Will climbing crags go the way of dams?

Sounds like you got the email the rest of us got from Patagonia last week. Damnation was an interesting documentry.

Maybe we could design a machine that weathers rock 10,000 years in 15 minutes? The only problem with that is no venture capital peeps would cough up the start up coin.

No wait! I got a great idea for a movie. Interstellar II The search for granite... The trailer would start: in the near future man has polished all earth's crags. Used up every square meter of crack rock. Now the search for more crack rock through a black hole near Saturn begins... Hell ya.

I'll be the third to ask where does the OP witness the popular empty crags? If it's the Gunks you might have been there on a weekday.

rocknice2 wrote:A few years back while on a southern France climbing trip we wanted to go to Finale in Italy. Someone told us that the place is getting very polished and recommended a newly developed area called Oltre Finale. So we went there and had an amazing time on grippy limestone.

+1

Looking at this a completely different way... Maybe, in a few hundred thousand years, those dams with a hundred feet of sandstone built up behind them will be taken down, leaving us with brand new slabs right next to waterfalls.

The OP isn't completely off base. The Niagara Escarpment has an unfortunate combination of high usage and easily polished limestone. Obviously the Milton area crags have not been abandoned, but the approach to climbing has certainly been altered. Many popular routes at Rattlesnake Point are now so slippery that they are no longer attractive propositions as trad leads and are commonly top roped instead (facilitated by bolted anchors at the top of all climbs). Similarly, many classic boulder problems at Niagara Glen (particularly in the Central Area near the stairs) are hopelessly altered because the first moves are now are polished slick as tombstones. Best to move on to less trafficked areas of the Glen. I personally wouldn't mind if someone found a way to "restore" these climbs and problems, but I'm not holding my breath.