Many thanks to the gunks climber who replaced the anchors on El Camino in the Nears and also the nice new steel cable anchors on the Alphonse rap. Very nice job and shiny new steel links on both.

IMHO, Alphonse does not need rap rings - it's very close to walk off and it encourages needless rappeling and top roping in a busy area...

I hadn't been on it to see in person until today, but man that Betty anchor looks terrible. One end of the cable is pretty frayed good for poking things. I'm also not convinced a little nylon padding helps the tree much anyway when people are weighting the cable.

Maybe I'm OT, but I don't like those steel cable anchors at all. Tubular webbing is (1) cheap, (2) easy to install, (3) easy to inspect, (4) there is enough of us to maintain/remove crusty sun-bleached stuff, (5) can be removed and replaced if it actually sticks around long enough for the tree's growth to catch up with it.

Now, about having a rap-line on Betty or Alphonse...that one is too OT for me to take up.

DL

Needless rapelling? It is a way to get down from the cliff quickly. There has been an anchor around this tree for the last 20+ years so there is nothing new here. People use this rappel regularly and are used to it. Does that make it a bad thing? If there were not a cable here, there would be a tangled mess of webbing that looks like shit and very few bother to clean up. I personally like having it there and am grateful to the person who replaced the sketchy setup that was looking a little aged.

Rappelling from points on the cliff that could be easily walked-off is a Very Bad Thing. In fact, anything that has us stomping around the already-all-too-compacted soil at the base of the dwindling number of the traditional rap trees is a Very Bad Thing -- which means some of the existing bolted anchors are quite poorly placed. The number of trees that have died and fallen off popular Gunks ledges in the past 10 years is large. Soil compaction is a likely culprit. We should all try to encourage _less_ rappelling where the rap involves any stomping on or near trees on (or at the top edge of) the cliff -- not more.

I have wondered from time to time if careful hand aeration of the soil around some of the tree roots might offer any benefit; but there's no point even trying while people are still walking there. I really think there are a number of areas at and around old rap stations that climbers or the Preserve should rope off (other anchors are almost always available) to try to let the trees recover before they take the plunge.

More and more, it is turning out to be a way to get down the cliff too quickly. Since the proliferation of rappel anchors, there has been an explosion of rap accidents, including very experienced climbers.

In the case of Betty, it is questionable whether there are, in general, any significant speed advantages.

Moreover, rappellers get themselves tangled up with ascending climbers, often create unpleasant clusterfucks, and drop ropes and pebbles, if not larger things, on leaders. The Preserve, after failing to think through its bolting policies, learned fairly quickly to set up rap lines that did not go down routes. Betty is a popular route for beginners and has got to be one of the worst imaginable places to have a rap route.


None of this makes it any less poorly conceived and undesirable.


I think the cable is actually an attractive nuisance. It encourages people to rappel back down the route, people who might have at least thought clearly for a moment about it if there had been webbing.

Cables give the illusion of safety, but we know nothing of the competence of the installer and can be fairly certain that once installed, no one is looking out for the integrity of the system or thinking about the kind of periodic replacement that such installations require. Indeed, who knows how to judge the integrity of cables?

Climbers understand how to inspect webbing, and if it gets messy, all it takes is a knife to clean it up.


I personally thought about cutting it down, but found that I neither had nor wanted to purchase the necessary tools. I was concerned that less expensive ad hoc methods might fail, leaving a weakened installation, which would surely be the absolute worst possible outcome.

There should not be a cable rap anchor directly above an extremely busy beginner's route.

Last Frontier: anchor was missing, someone cut it. I was pissed because I worked this anchor during Spring 2011. There is now new single 1" tubular webbing anchor and two rap rings.

DL

Better you than me on Last Frontier. Did that years back and was happy to get it and be done. Definitely intimidating, especially if your not used to that type of climbing.

Hey folks, two questions on anchors that I'm unable to verify:

a) Criss Cross Direct. A new report says the anchor there is now "fine", but Dave (Luc.) had previously reported it as "now only a couple of nuts all facing for a leftward pull and "equalized" with a cold shut. Pitons and some of the nuts are gone.". Can someone verify that it's improved from this state, & specify the improvements? New hardware?

b) Snooky's (yes, it's killing me to have to ask!) - "Minty P2 and Snooky's Return P3 trees are dead and webbing and rings are no longer on them.". Can anyone verify this, or the current state of things up there?

Tx.