What a relief. Scientists studied the vegetation on difficult climbs (they don’t say how difficult) and determined that: Rock climbers not guilty of destroying plant life. They suggest that the rock faces with less vegetation are more solid, making it more interesting and safer for climbing.
But they didn’t study the approaches to trails ( it’s probably a given that we do damage there), nor easier climbs.
Sorry I haven’t been posting lately. Here are a few interesting links I’ve found lately.
The Black Diamond website has a lot of great videos and interesting technical information. To see some ice climbing from the Ouray Ice Festival, check out Rich Marshall climbing and turn up the volume. There’s also some off-the-record info by Black Diamond’s QA Manager Kolin Powick about device failure in QA with KP. You can read about how many old biners or dog-bones break under 7 kN. He also has web-site with a cool home-movie video of Lauren Lee climbing a 5.13c. Great climbers know how to get some rest on climbs and you see her shaking the pump out.
Also, if you thought you couldn’t screw up by using a daisy chain, you’d better watch this video on the BD site: Daisy Chain Failure Video.
The Washington Post has a pretty good article about high-ball boulderer Jason Kehl: Not Always Hands-On Learning for Climber. It’s a little funny because the article’s in their “Adrenaline” section (”extreme”’s still an interesting category I guess). He’ll take his time figuring out the route to take, but I wish it compared how much on the rock time he spent vs. looking it at. He says 20 ft falls are pretty common for him!
You’ve heard about companies like Cliff Bar with climbing walls at their offices. But they’re even appearing at businesses like law firms: A new law form.
If don’t like your job and wanted to start up a climbing gym instead, you don’t to have to start big. You could just start small if there are no other gyms around: “Brewing a business from a hobby”
But most likely, you’d want to get away from co-workers and climb with friends, so maybe the best thing to do is to look for a climbing gym near work: map of gyms
I finally read Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. It’s a fun read as a personal history of an outdoorsman who happens to start a great, socially responsible company.
Some of the business insights aren’t great — the best CEOs are the ones that have worked with their hands — but he certainly knows how to kept good employees: flexible hours, on-site childcare, good food. At times I wondered what Jim Collins would think — most likely he’d wonder where the data was.
I find it reassuring they plan further along than their next quarter’s earnings Instead, they look at Iroquois practice of considering the impact of their actions on the next seven generations. Even though people might not find it completely applicable as a business text, it would give industries a great ideal — to constantly examine their companies’ negative impact on the world and trying to lessen it. This led to their switch from using conventionally produced cotton to organic cotton and their use of fleece that has been produced from recycled soda bottles.
Other fun bits -
This supertopo thread details a rope breaking when a lead climbing takes a fall from the top of a climb at an indoor gym. Also, a statement from the gym. They’ve checked everything in question and found no abormalities. The rope’s at the manufacturers for testing, so hopefully the results will let us know if we need to change how often we retire ropes.
Yahoo has a short article and video about the bouldering at the Teva Games. The video takes a little bit of time to load. It’s funny to hear the announcer barking out analysis with loud music behind it.
Site was down for a while. Now on a web-host, so any downtime isn’t my own hardware’s fault! Plenty of things I missed.
