Hahah.

So, say I spied a line that looks nice, not recorded as a route in any of the 4 guidebooks I own, but has a bunch of crap in the way. Like, bushes, a small tree (1" diameter). Not a lot, really, just a few spots of ... not particularly pleasant passage impeding what might be a nice route. What is the standard "ethic" on how much I can clean out?

Don't ask, don't tell.

Are you saying that the route is gay?

I can't tell whether you're tongue-in-cheek or not, but I am actually asking a serious question (despite the punny title), trying to think about doing the right thing before I barge ahead. Trying to be considerate before I grid-bolt ( <<- JUST KIDDING! SHEESH!).

I'm not making a joke about LC, I'm asking about the Trapps.

I know that some folks get upset over the use of, say, hand saws.

Although, of course, I'm sure the line in question is just a descent route from "back in the day", or at least has been climbed before.

unless it takes ballnuts, in which case it probably hasn't been climbed or there would be a piton

those old pitons can be found in the darndest out of the way manky places.

Personally, I would draw the line at cutting a trunk but perhaps not a limb. Scaredy-cat in me would use it as pro if possible! It seems that any other cleaning is accepted. Many areas, as you know, are usually not climbable until after several days work with a wire brush, but the Trapps drain well enough that this isn't usually the case here (unless you try Broken Hammer before it freezes).

That's a good guideline, Chip.

Before you break out the hand saw, consider that you're climbing on what is ostensibly a nature preserve. Consider also your motivations for putting in the route. At least make sure it's not a pitch pine!

After all appropriate thought and careful consideration, fire up the Stihl!

The Preserve forbids climbers from cutting trees.
I think if you were to stroll up to the crag with a saw you might be embarrassed if a ranger came along. That's probably a good guideline. Sounds like you're in the gray area of what might be embarrassing or forbidden behavior. So try doing just the stuff you're comfortable with, leaving tree trunks intact, and see if the route goes. If not, maybe next year the little tree will have died in an ice storm, and you will have done some of the route prep already. The cliff certainly will still be there.

Ok. Thanks.

It's a nature preserve that features an huge outdoor climbing gym that hosts thousands of climbers every year. It isn't exactly pristine wilderness. Given all the trampling, stepping upon, scraping, etc.; what you are hypothetically proposing would seem to be a drop in the proverbial bucket. Don't ask, don't tell is probably good advice.

Brings up a related but different point. What happens when the nature of a long established climb becomes significantly changed due to plant growth. For instance, a two or three inch diameter sapling growing out of a very nice crack, or what used to be a very nice crack. Or a crack closed out with dirt, debris, grass and ferns.

Also, what's the definition of a tree?

Tradjunkie's right. There's language somewhere (on the day pass?) that says something like, "No chipping, glueing, bolting, trundling, tree cutting..."

What's a tree? LOL. Well, I know one when I see one?

--
My own singular action might be a drop in the bucket; but in considering all of the trampling that does go on, I look at things from the point of view of "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing?" - which is usually a good way to approach other "is it ok if I .... (double-park, kill a bug, pick a flower)" questions.

but it's also balanced by the greater good; if I opened a worthwhile pitch of climbing for everyone ...

anyway, thanks for the input folks, I have a clearer picture now.

It seems pretty obvious what a tree is. There are many dozens of species of native trees on the Mohonk Preserve. If one of them was growing out of a crack, it's a tree.

Also in response to Bill's statement about the Nature Preserve being a huge outdoor gym. Yes, that may be true, but that still does not give someone the right to do whatever they "think" is appropriate. The landowners have set forth clear guidelines for the use of their property. It's not up to us to determine what is a wilderness setting and then act accordingly. It's up to us to use the land in accordance with the owners wishes.

So where do we draw the line? What makes a three inch crooked scrub oak sticking out of a crack more special than a piece of rock tripe, or a bit of dirt compacted in a horizontal? I think the answer to this is......we all know what is right and wrong. You know it before you do it. If you have to ask yourself, then chances are you shouldn't be doing it. Just my opinion. It happens to be right however!

500 Bonus Points for Ranger Rob.

Call me cynical but if I were firing up my Stihl to go up and remove that annoying 3" "tree" in the crack and a ranger walked up; I would be willing to bet if I handed him a $100,000 check made out to the Preserve, he would end up offering me a belay and a voting membership on the board to my little friend "Farm Boss".

Put another way, if the original deed to the Preserve specified no access fees could be charged to climbers but allowed any activities to be banned it wished, climbing would likely not be occurring at the Gunks today.

I believe there is a case to be made that the primary "resource" at the Gunks is the climbing cliffs and the scenic profile and not some unique ecosystem feature and the Preserve should be managed to that end. The ecosystem, to whatever degree it is unique, of the Shawangunks seems more than adequately preserved by the apparent benign neglect of the ecosystem 25 miles to the north and 25 miles to the south.

I receive any number of mailings during the course of the year. Really ticks me off by the way to have paper mail sent to mail when I have explicitly indicated I would prefer the more ecological sound method of email.

At any rate I haven't really looked closely but I believe some of the pleas have been for funds for land acquisition to protect valuable, scarce or whatever fauna, flora or geology. Could it be the Preserve tolerates climbers and the ecological toll they that extract on the oh so sensitive Shawangunks ecosystem since their fees fund what could be termed an expansionist goal. Oh by the way, why have daily use fees gone up 250% in 6 years?

I am very firmly in the camp of respecting to the spirit and the letter of the law the property rights of a landowner. However let's not so quickly cede the Preserve the higher moral ground. If the main goal of the Preserve is to manage a ecosystem resource of a sensitive and rare nature, then they are complicit in its being significantly damaged by their current management practices.

Um, no. Putting in a route is first and foremost nothing but ego gratification. It may become a worthwhile pitch for everyone, but we're really doing it for our selfish little selves.

Wanted: more solipsistic climbers. (thanx alice alice alice alice)

Well, I tried...

Preserve climbing policy is set forth in

http://www.mohonkpreserve.org/pdf/ClimbingPolicy.pdf.

Item III. B. of that document includes the statement

In order to maintain the cliffs as far as possible in their natural state, however, the Preserve forbids all environmentally damaging climbing practices. These include trundling rocks, chipping holds, affixing new holds, cutting trees, and placing new bolts and pitons.

C'mon Kent! Surely I must have earned some points for evoking that response.

BTW, what the heck does it mean?!?!

Does that mean we can plant trees?

It's something of an epithet once hurled at Ped by Alice here on gunks.com.

Solipsistic

"extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption."

You're going to cut down some live trees and bushes for your own little route? People have been run out of the Gunks for less. One got iced by his psychotic GF out west. Not that altering the rock here and there for his own glory had anything to do with that.

Sigh ... so much for the spirit of adventure!

Marc, I'm an academic, I'm licensed to think for the greater good ;-). Seriously, though, I would be tickled pink if it turned out to be good and other people had one more line to enjoy.

My intent is to climb it, disturbing as little as possible, and see if it's worthwhile, and exactly how much disturbing is necessary. I never said I'd be altering the rock itself, so you can hold off the threats of ice axes already!

I'm pretty sure you crawling out of bed each day, then mistakenly pissing on your leg, proceeded by walking over to the keyboard only to retaliate by pissing on all us selfish little selves in here, is in and of itself down right selfish, but what do I know...

Julie, why not just ask Hank what extent of alteration is permitted, or not permitted, in his or management's interpretation of Preserve rules?

If push comes to shove, I certainly will. I asked here because I wanted to sample the climbing community's consensus.

It seems like you're saying that if there is a clear consensus in the climbing community, one which is at odds with the landowner's rules for use of their land, then you're going to, or at least you might, go against what the landowner, in this case the Mohonk Preserve, allows on their land.

The point Ranger Rob made is that what cleansing is, and is not, allowed is not up to the climbing community but rather the landowner.

Do you disagree with Rob?

The full quote as uttered by Alice was, I believe: "wanted, more solipsistic climbers. Contact: GCC."

Thanks for confusing me with Kent, Bill, I'll take it as a compliment.

Ped --- no I was not confusing you with Kent, just was not clear with my meaning. Since Kent was giving out points earlier, competitive as I am I wanted some. BTW thank you for slinging such a cultured and sophisticated epithet in my direction. I am honored, I think?!?!

Kent --- if no points for me you must give some to quanto for this

RG et al --- BTW -- What is the definition of a tree?

Bill, for thinking critically, you get 1000 Bonus Points.

In response to Bill's statement about the ecosystem being "sensitive and rare". We can all sense the sarcasm in there, but really it makes no difference if it is rare or common. It is not your property to do with as you see fit. If you don't see it as sensitive and rare that's fine. I think we all agree that it is special for one reason or another. If you didn't then you probably wouldn't be a member of the Preserve in the first place. Peace dude

Of the very few FAs I've done, I was never putting in a route for anyone else but me! There was one particular "new" route at Seneca - a less than mediocre 5.5, that, like many other routes there, showed some signs of ascent from Army training in the 40's - thus, we never reported it. I was pissed that another FA party was credited with the route when the new guide was published. They gave it a dumb name, too.

What's the "I'm an ass level" difference from demanding that route be recorded that one has done vs. demanding a route not be recorded by anyone else after one has done?

Short answer? Zero.

Julie...the prospective "project" sounds exciting. I guess it begs the question; Is there anyway around damaging the tree, bushes, etc. to attempt the route?

I think so - I don't think it's as heavily vegitated as some of y'all might be thinking. I (only) got one look at it on rappel last weekend. My intent, as I said above, is to squiggle up it myself doing as little disturbing as I can (I think I can do it without much) and see whether it's worth it to do a bit of cleaning, such that other people might be enticed to climb it in the end.

It's something I always assumed was a route that had suffered neglect, but when I looked more carefully in the book, the route I thought it was, is distinctly not-it.

I just wanted my name in the guidebook! I was pissed at myself for not having reported the FA, not the party that eventually did so. The bigger point being, the motivation of the FA was entirely selfish ego-stroking. (They still picked a dumb name - ours was better!)

If it gets climbed once, and then forgotten again, is it a big deal? Sounds like the biggest problem would be telling everyone you climbed it.

why not just wrastle through the bushes like the rest of us?
keep telling people about it, and eventually the bush will "go away."

The Gunks ecosystem is shot.

Like just about every deciduous hardwood forest ecosystem from Maine to Florida and west to the Mississippi, it's in critical arrest not from climbers or hikers or bikers or ATVs or any number of kinds of recreation overuse - though fragmentation and overuse contribute to the problem - but from super-abundant white-tailed deer. The Gunks chestnut oak forests can't regenerate, wildflowers can't bloom, ground-nesting birds can't breed, and deer-resistant natives and invasive species are aggressively, quickly consuming the understory. The ridge we know and love won't be the same ridge in less than a decade. It's on the cusp of collapse. It's becoming a living graveyard.

Benign neglect? The Biodiversity Partnership is attempting to deal with this through a three-year, $150,000 DEC-funded grant to reduce the herd. But unless they take way more deer than they did last year, and start specifically targeting does, getting the herd down to where it registers no debilitating impact on the understory, and keep it down, it's over.

Recreation overuse contributes to the problem because disturbed habitat - roadsides, carriage roads, parking lots, cliff-bases, cliff-tops, hiking and social trails - are the corridors where invasives take hold and spread. From there, it's an easy route into the understory and fields browsed out of seedlings, saplings, native brush, and wildflowers. We carry their seeds on clothes, shoes, and gear - through the understory and onto cliffs and ledges.

Don't ask, don't tell? Cut or pull a native sapling or tree, plant an invasive.

Deer seem to be very abundant and causing damage in other parks in the North East. Look at the number of car/deer collisions, the numbers are astounding.
I think the Gunks just found a second source of revenue: bring on the bow hunters! That season in the Preserve area is open for 6 weeks. I'm sure many Hunters would gladly pay the day use fee to hunt in the preserve.

I recall seeing a TV documentary about an excessive deer population problem in Suffolk County. Among the non-lethal solutions are feeding deer food laced with a sterilizing drug or shooting them with a drug-laden dart with similar result.
When it comes to invasive species, the worst by far is Homo sapiens.

East, the Preserve already has a fairly open hunting policy. As our cougar chasing, deer hating Yorick points out though, it is not as successful as it needs to be. There are probably a number of factors contributing to this, some of which can't be controlled by the Preserve.

Yorick, excellent post as usual, but you didn't mention a key ingredient that has been taken out of the ecosystem! Anyone hazard a guess?

There you go Julie, just take a white-tailed deer up the route with you.

Two come to mind. Fire and mountain lions.

Having climbers swarming the area every day would seem to me to help force the deer into smaller areas and ultimately decrease the breeding. Yeah, that's the ticket, lots of climbers on Minnewaska to "control the deer". I would be glad to maintain sterilizing salt licks at all the crags and visit them on a rotating basis.

I'm a giver!

CITM, Rob.

I don't hate deer. Decades of game-agency mismanagement has brought us to this crisis. Few learned from Aldo Leopold and the lesson of the Kaibab Plateau 80 years ago.

http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story1.html

My apprehension with prescribed burns is that they aren't going nearly far enough. Massive deer exclosures like PA is building around its state timber harvests are needed to be in place long enough to ensure that the burned area is permitted to recover above the browse-line, otherwise deer-resistant natives and invasives will continue to do their thing. A 4,000 acre fence should have been installed around last year's Minnewaska fire, because it will be re-seeded with invasives catching a ride on animals and recreationists moving through the burned area.

As I've been nattering on about for the last year or so, we now have more than a decade of predator ecology research from Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite, the Olympics, and Jasper to provide a model for predator-dependent ecosystem management.

It's way too late to propose introducing cougars to save the Gunks. It's not too late to use predator surrogates - human volunteers and border collies - to complement the hunt, to mimic predator presence, since we've learned that predator presence in the landscape, more than direct predation, alters and restricts ungulate browsing behavior. Surrogates have been tried only to haze elk and deer out of residential areas and to protect nurseries and crops; not for ecosystem recovery.

The Partnership would need to try a variation of dovetailed established wildlife hazing management with ground-breaking predator ecology research...an intervention that would be entirely experimental.

mmmmm....venison. Had some great venison products in Talkeetna, AK last year. Those folks know what to do with deer.

Sounds like a great project for a privately funded, environmental research/education oriented Preserve.

And they can sell MP branded venison to the City restaurants.

Dude, when were you in Talkeetna? I was there briefly in early May. Went to some hotel bar and got L-I-T up after a good climbing trip.

the Fairview? We were out about the same time in the Ruth for 8 days. The "Rudy in a Parka" (reindeer sausage with cheese in a pastry) from the Roadhouse is f-in amazing!

are you a NY ranger? if so, we talked about your trip last year to the Moose's Tooth.

I play hockey for the New York Rangers, which is why I'm so ugly. What did you guys do in the Ruth? I'm sorry man, I don't remember you telling me you were there. That place is awesome. And yes, it was the Fairview. I don't know how I made it back to TAT's bunkhouse that night. I just remember waking up in the morning on the floor in front of the bathroom.

What happens when you take off the gloves with a Florida Panther.

eh...they're just big pussies

I've spent some time in the Fairview. The most memorable part of Talkeetna was upon coming into town for the first time and driving "under" the flight path when a Cessna was taking off and coincidentally flying directly in front and over us. It seemed like they were about 25' off the ground (which, I think they may have been).

It was a shorts changing moment. We headed directly for the Fairview and the nearest alcohol.

Barile, Dickey, part of Goldfinger on the Stump, and a couloir on Werewolf that we thought might be a new route but just learned was probably something Freddie Wilkison had done called Cornhole Couloir or something like that.

AOR - you must have had a take off from the old private field downtown. cool. Apprently they used to drive down the street back when they used that one.

We woke up in the TAT bunkhouse to acrid plastic smoke when some drunk swede melted a plastic spatula on the hot plate. that sucked ass.

great town Talkeetna but I dont think i'd want to live there.

Talkeetna provided the muse for the biggest-hearted, best written thing in the history of prime-time TV:
Northern Exposure.

Was the drunk Swede Either Trym or Ule? Those boys are bad ass. They did the Moonflower Buttress basecamp to basecamp in a little over 30 hours. They also did a new route on Cerro Torre this year that starts on the Compressor route, traverse right across the headwall under the bolt ladder, and encircles the entire upper section of the peak. They called it the Corkscrew.

Wombat...did you do something online or put a video on Youtube? I seem to remember seeing something about a group just those routes you mentioned. What route did you do on Dickey? I stared at that east face for a looong time!

RR

I'll say it again, Oeno. Where do you find this stuff?