All of you "this is a community"/ "taking booty is theft" people need to check yourselves. It is common sense what is booty and what isn't. Hank had it right. We shouldn't have to lay out every scenario for you. You know booty when you see it. We have all dropped stuff from the cliffs, or have had items get stuck and left in the stone, or have had items just fall off or out of a pack or harness. It happens. That is booty for whomever finds it. To compare that to taking someones pack when they are up on a route, or taking something from someones vehicle is just plain stupid. Get a clue. I think anyone with any sense knows the difference between stealing and finding booty. No one is saying that theft is okay. Booty is a part of climbing. You lose some/you find some, it usually comes out even in the end... listen to that little voice inside of you, if it says you are stealing, then you probably are... if it says, "sweet, I found booty." then it probably is.

WORD. Seems like common sense to me.

After coming down off a climb, this dude tells us that he had stuck a #8 stopper on the route and that if we could extricate the nut from its new home in the crack, it was ours. Upon climbing the route, we wrestled with the nut a bit, and low and behold the nut popped free. Who couldn't use another #8 nut on their rack, right? Well, I was feeling pretty good about my booty (one of my first scores). On the hike out, we happened to notice the guy coming down a connecting trail. I waited for him to meet us at the trail junction holding up his forlorn nut and the look on his face when I handed it to him was one of utter disbelief. I figured it was just good karma. Had I not seen him descending, that baby would have been mine...period.

I personally have 3 cams on my rack that I recovered from various crags. 2 were "fixed" where they walked deep into a crack and required serious effort(and lost skin) to remove. The other was found in the bushes at a popular and heavily used crag. All of these were recovered before internet forums existed. As far as "booty" vs. "the right thing to do" I look at it this way: Say you find a $20 when walking to the bar. Obviously, you'll never find the original owner, this is booty. Say you find a wallet, obviously dropped by accident, with no ID in it and $100 in it. Booty? Or do you use existing channels to find the owner? And say same "carelessly" dropped wallet has $100 and ID. Is it "booty" to keep the bill and turn in the wallet so that the owner can learn the lesson about being "careless"? hmmm. I know what I would do in each of these situations. Even before internet, there are windshields, trailhead signs ,etc. where a simple note with a phone # can go a long way. I guess in the big city(Boulder,SLC) it may be easy to forget what "community" means but around here we watch out for each other, NooB or old time Hardman. Do you really need that "friend" or is better to be a FRIEND?

Thank you Hank, John, Count, Rick, this is a silly *discussion* which tends to be the case for these sorts of "forums" (I always preferred that certain older *hardcopy* pictorial magazine's "forum" over these anywhos . . .

Nevertheless, at the cost of being repetitive, this reminds me of the old base jumping discussion "is it a building? or is it a grain silo?/nuclear cooling tower?/antenna?/or other? bull-crap. As the above noted authors point out, directly or indirectly; for most of us most of the time the answer is OBVIOUS we all know the difference between gear purposefully left (yet probably remorsefully left) and something accidentally left or forgotten like a whole rack a camera (the storm was coming so I had to rap off my camera lying on the ledge to get the Fxxx out of there???). There it is: we all know booty when we see it and if its something other than booty, the vast majority of us know it, regardless of how we choose to deal with it. END of STORY. . . .

Yes, there are grey (gray?) areas, that's what our great big, highly enlarged, heavily invaginated cerbral cortexes are for, figuring out and playing around with the fun stuff, the shenanigans. Examples: i)Sam's above, ahhh cultural ignorance! ii) an almost brand new 3.5 camalot (spray painted tan) I found on p4 colorado ridge of kingfisher a couple years ago, no where near fixed, almost certainly an aid climbing oversight left behind . . . = booty! I use it with PRIDE all the time. and iii) The three hexes, two brand new slings, three poor quality yet brand new biners left at the very bottom (below the beginning) of Good Evans on the black wall (what ever happened to the days of evacuation rapping off a single piece with a sling and no biner??)) Definately Booty if I hadn't seen and replied to the e-mail on this whack site and told Seth that I'd look for it when I was out there (BTW Seth, as I said, I DIDN'T see it two weekends ago when out there however a week ago enroute to Espresso I found it and have it all, zip me a line and I'll give it back).

Ciao girls and boys-

w

ps is it just me or is it a little humorous that the spell check keeps wanting to change biner to boner??

Right on, Wayne!

I say keep the booty call alive & well, mp.com'ers!

Call me east coast but if I find booty I may choose to enter negotiations on it's return, ransom status!!! Lost a cam? Want it back? Why don't you get me to brand new shiny neutrinos and a sling. Fair enough? If it's not worth 25 bucks to you it's mine. I don't want cash, just gear b/c then when I have to leave something I don't feel all that bad about it. Yar matey to truly apreciate the booty ya need a bit o' pirate in ya. Or a Sir-mix-o-lot mix tape with some 2 live crew on it.

I always make an effort to return Gear! It's not like I'm some "Rockclimbing Bum" that doesn't have any money. If something doesn't get returned to me that's just the way it goes. It just gives me an excuse to go buy a new piece of gear. Doing this just make's it all seem worth while working out in 100+ temps for my money. Money is made for spending and I just love buying new gear.