Well, this confab has been very entertaining- especially for the OP I imagine. I pretty much have to side with maestro healyje all the way. Falling is just part of hard leading.

I agree that falling is part of the game and I train to fall. I did three birtches sunday and it was a little bit wet. When you climb a diedral like that, you can put all your weight on your hand, and you will fall bump first or you can put all on your feet and your feet will hit the ground first (better). So, I was close to the middle (as much weight on my feet and on my hand) with a little more on my feet to have a clean fall...I didnt felt.

It is true that I practice to do that, on top rope or in a bolt lader in a gym or outside, but I really push my limit when I went on a new climb and I do it without any fall. If I fall, I return training.,,and I don't say that I am a 5.11 climber because I make the move after tons of fall. But it is trad climbing and the ethic is different.

If you can do 3 Birches when it's wet and not fall, you have the strength and technique to climb much harder. Why not get on Airation? I promise you're strong enough. You might not get it clean your first try, but you have the potential to do so. The gear is good and plentiful, and the falls are safe. And it's excellent climbing - much better than 3 Birches. The only thing keeping you from challenging yourself on such a nice climb is your silly notion that you must never fall.

Yep, that's how all the best surfers got good; twenty years of surfing without falling...

pretty sweet chuffer on chuffer discussion/argument here, discussing the finer nuances of how to best to rule the 5.9 trad crag in old man style.

pretty sweet chuffer on chuffer discussion/argument here, discussing the finer nuances of how to best to rule the 5.9 trad crag in old man style.

You're welcome to chuff on my old man routes anytime you like. And what the hell, I like a good show as much as the next guy so I'll even belay.

You're welcome to chuff on my old man routes anytime you like. And what the hell, I like a good show as much as the next guy so I'll even belay.

With a belay device?

Jay

With a belay device?

Jay

A non-locking carabiner.

How to become a trad convert...

acquire a rack you can fondle and play with as roughly (or gently) as you want any time you want. - check

note - bigger isn't always better, but it IS more to fondle!

Find people you don't mind fondling and playing roughly (or gently) with your rack. - check - assumed based on previous posts.

Go get high with those people (generally with some fine crack for the day) and play with your rack (big or small) for as long as it keeps giving you that thrilling pleasure feeling. - check

you've got a rack. I'd say you're converted.

If that's not the case, drop me a line when you want don't want that rack anymore. heh!

now being a safe trad convert...well I dunno, out of my territory now....

good luck!

cheers

LS

How to become a trad convert...

acquire a rack you can fondle and play with as roughly (or gently) as you want any time you want. - check

note - bigger isn't always better, but it IS more to fondle!

Find people you don't mind fondling and playing roughly (or gently) with your rack. - check - assumed based on previous posts.

Go get high with those people (generally with some fine crack for the day) and play with your rack (big or small) for as long as it keeps giving you that thrilling pleasure feeling. - check

you've got a rack. I'd say you're converted.

If that's not the case, drop me a line when you want don't want that rack anymore. heh!

now being a safe trad convert...well I dunno, out of my territory now....

good luck!

cheers

LS

It's the discipline I learned and nurtured from trad climbing long before I got involved in caving and rescue. And it's the discipline that has been central to alpine climbing since time immemorial.

Sport climbing, however, is a completely different beast. As a sport, the goal is to constantly test one's limits and try to exceed them.

Traditional climbing, like life itself, is a matter of learning to understand and live humbly within one's inherent limits - and to know when one is about to exceed them and then wisely back off.


Call it "tripe" if you're unable to understand this spiritual discipline. But believing that we can exceed our natural limitations by "better" technology is exactly why the human race is on the brink of global collapse and possible extinction.

The ancient Greeks understood that all human tragedy is rooted in hubris.

Here's some advice I've posted at different times, I hope not incoherently cobbled together.

The most important principle for using trad protection, especially but not exclusively if you are just learning, is redundancy. The idea is to develop a system you trust while maintaining a healthy scepticism about the reliability of any one piece. Try not to put yourself in the position of having a single piece, no matter how "bombproof," between you and disaster.

Redundancy is a state of mind combined with the will to carry it out. Placing more than gear than seems to be essential requires discipline and endurance, marks of a good trad climber. Failing on a system is a better longevity option than betting the farm on a single piece.

Nonetheless, all climbing to some extent, but trad climbing intrinsically, involves risk. A lot of climbs have places you better not fall from, and this is part of the essence of trad climbing---performing in a cool and controlled manner when confronting a risky situation. Neutralizing danger, not just by protection skills, but also by climbing skills, is part of the game.

Although leader falls are an intrinsic part of modern trad climbing once you get to the higher classical levels, which start around 5.9, people who are in the process of learning protection shouldn't be falling. You will hear, "if the gear is bomber, go for it," which is fair enough, but such pronouncements avoid the real problem by defining it out of existence. Some accidents happen when the bomber gear turns out not to be bomber. The climber (1) misjudged the pro (something that is quite possible for experts, let alone beginners) or misjudged the effect that rope motions would have on the pro, (2) failed to build sufficient redundancy into the system, and then (3) misjudged their ability and went for it in a situation when they were not well protected.

As for judging pro, experienced evaluation of your placements has value, but in addition to that I think top-roped aid climbing practice, with vigorous bounce-testing of every piece., is one of the best things you can do.

More and more people seem to be learning by placing pieces and getting feedback from "experienced" climbers about their placements. In some cases, the "experienced" climbers learned the same way. Such advice can be very valuable, no doubt, but it is also possible that the learner is part of a chain of people who have never fortified their own "judgement" with some kind of testing. A person without extensive aid climbing experience who has climbed for a long time and never taken any leader falls themselves cannot offer expert advice on and/or evaluation of gear.

But even genuinely experienced climbers can be wrong in their estimates 5% of the time. There is no substitute for placing, judging, and then testing yourself.

If you can place pieces near bolts on sport climbs and then fall on those placements with the bolt for back-up protection, that seems like a good idea. You'd need sport climbs that have sufficient placements. Make sure that you aren't putting in gear whose failure might alter or erase holds, however, and practice when you aren't going to be in the way of others,

For most people, top-rope aid practice is going to be the only available option. There are some other advantages to top-rope aiding.

(1) Perhaps the main advantage is that you will learn something about how to aid. This is an essential skill for getting out of jams (route too hard, off route, unexpected wetness, onset of bad weather, approaching darkness, injured partner, etc. etc.).

(BITD when big-wall climbing was the ultimate goal, folks learned free and aid climbing simultaneously. Now there are lots of trad climbers, some who are otherwise quite accomplished, who couldn't aid their way out of a paper bag.)

(2) Aid climbing will inevitably force you to get creative with some placements, because the available terrain just above your current stance may not be optimal. This will be good practice for analogous trad climbing situations.

(3) After finishing the pitch, you rap down with an experienced person and clean it. The experienced person should comment, not only on the placement itself, but also on whether there are better options nearby, something that beginners frequently miss, in my experience.

Then you get to clean the pieces you placed and learn whether your placements lend themselves to cleaning, which is also critical for multipitch cimbs in general as well as for your wallet in particular. This may provide an opportunity for the experienced person to demonstrate some of the tricks of the trade when it comes to extracting recalcitrant gear.

An important caveat about bounce-testing your placements: look at the placement carefully before you test it, but make sure to look away while testing it. If the piece blows, you don't want it to hit you in the face.

Having said something about learning to get good protection, it is time to affirm again that part of trad climbing involves climbing without falling when falling is a bad idea. (For example, if there is one piece between you and the ground and you can't back it up, then falling is a bad idea.) Here I think modern trends can inculcate bad habits. Gym climbing, sport climbing, and bouldering all emphasize moving up in the most marginal of situations. There is a risk of developing an "upward" mentality that, first of all, accepts marginal moves even though the consequences of failure are catastrophic, perhaps not even noticing that the climber has gone from control to high risk status, and second of all, that takes upward motion as the only solution to a difficult situation, blinding the climber to both the need and the opportunity to climb down to rest, regroup, and yes, in some cases, to retreat.

Mental discipline is the primary tool for avoiding the stress-induced upward stampede, but this discipline is not something acquired in the gym or on sport climbs, where it is counterproductive, and so retraining may be called for. Here are some exercises that may be of some use:

(1) When climbing in the gym or on sport routes, try to be conscious of how marginal you are. (This does not mean reducing the difficulty level, just striving for heightened awareness.) From a trad perspective, a calculated fall may be ok, but an unexpected fall is not good. Strive to know when you are on the edge.

(2) A lot of falls on steep ground happen when the leader runs out of gas. Try to develop a sense of your "half-way point," because this is one of the moments when you have to decide whether to move up away from your gear into a realm of longer and longer falls, or down towards your gear and the possibility of shorter falls. For example, a gym exercise is to select a challenging endurance route and then see how high on it you can get and still climb all the way back down without falling.

(3) Develop the mental habit of filing away "retreat data." This can make the difference between stepping down and falling. (For example, when you step over a small roof, the holds underneath disappear. Did you make a mental note of features above the roof that will help you locate the holds underneath?)

(4) Don't neglect the building of a base of climbing below your limit, climbing in which you are relatively comfortable but are also frequently in the "must not fall" zone. A steady diet of well-protected hard climbing at or near your limit, while essential for raising your climbing level, may shortchange you on control and calmness when things get dicey, as they will, sooner or later.

One of the things the trad leader has to learn is rope management. Where the rope goes and what to do about it is decided for you on bolted routes, but when you are placing the gear, it is up to you to make placement choices and slinging choices that keep the rope running as you advance. Even experienced climbers find that they have made bad choices about gear location or slingage. But one of the differences is that the experienced climber will often climb back down and fix what was wrong, while the inexperienced climber will push on, finding later on that they can barely move because of rope drag.

I think one of the most common errors experienced people make is placing nuts that zipper---meaning that the rope motions that occur during a fall lift the nuts out. (By the way, if you haven't taken leader falls, then you won't in general even know, except theoretically, what situations are critical in this regard). One thing to be careful about is to either have the belayer right up against the wall, or else place a first piece that is fully stable under an upward load. (I often hear people say a cam in a vertical crack satisfies this condition because it will just rotate upwards without pulling, but I don't believe this is an assumption you want to bet your iife on.)

Zippering potential occurs mid-pitch whenever there is a transition from less than vertical rock to more than vertical rock. The rope will try to make a straight line from your first piece to your top piece if you fall. Nuts that do not lie in this straight line are likely to lift out unless slung so the rope-end carabiners do lie on the line.

Something infrequently mentioned is that the leader is responsible for the safety of the second. The leader gets to choose the level of risk they are comfortable with, but the second is obliged to take risks imposed on them by the decisions of the leader.

These issues come to the fore when the climb involves traverses. Before launching out on a traverse, the leader has got to arrange for a bombproof "pivot" piece if it is at all humanly possible. This is a moment when the whole ascent might have to slow down while the leader works to get in something good, and then they have got to place enough gear along the traverse to keep the second safe. One of the worst offenses in this regard happens when the traverse is easy, but the leader either places nothing or else installs a manky "pivot" piece at the start, leaving the second to climb the vertical bit before the traverse with an inadequate and possibly very dangerous level of protection.

If the traverse is long and easy enough not to merit much protection, then the leader should arrange for a substantial redundant "pivot" piece; I have in some cases installed something equivalent to a belay anchor to make sure that the second is properly cared-for.

Incompetence in protecting the second is climbing malpractice and deserves all the condemnation we are capable of mustering. You can't just be thinking about yourself up there.

Folks mention starting on easy climbs so you can work on protection skills. But this is where you also learn about rope management, slinging, avoiding zippering, and proper protection for the second. You want to have a good hold on all these things before beginning to push into difficulty levels where you are significantly stressed by the climbing moves.

Here's some advice I've posted at different times, I hope not incoherently cobbled together.

As for judging pro, experienced evaluation of your placements has value, but in addition to that I think top-roped aid climbing practice, with vigorous bounce-testing of every piece., is one of the best things you can do.

I dunno. I saw someone at a concert the other night. "She" looked like "she" was smuggling large grapefruits. But as for whether "she" was really converted? Maybe, maybe not. I didn't want to check.

Point being - just having the rack is not conclusive evidence.

GO

ps- it was a hexish weekend and they are still on my mind...

I am not convinced. There is no way, NO WAY, that hexes were useful. It's a well known fact that hexes are useless lead-weights that drop you 2 number grades.