Half Dome has fallen.

Is removing all of the new hardware the best long term solution? Genuine question I'm asking so that I better understand, not because I disagree. (FWIW - my personal opinion is remove it all, the route should have been left alone and needs to be left alone for good so that the inherent appeal and nature of this classic climb remains the same. IMO, if you can't or don't want to climb this classic because of the run out, then climb the literal thousands of other routes available to you in Yosemite and to paraphrase Royal Robbins, be a better climber instead of expecting the route to meet you where you're at). 

Someone counted responses have been 3:1 in favor of the anti-retrobolters. But for the remaining third in favor of retrobolting, the most common argument in favor of retro-bolting is "the FAist said add more bolts". Eric Beck was pretty specific in his response where he thinks additional bolts could be added, right? So if some of the new hardware does match what the FAist recommended placements, should those stay? Just playing devil's advocate.

The rock and route has already been altered, I'd hate to see it altered again since this topic doesn't seem to ever die.

Additional bolts were already added long ago. "Steve Roper on the route's second ascent (and with the permission of the FA party), added a few bolts.

The THREE FA people had several decades to change the route.  2/3 of them did NOT agree that it needs more bolts.  The Time Limit to dumb the route down has LONG Passed.  At least 30 years ago.   Thousands have done this route AS IS.  NO MORE BOLTs will be tolerated.  PERIOD.

tom donnellywrote:

Additional bolts were already added long ago. "Steve Roper on the route's second ascent (and with the permission of the FA party), added a few bolts.

The THREE FA people had several decades to change the route.  2/3 of them did NOT agree that it needs more bolts.  The Time Limit to dumb the route down has LONG Passed.  At least 30 years ago.   Thousands have done this route AS IS.  NO MORE BOLTs will be tolerated.  PERIOD.

Mountain Project loves to rehash the same topics periodically, but now we are rehashing comments word-for-word from 4 pages back?

Dan Booklesswrote:

I did Snake Dike in 2014 or 2015.  I'm not a part of Yosemite climbing community by any means; but I think this conversation about Snake Dike is really just a proxy for a larger conversation about climbing ethics.

I think you're correct on the latter end here Dan.

I've been reading a lot of Aldo Leopold lately. Leopold wrote mostly during the 40s, heavily influenced by a rapidly changing world around him - FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps was cranking out highways, roads, and trails that massively enabled access to the relatively newly established national parks systems and collection of other freshly protected public lands. He was a very active critic of "Windshield Tourism", a rapidly growing trend of folks experiencing nature solely through the glass of a moving vehicle. 

Leopold was a firm believer that experiences in nature should aim to be transformative - that they should have the potential to change the way you feel about your surroundings, your impact, and even yourself. His quote is one of my favorites (emphasis mine):

"It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind." - Aldo Leopold

He recognized that the potential was largely related to things like required effort, risk, solitude, and more. At the same time, he also recognized that access to these places was an absolute need.

"We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in." - Aldo Leopold

Ultimately, Aldo recognized and wrote about the tension between the two ideas throughout his entire life, never ultimately coming to a concrete cohesive framework he felt satisfied the requirements en route to his ultimate "Land Ethic". He did seem to advocate for the understanding that the access-impact field ultimately needed to be a spectrum. There needs to be high-access opportunities, in order to allow even the lowest-common denominator user an opportunity to find themselves genuinely, personally impacted by these spaces, in order to develop a relationship with it. But there also needed to be wild recreational spaces, where those willing to have a higher buy-in had the opportunity to have a higher pay-off. 

As we frame this around Snake Dike specifically, and heavily caveating this with the fact that RNWF is the only route I've done up Half Dome, we can do that algebra pretty easily. Snake Dike has an enormous throughput, and a well-documented history (even in this thread) of transformative potential that is largely rooted in the scale and wildness of the route. Adding additional bolts in the manner that was done is undeniably changing that transformative quality into a more consumptive one. As said above by Leopold, it enables a larger audience to climb the stretch of rock, but diminishes the overall gravitas, fundamentally altering not only the experience, but the general manner of recreation in the local region. Each individual needs to do their own math to determine to what extent that experience is altered and if the overall, let's call it "net perception", as defined by (throughput * average potential for personal impact), is diminished by the new bolts.

I had the opportunity to sit with this general concept of the trade-off of access and impact just yesterday. We were climbing Cary Granite, where the crux is an unprotected traverse. While consequences of blowing the crux aren't super severe, the exposure (and the fact that we unfortunately forgot to bring along a significant portion of the standard rack for the route) certainly makes it easy to wish there was a bolt in the traverse for both the leader and follower. I felt myself wish there was a bolt, accept that there wasn't, and own the need to commit to the moves, and the satisfaction of "going for it". Unfortunately in my case, I bled quite a bit on the crux crimps and ended up slipping on my blood and falling towards the end of the traverse. However, I still viscerally felt that I had a few minutes of perception of the entire "experience", rather than a hyper-focus on the climbing itself, that almost certainly wouldn't have been possible if I had a bolt right in the middle of the scary bits.

Again, I haven't done the route, and can't speak to precisely how these bolts impact the route. All I can say is that I hope future generations of climbers never find themselves in a situation where these transformative experiences with generations of participants have all been irrevocably altered. Things will inevitably change, but as with the ancient thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus suggests, there may eventually be a point where it is a product that can no longer be called by the same name. 

I'll end this with a wonderful quote from the late Keita Kurakami that ties all of this together.

"I believe that our society is not something that we leave behind when we venture up a mountain or a wall, routes and culture must be tied together.
The rock we climb is a mirror, and in it, we see the silent reflections of dialogues that have taken place between climbers across many decades—and also within ourselves.

Out of all this action and conversation, something greater emerges that is transmitted from generation to generation, forming a kind of collective intelligence, an influence that might still flicker across great spans of time and space, mere fragments of dreams of the billions of lives that come into the world—and leave the world.”  

- Keita Kurakami

Camdon Kaywrote:

Mountain Project loves to rehash the same topics periodically, but now we are rehashing comments word-for-word from 4 pages back?

As long as people act like there was only one person on the FA, I guess corrections will have to be repeated.    
The floggings will continue until morale improves.

Mr. Roper would be loving this. The debate about bolts is as old as the climbs. Here is a passage from his book, "Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber"

It was Roper himself who suggested adding some bolts after the FA, and he only added four in total, mostly to the belay stations. Funny to imagine the three-man FA team hanging out on the slabs on one buttonhead per belay. Overall this was a very forward-looking maneuver by Roper at a time when climbers commonly chopped bolts from existing routes if they didn't use them. Pretty quickly they realized this would lead to madness and the ethic of preserving the route in its "first ascent" condition became standard.

I agree with others that this historic route should be preserved as it was for so many who have ventured onto it! That is a community consensus!

/

P.S. I award Tal +10,000 points for bringing up Aldo Leopold. A prescient reminder to appreciate the wonders of nature, possible even in a bustling place like Yosemite! After meditating in fern gully, probably you'll worry a lot less about bolts too.

"Shameful rape of a beautiful climb" 

Might as well close the thread on that note.

I was lucky enough to climb it a week ago - when only the alt first pitch was bolted. Reading all of this certainly sears into my memory the amazing feeling of looking up at the traverse and seeing only one lone rusty bolt midway across the beautiful slab - just as God intended. Perfect - it was - any may yet soon be again. 

Mark Starrwrote:

You're going with the see-a-nazi-punch-a-nazi logic and I get it, it's a forceful way to set precedent and it has its place. I just think all the extremes one way or another are damaging when really we're just talking about bits of metal in rock. How many hundreds of thousands of words will be wasted on this and how many relationships damaged? And for what, really? My only hope is for personal growth towards empathy and love among my fellow residents of earth that will bring us closer to the world I think we all want. Discussions like this can help people grow if they let it. We need to deeply feel our emotions, dive into them and investigate them. Sad to see many don't think this way. I know, perhaps the hippie here should just quiet down — and maybe that's my lesson to learn. I'm working on it.

Perhaps the middle way would be something closer to your original suggestion of taking the hangers and damaging the threads. That way people can bring some wires to put on the bolts sticking out if they want. Or something like they do in Australia with carrot bolts.

Unfortunately "empathy" is a dysregulated practice and is applied disproportionately and accrues to some groups and not others. If curious read "Suicidal Empathy: dying to be kind" by the Canadian evolutionary biologist Gaad Saad.

Mark Starrwrote:

You're going with the see-a-nazi-punch-a-nazi logic and I get it, it's a forceful way to set precedent and it has its place. I just think all the extremes one way or another are damaging when really we're just talking about bits of metal in rock. How many hundreds of thousands of words will be wasted on this and how many relationships damaged? And for what, really? My only hope is for personal growth towards empathy and love among my fellow residents of earth that will bring us closer to the world I think we all want. Discussions like this can help people grow if they let it. We need to deeply feel our emotions, dive into them and investigate them. Sad to see many don't think this way. I know, perhaps the hippie here should just quiet down — and maybe that's my lesson to learn. I'm working on it.

Yes - we are responding differently to adding bolts to a long-established often-climbed routes. And our backgrounds are important and can both help and hinder us. It is good for me to also investigate the “why”. Perhaps in person, Mark?

I do see a lot of value in the journeys all climbers have taken, do take, and will take concerning our route choices. And I wish to see the variability of this particular category of routes preserved as much as practical. The bits of metal in rock (or lack) are foundational for a nearly unbounded number of journeys.

Mark Starr wrote:

Perhaps the middle way would be something closer to your original suggestion of taking the hangers and damaging the threads. That way people can bring some wires to put on the bolts sticking out if they want. Or something like they do in Australia with carrot bolts.

I truly welcome kicking around an idea before a deed is done. Afterwards, options are reduced.

On this one, there may be a bit of a snag hazard to someone falling while leading this line. Perhaps bending the bolts over or just chopping off the protruding part would return the slab closer to the original state while keeping the wrecked bolts visible. It’d still be ugly but does tell the story here of the sadness of one person not engaging the community before acting and another not willing to accept that.

Bill Lawrywrote:

.

On this one, there may be a bit of a snag hazard to someone falling while leading this line. Perhaps bending the bolts over or just chopping off the protruding part would return the slab closer to the original state while keeping the wrecked bolts visible. It’d still be ugly but does tell the story here of the sadness of one person not engaging the community before acting and another not willing to accept that.

Leaving the chopped bolts is a terrible idea. You know it as well as I do. No trace should remain except the unfortunate patches that will become obvious over time. Sloan doesn’t get to keep his stain on the rock. Remember it’s the climb that needs to be preserved not the memory of a rando’s wet dream. Yes, talking about you EriK, you have never represented Yosemite, you have just exploited it. 

Fuck that. If the bolts are going to be removed, do it the right way. Bolt wars that scar the rock and leave unsightly holes and protruding metal are an excellent way to lose access.

With a humble heart, I withdraw my suggested bolt "removal" technique.  It was born out of a couple reasons.  Message me if interested to hear them. Cheered to hear the resistance.

If short on time, I'd say just take the hangers for now. He most likely used the cheapest wedge bolts he could find, and probably put loctite on the threads, so some heat and a long wrench might be necessary to loosen up the nut. Hammering over the studs or damaging the threads may make them more difficult to fully remove later. 

If this is a completely independent pitch 1. I'm okay with the bolts. If they are retro bolts that reduce the challenge, chop 'em.

It's sad to see a lower and lower percentage of climbers don't get why it's lame to add retro bolts. It's not about gatekeeping or keeping it less "safe" it's about respecting future climbers and allowing them to have the challenge (both mental and physical) the route offers. You don't chip holds to reduce the physical challenge and you don't add bolts to reduce the mental challenge unless there's a damn good reason to do it.

If there was one or more spots where multiple people got hurt, and it was clear the FA screwed up and should've put a bolt there, the community will often accept that bolt. Snake Dike is not like that. Almost all the injury accidents were due to people being off route. Adding bolts on route is not going to solve that. I'd honestly think it would be better to bolt a little sign on over the top of the pitch 2 anchor with an arrow pointing in the right direction. That would likely prevent more injuries than adding bolts.

ONE of the FAs did say he'd be okay with adding some bolts after the woman was seriously hurt getting off route. I asked him here "where do the added bolts go" he couldn't answer. When I pointed out she got hurt getting off route, how would bolts help that, he didn't have an answer. 

The FA doesn't "own the route." We generally leave the route how the FA did it because otherwise it could lead to a free for all of people adding or chopping the original bolts. Adding or removing bolts really needs to make sense and be supported by the particular conditions of that route. 

Reposting from the regional thread:

To Tanner and others taking on the Snake Dike restoration project:  Good on ya for doing this rightous work!  I'm currently unable to lend a hand myself, but I strongly support your efforts.

Thank you!

Okay so were the second sub and the second anchors re bolted, and the first and second protection bolt between the 1st and 2nd pitch re bolted which equals 6 bolts?

Petition for a second set of cables on snake dike!!!

Gloweringwrote:

If this is a completely independent pitch 1. I'm okay with the bolts. If they are retro bolts that reduce the challenge, chop 'em.

It is not a completely independent pitch 1.  It is an alternate start which bypasses the crux of the standard way.

erik sloan is a gigachad and I'm tired of pretending he's not