To Ban... or not to Ban Bolts!

Gloweringwrote:

That won’t happen. Neither will an honest reassessment of the situation. Some people make up their minds and don’t have the ability to admit they’re wrong.

Why would he admit he is wrong? He believes as others do that bolts should be not allowed for climbing, he's not right or wrong it's just what he believes

Daniel Chode Riderwrote:

No, it shouldn't. That kind of logic is a slippery slope; why shouldn't the government ban unhealthy food or cigarettes? Heart disease kills way more people than guns, although probably not more children. Why doesn't the government just decide what is the optimal healthy meal for each person and feed them that for the rest of their life? Why are roller coasters allowed? Plenty of potential for danger there. Why are people allowed to own scissors, machetes, hatchets, etc without locking them in a safe? Chainsaws? Lawn mowers? Because of personal freedoms, and also the second amendment. "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Infringed: 'act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on.' Making federal or state laws to limit someone's right to bear arms is unconstitutional. 

There are plenty of children who have the judgement to handle guns. There's no way you can make a blanket statement about that; certainly there are many who should not use guns, actually I'd probably say most children should not use guns alone because most children don't handle guns often. But someone who is around safely used guns their whole life and is over a certain age should be just fine with guns. There's 50 million households with guns in the US; a solid percentage of those are households with kids; 1300 children is a pretty low percentage. 

The government does ban cigarettes (from children) and you need food to survive(even if unhealthy) you don't need guns to survive. And scissors, matches, hatchets? compared to a loaded gun? just a little bit of a stretch.   "There's 50 million households with guns in the US"    yeah is any wonder why we have such a higher percentage of gun deaths here than most if not all the rest of the world. But do not worry, you'll be able to have all your guns.

The one single point about owning guns is that if the government starts shooting at us, we should be able to shoot back. 

The modern police state we live with now is the Standing Army the Founders warned us about.

Dylan Colonwrote:

Let's say I live in Boulder and want to climb Longs Peak via a route on the Diamond. I don't really see the moral difference between the paved road to get to the trailhead, the maintained and signed trail to Chasm Lake, the climber's path above that, and the occasional protection bolt on the route where gear cannot be safely had. Now, if any of those was excessive, like if the park service proposed to pave the trails, or someone wanted to put in an unnecessary bolt ladder up protectable terrain, I'd object, but it seems clear that the environmental impact of a handful of bolts is less than a trail, which is much less than the road, all of which are essential to the overall experience. 

Now, you may argue that without the bolts, the trail would not exist and the road would get less use, which is true to a degree, and there is a serious debate to be had there about what level of alteration of the wilderness is justifiable in service of access. I don't think there is a good argument to be made, however, that banning the placement of hand-drilled bolts up there "saves climbing" in any way, as there is almost no chance of the NPS deciding to ban climbing, and even less chance of bolts being the reason why. No one but climbers will ever see bolts, pitons, and fixed tat up there, so it really is climbers alone who suffer the negative impacts of the bolts being there, via aesthetic impact and the removal or risk inherent to boltless climbing. I do think the climbing community has done a reasonably good job of self-policing in this regard, though if this ever stopped I would not be too sad if the NPS started requiring "new route permits" or something like that.

Your point would work if bolts are necessary in order to climb, they are not. 

Gloweringwrote:

That won’t happen. Neither will an honest reassessment of the situation. Some people make up their minds and don’t have the ability to admit they’re wrong.

Your assessment of the state of affairs could easily be turned around back upon yourself.

Glowering wrote:

If we banned bolts, which isn’t going to happen so this thread is all just speculation, many trad climbs that have an occasional protection bolt or bolted anchors would still be climbed. People would end up getting killed on them more often. THAT is what would get climbing banned. 

If you read the accident reports like I do you would see that the lack of bolts is almost never the cause of an accident and that the spread of bolted climbing has given people a false sense of security leading to MORE accidents, not less. 

Hey, I've got an idea! 

Tradibanned...

Why don't we argue about SOMETHING ELSE?

Tradibanwrote:

Your point would work if bolts are necessary in order to climb, they are not. 

Your assessment of the state of affairs could easily be turned around back upon yourself.

If you read the accident reports like I do you would see that the lack of bolts is almost never the cause of an accident and that the spread of bolted climbing has given people a false sense of security leading to MORE accidents, not less. 

 

I wasn't ever arguing that bolts are strictly necessary to climb. Neither is the trail or the road involved. The entire Front Range could be a trail-free wilderness necessitating an epic multiweek Fred Beckey on Waddington-style bushwhack to even approach the Diamond. In all cases, alterations to the landscape are compromises between the ideals of access for recreation and the preservation of nature. What I'm arguing is that if we consider alterations to the environment that we use to get to the base of the wall, what ethical rule makes any alterations once the terrain goes vertical unacceptable? If you look at Google Earth, you can literally see the more popular hiking trails in The Park from space, while bolts usually can't even be made out from more than 50 ft away unless they're particularly shiny. 

The real problem with bolts isn't environmental impact but rather the "murder of the impossible," as Messner put it. It is a sad thing when someone ruins a good challenge by bolting a face that would go without bolts, even if significant boldness might be required, and a line of bolts for a "rad face climb" that is right next to a gear-protected natural line can be suspect (though certainly occasionally justifiable). 

Finally, I'm inherently suspicious of any argument that best practices should have limiting accidents as a primary goal, because non-climbing land managers will never look at this kind of thing in a nuanced way. Land managers confronted with arguments that we have to restrict things to prevent accidents are likely to take this attitude to its logical conclusion and just ban climbing. Bolts may represent a "moral hazard" encouraging risky behavior, but that doesn't mean they're a bad thing anymore than seat belts and bike helmets are bad because people tend to go faster when using them. 

Edited for sloppy grammar.

Dylan Colonwrote:

I wasn't ever arguing that bolts are strictly necessary to climb. Neither is the trail or the road involved. The entire Front Range could be a trail-free wilderness necessitating an epic multiweek Fred Beckey on Waddington-style bushwhack to even approach the Diamond. In all cases, alterations to the landscape are compromises between the ideals of access for recreation and the preservation of nature. What I'm arguing is that if we consider alterations to the environment that we use to get to the base of the wall, what ethical rule makes any alterations once the terrain goes vertical unacceptable? If you look at Google Earth, you can literally see the more popular hiking trails in The Park from space, while bolts usually can't even be made out from more than 50 ft away unless they're particularly shiny. 

The visibility of an offense means nothing, it is still an offense. See no evil?

The real problem with bolts isn't environmental impact but rather the "murder of the impossible," as Messner put it. It is a sad thing when someone ruins a good challenge by bolting a face that would go without bolts, even if significant boldness might be required, and a line of bolts for a "rad face climb" that is right next to a gear-protected natural line can be suspect (though certainly occasionally justifiable). 

The "murder of the impossible" is a matter of style not environmental impact. in the context of this conversation it doesn't matter if people want to cheat at climbing. 

Jay Keche wrote:

I'm still waiting for that coherent rebuttal that doesn't rely on a logical fallacy.

Jay, it is your opinion that I'm using a logical fallacy. First you must show that the logic is false. For review, my logic is that justifying destruction of public lands for safety is a slippery slope, meaning that you can justify just about anything in the name of safety AND bolts don't actually save lives, they have actually contributed to the increase of accidents.

Mike Preisswrote:

Why would he admit he is wrong? He believes as others do that bolts should be not allowed for climbing, he's not right or wrong it's just what he believes

 He’s wrong in that he doesn’t have a “coherent rebuttal that doesn't rely on a logical fallacy.” He’s certainly welcome to believes bolts should not be allowed  I can think of several actual reasons to help support this, especially if it’s limited to certain locations. Where he’s wrong is trying to convince others to believe all bolts should be banned by using logical fallacies, and not being able to admit he’s wrong on these fallacies when called out on it.

Gloweringwrote:

 He’s wrong in that he doesn’t have a “coherent rebuttal that doesn't rely on a logical fallacy.” He’s certainly welcome to believes bolts should not be allowed  I can think of several actual reasons to help support this, especially if it’s limited to certain locations. Where he’s wrong is trying to convince others to believe all bolts should be banned by using logical fallacies, and not being able to admit he’s wrong on these fallacies when called out on it.

You can't just declare an argument a logical fallacy and make it so. You have to prove it is a logical fallacy. So what part of my argument do you consider a logical fallacy and why?

djkyote wrote:

Traddy,

Like i said in your last last attempt at a trol post:

please post photos of you chopping your own Bolted 'Trad' anchors...

until then, it's just BS

put up, or shut up

You seem confused. I am not proposing to chop all bolts. I only support chopping if the authority with jurisdiction deems necessary to control the crowds. It's a concession I made way back in the beginning.

djkyote wrote:

still waiting...

stop feeding the TradiTroll

This.

Jay Keche wrote:

Can you prove that bolting routes in the name of safety leads to unintended negative consequences? If you can't you're using a slippery slope fallacy to justify your position. If you can provide some actual empirical evidence that bolts are driving an increase in accidents I'll admit that I was wrong about you using a logical fallacy. Simply making a claim like you have isn't evidence though.

Edit: Even though the burden of proof is on the one who made the claim, I went ahead and looked for some data and found a pretty cool peer-reviewed study on climbing accidents (doi: 10.3390/ijerph17010203). Turns out that bouldering has a higher injury rate than sport climbing or mountaineering (80% career prevalence vs. 20% for sport). This contradicts your claim about bolts causing accidents, but I'm sure you'll have something to go off about lol

Edit 2: Here's another article that breaks down some climbing accident data and doesn't support your claim: rockandice.com/climbing-acc…

Thank you for taking the time to uncover a few bits of evidence to support your claim. I am assuming that you are attempting to justify bolting by saying it "saves lives"? 

Regardless, there seems to a few problems with your analysis of the linked study. First of all your claim that bouldering has a higher injury rate than sport climbing or mountaineering is no where to be found. I can only guess that you extrapolated this conclusion from the last sentence of the first paragraph of the introduction, which states "In a study from Colorado, rock climbing rescues accounted for approximately 20% of mountain and wilderness rescue victims."  The entire study never does direct comparisons between bolted and non-bolted climbing and even admits as such in it's closing paragraph, "To further improve preventative measures, more standardized and sport-specific research is needed to report and fully evaluate the injury risk, injury mechanism, the severity of injuries and fatality risk in climbing sports.". In short, this study does not apply to our question.

Your second article does alot better and indeed claims that "trad climbers reported about three times the number of accidents as sport and toprope combined", however in the next paragraph admits "It’s not definitive that trad is three times as dangerous—as stated earlier, this is not a truly random sample—only that it is three times more dangerous in the context of the published accidents. Other missing information includes the total number of climbing days that are spent on each discipline.". An about-face that really casts doubt on the validity of the articles conclusions.

Regardless, for fun lets say that bolts do indeed "save lives". Do you believe all climbing should be bolted then? That would be the only logical conclusion, yes? Lets go back to your original statement:

Jay Keche wrote:

When considering the ethics of bolting one can't just ignore the trade-off between protecting human life and preserving nature/property. I personally would say that protecting human life should take priority and therefore bolting in many cases (rap anchors, unprotectable sections of trad routes, etc.) is totally ethical.

I believe you are right in the sense that IF bolting was simply a choice between protecting human life or preserving nature, it would be technically ethical to bolt everything. However, this view is extremely selfish and assumes that humans are the only important being in the universe. Making climbing all about *us* is unethical itself! Can you imagine what our public lands would look like with this viewpoint? Would we even be allowed to enter public lands with this viewpoint? Rock climbing is inherently dangerous and bolting everything still won't put an end to the accidents.

 In short, I accept some human death and tragedy in favor of something bigger than ourselves, the earth we live on.

Tradibanwrote:

Thank you for taking the time to uncover a few bits of evidence to support your claim. I am assuming that you are attempting to justify bolting by saying it "saves lives"? 

Regardless, there seems to a few problems with your analysis of the linked study. First of all your claim that bouldering has a higher injury rate than sport climbing or mountaineering is no where to be found. I can only guess that you extrapolated this conclusion from the last sentence of the first paragraph of the introduction, which states "In a study from Colorado, rock climbing rescues accounted for approximately 20% of mountain and wilderness rescue victims."  The entire study never does direct comparisons between bolted and non-bolted climbing and even admits as such in it's closing paragraph, "To further improve preventative measures, more standardized and sport-specific research is needed to report and fully evaluate the injury risk, injury mechanism, the severity of injuries and fatality risk in climbing sports.". In short, this study does not apply to our question.

Your second article does alot better and indeed claims that "trad climbers reported about three times the number of accidents as sport and toprope combined", however in the next paragraph admits "It’s not definitive that trad is three times as dangerous—as stated earlier, this is not a truly random sample—only that it is three times more dangerous in the context of the published accidents. Other missing information includes the total number of climbing days that are spent on each discipline.". An about-face that really casts doubt on the validity of the articles conclusions.

Regardless, for fun lets say that bolts do indeed "save lives". Do you believe all climbing should be bolted then? That would be the only logical conclusion, yes? Lets go back to your original statement:

I believe you are right in the sense that IF bolting was simply a choice between protecting human life or preserving nature, it would be technically ethical to bolt everything. However, this view is extremely selfish and assumes that humans are the only important being in the universe. Making climbing all about *us* is unethical itself! Can you imagine what our public lands would look like with this viewpoint? Would we even be allowed to enter public lands with this viewpoint? Rock climbing is inherently dangerous and bolting everything still won't put an end to the accidents.

 In short, I accept some human death and tragedy in favor of something bigger than ourselves, the earth we live on.

Hey Tradibanned... if the earth is more important than us, why don't you shoot yourself in the head? Then you really wouldn't impact the environment except as food for some bacteria. It's the only ethical solution, I think. 

That's a paraphrase from Ed Abbey, but the premise remains. I think humans are 'the most important beings in the universe' in the sense that making choices to have a negative impact on humans versus the earth is a bad choice.

tradiban for dictator of MP! for LIFE!

Gloweringwrote:

It depends what species you are talking about but usually habitat loss due to human encroachment is the number one reason species go extinct and over-exploitation second. I would guess a lot of the hunting done in the US is regulated enough that it's only allowed for species not threatened (unfortunately they are usually hunting the biggest healthiest males instead of the old, young, and sick that a natural predator would take). We've removed a lot of the natural apex predators (bears, wolves) so some hunting to replace what they do and keep an eco system healthy is not a bad idea. I hate trophy hunting, it's a sign of a small minded man. And I haven't done any but I can see hunting as a very primal satisfying activity if you are hunting for food. I have guns and deer on my property. I don't shoot them because I don't want to kill these beautiful animals, they are our neighbors. But if there was a natural disaster or something and I needed to shoot some for food I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Thanks, Glowering, for taking up the fight while I was out hunting. Indeed, habitat loss it number one. 

Yes, some of us like to eat quality meat vs. crap from the store...I hunt for food only. And, if you're whining about responsible hunters, while being a meat eater and a property owner/renter, hunters who are needed to keep populations in check because you likely live on land they used to roam on, as well as all of their former lands where your meat and veggies (vegetarians aren't without fault) are grown that the wildlife used to roam on, then you could do the animals a favor and donate your property as wildlife habitat. You don't want bears in your garbage at your cabin in the Rockies, but no hunting them...OMG, that would be cruel! Just have game and fish trap and euthanize them...so much better.  Ignorance is bliss! 

Put your money where your mouth is and post up your property donations to the cause of wildlife!!

Daniel Chode Riderwrote:

Hey Tradibanned... if the earth is more important than us, why don't you shoot yourself in the head? Then you really wouldn't impact the environment except as food for some bacteria. It's the only ethical solution, I think. 

Quite the morbid thought Daniel. If you need professional help call the suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255. 

Taking your post at face value however, I am only one man whose existence, or not, would have no effect on the environment. If we could orchestrate some sort of climber genocide then we could make a difference but that would be unethical.

That's a paraphrase from Ed Abbey, but the premise remains. I think humans are 'the most important beings in the universe' in the sense that making choices to have a negative impact on humans versus the earth is a bad choice.

I suppose you are Pro-Life then? Abortion actually has very positive effects on the earth and our society albeit at the loss of individual lives. Generally speaking though, abortion benefits everyone.

Jay Keche wrote:

I was looking for evidence to support *your* claim that bolts cause accidents, but I failed to find any.

I couldn't care less if bolts do or don't "save lives", I was simply pulling on your thread. If they do my guess is that they don't save alot of lives and in the grand scheme of things a few lives lost isn't as important as the "whole" of the earth.

You've made it clear from that essay full of strawmen, cherry picked quotes, and serious lack of empathy for other humans that you aren't really trying to have this conversation in good faith. I'm done feeding trolls for a while now. Have a nice day.

That's too bad, I enjoyed our exchange. I assure you this conversation is in "good faith" and I would welcome any specific criticism you have of my responses if you can narrow that criticism down from your broad ad-hominem attacks.

Tradibanwrote:

I couldn't care less if bolts do or don't "save lives", I was simply pulling on your thread. If they do my guess is that they don't save alot of lives and in the grand scheme of things a few lives lost isn't as important as the "whole" of the earth.

That's too bad, I enjoyed our exchange. I assure you this conversation is in "good faith" and I would welcome any specific criticism you have of my responses if you can narrow that criticism down from your broad ad-hominem attacks.

Other then on here, MP, where are you attempting to get the bolting changes accomplished?  Are you talking to local rangers, land managers, and ruling bodies? Have established a concise mission statement for you pitch? 

I would like to see some elbow grease not just keyboard justice.

Jay Keche wrote:

Ugh, I'm too much of a sucker to let this go so here are those specific points:

1) You straw-manned me by changing my argument from 'bolts are justified in specific cases where they stand to improve safety' to 'new bolts are always justified because they save lives.' Those two arguments are very different. Rather than arguing against my actual position, you argued against the false strawman that you created.

2) You cherry picked the one line from that whole peer-reviewed study where they acknowledge the shortcomings of their study in order to invalidate the whole study itself. No study is perfect and quite frankly that study is incredibly rigorous (it reviews the entirety of the literature on climbing injuries to date!) and valuable despite its shortcomings as a meta-analysis. Seeing as we were discussing the effect of bolts on injury rates, this study of factors influencing climbing injuries/accidents is hugely relevant to our discussion - it just doesn't support your position so you tried to throw it out the window. Not to mention that you didn't read the results section where they actually describe the data. The parts that I cited are from section 3.2.7 Risk, Risk Factors, and Prevention. The 80% quote about bouldering is from the last sentence of the second paragraph of the discussion. 

I think getting into the minutiae of whether I did or didn't straw man you, or cherry pick quotes, will just make you upset and is just trying to change the subject anyway, so all I'm going to say is that it's obvious that you cherry picked the study yourself and we can call this one a draw. Moving on...

3) I'll admit the part about your "lack of empathy" was a bit of an ad hominem, but to state that "I accept some human death and tragedy" or "I don't care if bolts save lives" really does show a lack of empathy in my opinion. Furthermore, you can't ignore the effects of an action on human life when we're having a discussion about the ethics of said action. I'm no philosopher, but last I checked trying to prevent/reduce human tragedy is usually considered morally good and simply not giving a shit whether someone lives, dies, or gravely injures themselves is considered morally bad.

So are saying we should bolt everything in the name of safety? If not when should we or shouldn't we bolt something, ethically speaking?

4) Sport climbing crags are a far cry from "the whole of the Earth." Even if every accessible crag was excessively bolted that would be a relatively small portion of the planet affected. At least be realistic about what you're trying to protect.

I agree that if all rock was bolted it would still be insignificant considering the entire earth and it's problems but I think it's very important to focus on all the small parts, lest we get overwhelmed with the "whole".

Anyway, all that taken together make it pretty clear you're not trying to have a good faith conversation about the ethics of bolting (which I think is an important discussion to have as climbing goes mainstream), but rather just trying to piss people off on the internet. 

Ok, so your take on bolting is that we should bolt everything in the name of safety? Or do you have a different set of ethical parameters that would guide your bolt placement?

Tradibanwrote:

Quite the morbid thought Daniel. If you need professional help call the suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255. 

It was sarcasm. I ain't killing myself.

Taking your post at face value however, I am only one man whose existence, or not, would have no effect on the environment. If we could orchestrate some sort of climber genocide then we could make a difference but that would be unethical.

Of course you have an impact on the environment, everything anyone does has an impact, but considering what you do negligible and therefore unimportant is just what you're arguing against.

I suppose you are Pro-Life then? Abortion actually has very positive effects on the earth and our society albeit at the loss of individual lives. Generally speaking though, abortion benefits everyone.

Yes, I am pro-life. If this is more of this CCP-population control bullshit, well, I have no words for that. Whatever you want to argue about its effects on the earth, abortion has a horrible effect on society which is fairly obvious.

Professor Bootywrote:

Thanks, Glowering, for taking up the fight while I was out hunting. Indeed, habitat loss it number one. 

Yes, some of us like to eat quality meat vs. crap from the store...I hunt for food only. And, if you're whining about responsible hunters, while being a meat eater and a property owner/renter, hunters who are needed to keep populations in check because you likely live on land they used to roam on, as well as all of their former lands where your meat and veggies (vegetarians aren't without fault) are grown that the wildlife used to roam on, then you could do the animals a favor and donate your property as wildlife habitat. You don't want bears in your garbage at your cabin in the Rockies, but no hunting them...OMG, that would be cruel! Just have game and fish trap and euthanize them...so much better.  Ignorance is bliss! 

Put your money where your mouth is and post up your property donations to the cause of wildlife!!

I agree in certain areas and with certain animals habitat loss is a main issue but over fishing, killing of animals whether its for food or just greed is still a main reason for animal extinction or near extinction. such as certain wales were hunted to near extinction when they used their fat for burning oil, elephants for their ivory, on and on, and on..... but yeah human encroachment for the black bear, deer, ect... has helped them.  All I said is I personally I find no sporting achievement in hunting and could not get myself to shoot a beautiful elk or deer or any animal trying to survive in the wild (unless of course I had no choice, but nowadays we have many choices) hunt on professor booty

Daniel Chode Riderwrote:

Yes, I am pro-life. If this is more of this CCP-population control bullshit, well, I have no words for that. Whatever you want to argue about its effects on the earth, abortion has a horrible effect on society which is fairly obvious.

and we're off!