For those unfamiliar with the climb, here's Sara Watson fighting it out with Air Swedin*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t6bMB9WgJE\

*: Everyone seems to be spelling it Sweden now, but in the guide it's "Swedin" .

Aww, that's too bad, I thought I had something there, was about to start climbing with a 15m rope...

Marc- looks like a great climb, but that camerawork was making me nauseous, had to stop watching it.

I agree about the camerawork. There's a much longer segment on Air Swedin in the Parallojams portion of the film Return to Sender.

On Sight or A Vue as the French say are best saved for road trips. You should be getting on everything you can at your home crag, you will then be that much more prepared for when you might not have a second chance to send.

So Marc, since for most of us here on gunks.com that's not our home crag, why are you trying to blow our onsight attempts on Air Swedin by sending us betamax?
Given that the thread is [well, was] about saving routes for an onsight...

I TOTALLY woulda missed the heel hook...

I don't recall that clicking on the video link was a requirement....

The great thing about believing that you didn't "lead" a route unless you led it cleanly is that you can never take a lead fall, since as soon as you fall you've stopped leading. This logic will undoubtedly save many lives.

Over the years the word "failed" has come to mean a totally different thing to me.

I think I should never have started down this road. I'm well aware that my ideas on this are archaic and belong to a previous and rapidly fading generation.

But Dawn, if the quote above is in response to what I said, it contains a misunderstanding. My perspective is that aiding a route in order to obtain move and/or protection beta and calling that some sort of qualified success (I did it, but not cleanly) simply doesn't correspond to what I think of as having lead the route free. Hanging around on gear and getting rested is most definitely "aiding for information" in my book, and is quite different from falling off, which actually ends the beta stream rather than providing an opportunity to enhance it.

So if you take multiple falls but don't use them as opportunities to gain knowledge of what lies ahead and eventually succeed, you've "led the route" in my book. Whereas if you hung rested and inspected and went on and hung some more, then the eventual lead, or "redpoint," is tainted by the fact that the full set of difficulties was never encountered and resolved free. As for the degree of cleanliness, that isn't my term and I feel under no obligation to elaborate on it.

This is obviously a trad climbing perspective; sport climbing is another discipline with a different set of expectations---or perhaps the point is that there really is no difference in expectations any more, and trad climbing is just sport climbing with gear.

Rob, I suppose I should have used the term "...failed to do it free..." rather than just saying "failed." I've had many delightful days composed of almost nothing but failures, and am not aware of implying that failing to do a route free is cause for ruining anyone's day. In fact, one of the cornerstones of the Vulgarian tradition was the Fiasco, a multidimensional failure that was appreciated in direct proportion to the absence of any recognizable elements of success.

A tradition that I'm actively following.