Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
If you look at a photo of Adam on one of his 9b's [1], it looks like a guy having a really hard time in a really steep place, but there are holds there. You see things that seem like a fella could hang from them.
Compare to the photo in the article, with its dead vertical, mile-high flat granite surface that's, well, kinda bumpy. There is nowhere in that image that the layman could picture himself existing for even a second before falling off.
It's a shame, in a way, that we sort of climbed off the top of the feasible difficulty for this style of route back in the '90s and had to turn to steeper, longer routes. You just don't get the captivating photos like you used to these days.
[1] https://www.8a.nu/images/news/large/636002137114161240_13320...
layman can see me climbing some easy overhang in the gym (say 5c) in amazement, but it's basically a series of pullups with some stamina required (yeah, I am not a very good climber). on real rock with similar surface angle, or on some proper route I wouldn't last there for 2 seconds
I have such immense respect and awe for those people that can climb such a flat surface. You really realise the insane grip strength and stamina they must have to be able to actually not fall off, let alone climb up.
I am quite happy with my positive holds on a flat surface and indoors though. Youtube bouldering world championships for some insane athletes!
Amazing feat!
PS: Would be happy to take anyone else's recommendations for videos or books too.
I just finished Alex Honnold's book (Alone on the Wall) and it's a fun read. Gives you a bit of backstory to the media frenzy that surrounds him at times.
In terms of videos, the Reel Rock film tour is amazing. They cover some really awesome climbs. And "Meru" is on Amazon Prime Video in a lot of countries (a short version was in Reel Rock one or two years ago).
https://video.aktualne.cz/dvtv/mam-lezecky-mozek-sedi-mi-div...
For English speakers I would recommend "La Dura Complete: The Hardest Rock Climb In The World" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1P97VVt6_k)
edu marin from spain is also very good climber, I've found mostly shorter videos for all of these.
That said, this is a pretty descriptive article describing what happened in a way accessible to fairly general audience. I particularly liked the comparison "it's akin to Usain Bolt also being the fastest marathoner alive. That’s the hold Ondra has on climbing." It's incredible to imagine how far this guy might push the sport, given everything he has already accomplished at such a young age.
IMO, as someone who has climbed in the Valley for more than 25 years and has always been a traditionalist, drilled bolts have there place in climbing. It would be hard to convince me that bolts on El Cap or any where else in the Valley have 'ruined' the massif.
By comparison, I tend to consider a brisk walk too much exercise.
Hans Kraus was JFK's back doctor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Kraus)
Hmmm...actually, that's very unlike many of the developers I know... ;-)
add to it very friendly community, possibility to focus on anything from 2m boulder problem to few thousand metres of altitude difference alpinism depending on your current wishes, and I am not surprised.
there are tons of great sports out there, tried many (but far from all!) but this one just works for me personally best (+ ski touring in winter).
Mmmm, my experience was quite different. I found it very click-ish and there was never a shortage of people saying "you're doing it wrong" based entirely on an incomplete observation from an obstructed vantage, technical differences of opinion or merely vanilla brow-beaters. If lots of testosterone(not exclusively) and competition is what you're after, then my point doesn't apply to you. This does not imply all climbers, but enough times I opted to avoid established routes and crowds. To each their own.
Been exploring remote canyons & game trails solo for 25 years, I find the experience of discovery on 3s and 4s more satisfying than conquering 5+s for the nth time.
edit; addwd an "If"
Nevertheless those explorative scramble/easy climbs are indeed very nice experiences, but it depends. Matterhorn hornli route has only 4c french grade as at crux, but doing it with massive exposure, cold, in alpine boots/crampons and gloves makes it damn stressful and hard for us weekend warriors for example.
I climb, many of my climbing partners are developers, including a few who recently climbed in Yosemite. It's engaging and fun. If you've got a climbing gym around, you should check it out!
On most business trips I have always pair of my climbing shoes and first lookup in a new city is for climbing gym :-)
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Google translate learnt Czech from people from Prague :)
And unless you REALLY toss and turn in your sleep, you are as safe as your anchors (and if you are doing this, you know how to make anchors. Or are so incredibly stupid that you are trying to win a Darwin award).
You might be interested in the ascent of "Wings of Steel" which originally took Mark Smith and Richard Jensen 39 days, later also completed by Ammon McNeely and Kait Barber. The first ascent team had to deal with a lot of problems too. Not only less modern gear, but open and dangerous hostility from some of the local climbing community.
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/assault_on_el_capitan
http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/el-caps-hardest-wings-o...
http://gripped.com/news/dec-16-2011-top-climber-confesses-to...
Who: Aside from Yosemite, the answer is "it depends", a lot of these are just set up by enterprising enthusiasts, often technically illegally, but few care enough to bother them.
In some parks & locations they're set up by whoever manages the park / owns the area to attract climbers & the business that comes with it.
Some people in the mountaineering / climbing community don't like them since they leave a permanent trace ("take only photos, leave only footprints"), and prefer to use removable versions of these for just the duration of the climb.
The Dawn Wall has been a significant battleground in this war. The first ascent was made by Harding and Caldwell in 1970 using bolts and significant aid climbing; A year later, Royal Robbins made the second ascent, chopping off the bolts as he went.
What you're talking about with Harding and Robbins on the Dawn Wall is a clash of ethics that is long in the past. Very few people consider it worthwhile hammering pitons into a slice of blank rock in order to ascend it and aid climbing in itself is less popular with respect to free climbing.
un-devmox said that Royal Robbins stopped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13015150), and Wikipedia agrees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Robbins#Dawn_Wall). (Technically, I guess neither of those contradicts what you said.)
Most bolts are placed by local climbers, and it's widely recognised that there is an "ethical" aspect to bolting: whether they should be fitted, where they should be fitted, etc. If someone came along and indiscriminately bolted a route, without any consultation with the local community, it would provoke an outcry.
Generally, bolts are fitted by a climber on an abseil rope. They'll reach the top using an alternative, easy route (at many crags, you can reach the top simply by hiking along a path), then abseil down, and drill/fit the bolts whilst attached to an abseiling rope.
Installing bolts whilst lead-climbing is done, but it's not very common. The climber would start by securing themselves to the cliff using traditional 'lead protection' (which is designed to be temporary, and generally not as secure as a bolt). Once secured, they would drill and fit the bolt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANAk7UC6rg&feature=youtu.be...
If you think it isn't sporting, just do the route solo free so you don't have any impact on the rock at all. /elitist /maybe
http://www.rockandice.com/dawn-wall-el-cap-yosemite-topo
EDIT: I should note that this image is the route that a different pair of climbers took last year. I’m not sure if Adam followed the same route or not.
So for such climbing do they use earlier runs to put the rings (whatever they are call) for the safety lines during the actual climb?
The amazing thing is that if you apply yourself to climbing and train for a few years, you will be able to move off similar holds in similar positions.
It's a pretty cool feeling.
https://www.8a.nu/images/news/large/636002137114161240_13320...
A famous bouldering problem, "Witlness the Fitness" that inclues a cieling:
And yes, the bolts here were originally installed earlier, possibly back in 70s by the first ascensionist, although I'm not sure what the history of the present-day bolts are. I'm guessing they were added by Caldwell/Jorgeson as they were preparing the free variation of this classic aid line some years ago.
There are various ethical considerations in bolting and it gets very contentious among people who care about this sort of thing.
Suffice to say, to free climb a route like this, yes, you have to be incredibly strong, mentally and physically.
Do you mean that if people put in bolts that it might somehow dilute the climb?
Some people think that bolting a wall "spoils" it ecologically, damages it's pureness. Once you've run a line of bolts up a route you can't un-do it. There's always going to be at least bolt holes or bolts there.
Some people don't think "sport" climbing (where you clip into quickdraws on the way up) is "real" climbing, but "trad" (where you place "pro", or protection, on the way up that you later "clean" or remove) is.
You can still trad climb a route that's been bolted, you just ignore the bolts, but some people might consider it less pure as a result I guess.
1 - You're drilling a hole in a rock. It's a small action, but it can't be undone. Can you justify forever altering part of a beautiful natural landscape to support your ambition? Keep in mind that the outdoors community in general has a leave-no-trace ethic.
2 - Every piece of permanent hardware makes the route safer and logistically and psychologically easier (to a certain extent). There's an argument that just because YOU want/need a bolt at a particular point on a route, there's no guarantee that someone stronger/tougher/better-equipped couldn't come along and forgo that bolt. What right do you have to bring the challenge down to your level? Perhaps the most extreme example of this was Cesare Maestri hauling a gigantic compressor powered drill up Cerro Torre and drilling a line of bolts all the way to the top [1]. Reinhold Messner called this 'the murder of the impossible.'
There's a forever-ongoing debate in the climbing community on these subjects, trying to determine what good 'style' is. Part of that discussion is determining the appropriate circumstances for installing permanent hardware. Personally I'm happy to clip bolts when they're needed, but I can understand the perspective of those who don't like em.
you can train a bit with various squeezy thingies, what helps too is just hanging by hands from some thicker bar (so you cannot grip it comfortably). but by far best training, especially in beginning is just climbing. it takes time for all connecting tissue to build up (tendons, ligament etc. - it's not about muscle for fingers). fingerboard can indeed be dangerous if attempted early - say from 6b-6c in french scale.
much of the art of staying on the wall is about proper balance - this can be trained a bit on slackline for example, but again best training is just climbing often.
Although, the lifter thing is more just that they don't realize they need to use their legs. Common problem in general, but most people are weak enough that they realize "Something isn't right here" soon enough.
We like to mock one of our friends because he started off climbing and was completely drained after a single 5.7 because he used JUST his arms. Made it to the top (and got pretty damned far up a 5.8), but... holy crap. Few things will make you feel more inadequate than being reminded that your belayer used to do that.
For pitch 15 of the Dawn wall, Caldwell drilled bolts with hangers into the granite likely while rapelling down from above and pre-placed quick draws (two carabiners connected by a short loop of webbing) on the bolt hangers- this was all done ahead of time in preparation for the redpoint, (the official climb done from the ground up) You can see Tommy in the video clipping his rope in as he goes along.
The permanent bolts are only used on blank sections of the wall where there are no cracks available to place removable anchors such as nuts and cams.
You can check out the topos for each climb. This is the nose (http://www.supertopo.com/topos/yosemite/thenose.pdf [p15-16]), and you can see, with just a few exceptions, most of the pitches are graded 5.10 or easier.
This is the Dawn Wall (http://www.rockandice.com/dawn-wall-el-cap-yosemite-topo). It's much, much harder, particularly when you realize that the Yosemite Decimal System progresses like the Richter scale, in the sense that a step from 5.13a to 5.13b (an increase of 1 grade unit) is leaps and bounds harder to achieve than improving from, say, 5.8 to 5.9.
It's much, much harder, particularly when you realize
that the Yosemite Decimal System progresses like the
Richter scale, in the sense that a step from 5.13a to
5.13b (an increase of 1 grade unit) is leaps and bounds
harder to achieve than improving from, say, 5.8 to 5.9.
Climbing grades don't follow that, nor do they follow a linear pattern, (although they follow MORE closer to a linear pattern...). It's just that 5.10 is harder than 5.9; 5.13b is harder than 5.13a.
There's no mathematically exactitude over it. A 5.13b climb just "feels" harder than a 5.13a climb, and a consensus has been reached. YDS is after all, open ended. If it was logarithmic like the Richter scale, going from 5.13 to 5.14 (5.13a, b, c, d, then 5.14a) would be 100,000x more difficult, which obviously it is not. The original YDS from 5.0 to 5.9 were based on benchmark climbs (not in Yosemite, strangely enough).
Grades afterwards were added as things were getting a little crazy to be calling them, "5.9", so "5.10" was born. This also gives you the peculiarity where established 5.9 climbs are, "harder" than newer 5.10 climbs, and this repeats for 5.10d/5.11a; 5.11d/5.12a, as the scale kept going up.
Then you gotta remember that all the climbing areas in even just this country are geographically isolated, so a 5.9 in Eldorado Canyon is different than a 5.9 at Devil's Lake. Yosemite itself is known to be pretty stiff. Unless you're good at a particular style, then...
Anyways, it's a big mess, and it'll never be fixed. What Ondra is doing is pretty hard. Let's remember he's only 23.
It's like lots of things in sport, actually. Imagine the progression from running a 6 minute mile to a 5 minute mile to a 4 minute mile. Now go to a 3:55 from there. It's a much smaller notch than 6:00 to 5:00, but will take you ten years of training.
So sure, you can consider it just adding more weight to the bar in a linear fashion. It still a lot harder to lift each individual pound as the weight increases.
There's no objective way climbs are organized in difficulty except by subjective feeling. Holds may be (say) smaller, and/or farther apart, but the difficulty can only be sussed out in a general sense - there's far too many things to take into consideration.
Compounding all this is that a climb could be more/less difficult because of a climber's body type (tall/short climbers excel at different climbs)
So you're left with a consensus, which is living and breathing, not a calculation.
Those difficulty conversion are possibly way way off and this areas may attract particularly good climbers ... but my point is the scale is logarithmic in the sense of how many people can achieve each tick level.
Gill was a Math professor, so this is somewhat interesting to the discussion. He famously thought of boulders as, "problems", of course.
http://www.climbing.com/people/the-wright-stuff-the-art-of-t...
They're both the best at what they do, but they do different things, and I don't think either of them could do what the other does.
http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/races-sports/alex-honno...
> People just assume I must be some great climber but I'm like, 'yeah but this is even harder than anything I've done.' It's really, really hard. The holds are just a little bit smaller and [a] little bit further apart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ&feature=youtu.be...
The whole video is pretty interesting, but may make your hands sweat even more.
Please refrain, Thx
Your second link mentioning problem solving is interesting. But overall I think the comparison is a little stretched.
As always when someone asks such questions (including when I asked one a week or so ago), the answer is that this is a site for news of interest to hackers, not necessarily news about hacking. If you want to judge whether this is of interest to hackers, then just look at the lively activity of the rest of the thread; it compares quite favourably to even some quieter front-page discussions.
Still, the livelyhood of the thread is not much of a factor in my opinion.
Though rock-climbing is in itself interesting (maybe more than average to devs) it has no direct link to being a hacker/dev.
It borders on 'lifestyle' kind of content.
Such civility is always welcome. Thank you!
> Still, the livelyhood of the thread is not much of a factor in my opinion.
> Though rock-climbing is in itself interesting (maybe more than average to devs) it has no direct link to being a hacker/dev.
Isn't this in contradiction with your first paragraph, though? This site is specifically and explicitly about things that are of interest to hackers, not things that are directly linked to being a hacker or developer; and it seems that the best way to gauge what is of interest to hackers is to get together a community of them, such as we have here, and see in which discussions they participate.