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kachoong
Mar 5, 2009, 4:51 PM
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pfwein wrote: Unless you are a really slow learner, the more trad placements you place (and remove), the more you get a sense of what is good/marginal/junk.
What you say is true but....it's more likely to be from falling more on placements that will give you a better sense of what's marginal or not.
Also Navy, I second the point to try aid climbing for a while... allow yourself to see how placements settle and interact with the rock under body weight and also how they react to a fall. Usually, if it's an easy line with lots of good placements your falls will be as long as you make them, depending which pieces you want to clip to your lead line. Avoid "practicing" your falls and testing your gear on shitty rock.
(This post was edited by kachoong on Mar 5, 2009, 4:52 PM)
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k.l.k
Mar 5, 2009, 5:05 PM
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kachoong wrote: pfwein wrote: Unless you are a really slow learner, the more trad placements you place (and remove), the more you get a sense of what is good/marginal/junk. What you say is true but....it's more likely to be from falling more on placements that will give you a better sense of what's marginal or not.
Actually, I think that's also unlikely, at least as a generalization. Unless you think that your experience of repeatedly whipping onto cams gives you a better sense of gear than, say, Henry Barber or John Stannard any of a number of other folks who spent their careers largely avoiding repetitive accidental testing of placements.
One of the things aid climbing taught me (aside from the fact that I didn't like aid climbing), was that gear that looked incredibly marginal could occasionally withstand pretty large forces. And placements that looked bomber in each and every way could occasionally fail miserably.
What we've heard recently from the manufactureres is that occasional "bomb" cams in plumb parallel cracks can fail unexpectedly for mysterious reasons: Not most of the time or even half the time, but often enough to let us know that there is basically no useful, portable takeaway for the rest of us from any "experiment" of the sort that the OP has unwisely documented.
Even if the dummy drop had been done in something like a more intelligent way by someone whose competence we could actually trust, it still would have no portable value.
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 5:16 PM
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k.l.k
Mar 5, 2009, 5:37 PM
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adatesman wrote: kachoong wrote: Avoid "practicing" your falls and testing your gear on shitty rock.I actually disagree with this.... I found it most helpful to intentionally find something slick, chossy and topropeable for this. Aid the line, but have a very loose TR belay for safety. There's nothing like a sudden 3' penalty TR fall while being hit in the face with gear to drive home the point that your placement was crap. Burned hand teaches best, no?
No.
Although your post has certainly given me an interesting mental picture.
A top-rope is a great idea for n00bies practicing their grounder aid. Had the OP employed a top-rope, then I probably would've avoided this thread altogether, since I'm probably losing a few brain cells each time it loads on my screen.
But that's not the context of the post you are quoting. There, as advice for n00b aid climbers, it's really good advice that basically boils down to, "Start with something easy."
You need a substantial base of competence even to learn the proper lessons of failure. If anyone needs evidence in support of that claim, simply refresh this thread and read the original post again.
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cracklover
Mar 5, 2009, 5:57 PM
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I've never had a sig before. Thanks for this (see below).
Cheers,
GO
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 5:59 PM
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k.l.k
Mar 5, 2009, 6:18 PM
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adatesman wrote: k.l.k wrote: adatesman wrote: kachoong wrote: Avoid "practicing" your falls and testing your gear on shitty rock.I actually disagree with this.... I found it most helpful to intentionally find something slick, chossy and topropeable for this. Aid the line, but have a very loose TR belay for safety. There's nothing like a sudden 3' penalty TR fall while being hit in the face with gear to drive home the point that your placement was crap. Burned hand teaches best, no? No. Although your post has certainly given me an interesting mental picture. A top-rope is a great idea for n00bies practicing their grounder aid. Had the OP employed a top-rope, then I probably would've avoided this thread altogether, since I'm probably losing a few brain cells each time it loads on my screen. But that's not the context of the post you are quoting. There, as advice for n00b aid climbers, it's really good advice that basically boils down to, "Start with something easy." You need a substantial base of competence even to learn the proper lessons of failure. If anyone needs evidence in support of that claim, simply refresh this thread and read the original post again. Isn't building that substantial base of competence in placing gear for trad by practicing aid exactly what Kachoong is talking about? I originally just quoted the end of his post, but immediately went back to add the whole thing for context. Good advise IMO, and the only thing I'd change is to intentionally seek out the worst case scenario for it.
Yes. Perhaps I was unclear. Kachoong's advice was good, including the bit about NOT doing practice whippers onto marginal gear in bad rock on aid climbs.
You replied that practice whippers on bad gear in bad rock was the best way to learn, so long as you had a top-rope.
I then replied that yes, if you are a n00b doing grounder aid, you should use a TR until you've become competent. But I disagreed with your suggestion that whippers, failure, and marginal placements were fertile ground for n00bs looking to hone their skills.
Beginners should begin on beginner terrain, and that includes beginning aid climbing. The traditional ladder of competence begins with jugging, then TR aid on a short, fixed bolt ladder, then A1, A2, and so on.
Your suggestion (which you may not have intended) that the way a n00b or gumby (like our OP and virtually all the lurkers on RC) really learned quickly was to "burn his/her hand" top-roping A4 on shitty rock, would certainly offer an innovative approach to learning how to aid climb. Innovation is not always a good thing.
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USnavy
Mar 5, 2009, 6:24 PM
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cracklover wrote: USnavy wrote: Of course I had a bolt clipped under the cam. I threw a two foot sling on the bolt in the first picture and placed the cam between the sling and the bolt. Can I understand from the above that you did not have any sling on the cam? In each fall, the rope was clipped directly to the cam's sling, yes? I'm not trying to imply anything, I'm just looking to clarify a still rather muddy picture. GO
Sorry I made a typo. It was a 48" sling attached to the bolt not a 24” sling.
The only sling on the cam was the sling that came with the cam. I did not attach an extension sling or a quickdraw to the cam's sling for there was no need in my opinion. The cam did not walk as I climbed above it and the rope was not pulling on it as I climbed above it.
I clipped the bolt with a 48" sling. I then placed the cam between the sling and bolt and clipped the cam's stock sling straight to the rope. In this configuration 100% of the fall had to be caught by the cam and if the cam failed I fell a few feet further onto the sling. At no time was the 48" sling attached to the bolt able to bare any weight. The cam would have to have completely disengaged from the rock to provide enough extra distance for the sling to bare the weight of the rope.
(This post was edited by USnavy on Mar 5, 2009, 6:34 PM)
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 6:32 PM
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 8:13 PM
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cracklover
Mar 5, 2009, 8:36 PM
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adatesman wrote: cracklover wrote: This is totally a straw man. I don't know about all the beautiful splitter granite cracks you guys are secretly guarding in PA, but in the rest of the world, even the cleanest cracks will require a good deal of creative thinking when all you've got at your disposal is your standard trad rack (one or two nuts in each size, one or two cams in each size, and maybe a few tricams). Especially for a new aid leader, placing gear on average every two feet if the line is steep. GO True, but I don't think it negates the point that I was trying to make in that aiding a smooth, regular crack in bomber rock where you'd have to try hard to screw up a placement is most likely of little use. I hadn't thought it though to the point of running out of gear and needing to be creative.... Good point, and I agree that would probably be worthwhile.
Where is this smooth regular crack in solid granite you're (continually) referring to? Most budding leaders I've known don't have access to this mythical climb of yours.
I'm beginning to wonder if this is something you've actually done, or are just theorizing about.
The best practice aid lines I did when I was starting out were 5.10 to 5.12 trad lines. I did them in the winter, in New England. Here's the point: they were totally "G" rated as free climbs, but in order to keep moving up, you absolutely *had* to make moves off of questionable gear placements.
Your straw man argument pretends that the above is not the case. It's a bogus argument.
GO
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 8:52 PM
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cracklover
Mar 5, 2009, 9:13 PM
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adatesman wrote: Perhaps I need to point out that this perfect crack is an hypothetical abstraction for use in making my point. I thought this was obvious, but perhaps not.
Of course it's hypothetical. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's a straw man.
Unless I'm mistaken, your argument was that you need to seek out poor rock in order to get the best use of your time, because good rock = easy no-brainer placements, and thus is a waste of time.
From wikipedia:
In reply to: A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
GO
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 9:56 PM
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cracklover
Mar 5, 2009, 10:51 PM
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Hmm... we're getting pretty far off-topic, but I'll just say that for the beginning trad leader leader, who's currently leading G and PG rated routes, mock leading C4 choss (with a toprope) is just as useless (for an equal and opposite reason) as you think leading a bolt ladder is.
Though I haven't done it, and you have, so perhaps you're right.
GO
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vegastradguy
Mar 5, 2009, 11:17 PM
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adatesman wrote: Good rock = less frequent non-obviously marginal placements Bad rock = more frequent non-obviously marginal placements
this may be true, but how many of those marginal placements in bad rock are due to rock quality rather than placement quality?
i think the emphasis here should be on placement quality- in which case, good rock would be more productive due to the fact that you're focused solely on placement quality rather than worrying about rock quality.
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adatesman
Mar 5, 2009, 11:42 PM
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vegastradguy
Mar 5, 2009, 11:49 PM
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adatesman wrote: vegastradguy wrote: adatesman wrote: Good rock = less frequent non-obviously marginal placements Bad rock = more frequent non-obviously marginal placements this may be true, but how many of those marginal placements in bad rock are due to rock quality rather than placement quality? i think the emphasis here should be on placement quality- in which case, good rock would be more productive due to the fact that you're focused solely on placement quality rather than worrying about rock quality. Perhaps, but it seems to me that could lead to a false sense of security since identical placements in both good and bad rock may give wildly different results when put to the test. So while I see placement quality as separate from rock quality I think they need to be looked together as a system. Otherwise you could find yourself learning the hard way that something that works well on good rock doesn't actually work on choss.
true- but i would argue that learning placement first on good rock(especially since, as a beginner, you shouldnt be climbing on choss anyway) and getting mileage would be the better way to go.
this can be really location dependent, as well- but there's no sense in climbing on bad rock when you're new anyway- go climb the good stuff. as you mature in your leading skills, moving onto less than stellar rock can be a natural transition when you have already grasped the finer points of gear placement- which will in turn give you more ability to read the rock and realize that more care is required.
my thought is that there is so much to learn when placing gear, that putting bad rock into the equation in the beginning when your grasp of the concepts is still barely there, you're not going to learn as efficiently as you would on solid rock.
that said, obviously rock quality needs to be considered- and i would also note that distinguishing rock quality when new can be very difficult. it has taken me years to be able to read the sandstone out here- and even now and then i get a surprise.
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robdotcalm
Mar 6, 2009, 12:54 AM
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l first learned to climb on bad rock. It taught me a valuable lesson in not blindly trusting hand and foot holds. That's an advantage, I'm not saying it outweighs the obvious disadvantages.
r.c
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adatesman
Mar 6, 2009, 2:14 AM
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patto
Mar 6, 2009, 2:38 AM
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That crack looks TOTALLY sew up able. Unless the rock is extremely poor then it looks perfect for passive gear. Sure it may be too irregular for cams but come on! Nuts are bomber, or is that a lost art these days?
(I learnt to climb purely on nuts so I might be slightly biased here.)
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rocknice2
Mar 6, 2009, 3:56 AM
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What was shown by this experiment is that you have a 50% chance of a cam hold in a "fair"placement.
If two of the BD lobes wereable to tip over then I would call that a marginal placement at best more like a poor placement.
It sounds like you need more experience in evaluating gear placements.
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catbird_seat
Mar 6, 2009, 4:31 AM
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No one responded to the OP's statement that he clipped the cam's sling and did not use a quickdraw or a shoulder length sling. The link cam is especially unforgiving when it comes to orientation.
It's quite possible that in the act of climbing past the cam, or in falling, it pulled out away from the rock and then back down in the direction of the fall. This could explain the damage to the cam. It looked like it had been torqued. The OP said he oriented it towards the fall, but it is quite possible that it rotated up and then down without him being aware of it.
I wanted to also comment on the meaningfulness of the test. It should be intuitively obvious to most people that as placements go from good, to fair, to poor, the variability would increase. What that means is that if you repeated the test in a fair placement, there would be a wide scatter in the data.
Few people have the resources to get a statistically significant sampling and then it would only have meaning for that one placement. If you moved up or down in the crack, you might get entirely different results. One brand might suddenly do better than the other.
Still it would be cool to attempt to collect statistically significant data. You'd probably have to start out with larger cams and larger loads as was already pointed out.
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