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Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

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Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#101

Post by spuz »

jdietrich wrote: post #71
avar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4zuO1XSxQ Who: Aside from Yosemite, the answer is "it depends", a lot of these are just set up by enterprising enthusiasts, often technically illegally, but few care enough to bother them. In some parks & locations they're set up by whoever manages the park / owns the area to attract climbers & the business that comes with it. Some people in the mountaineering / climbing communi…

Dislike is something of an understatement. For many decades, there has been a tit-for-tat war between sport and trad climbers. Sport climbers bolt a route, then trad climbers come along with bolt croppers and remove the protection. In many areas, bolting is carried out under cover of darkness, for fear of violent confrontation with traditionalists. The Dawn Wall has been a significant battleground in this war. The fi…

I think that's overblowing it. 99.9% of the time, trad climbers and sport climbers and their respective ethics coexist peacefully. There are rock climbing areas that are better suited to trad and areas that are suited to sport, and most of the time those areas are pretty well agreed upon. There are also areas (such as Yosemite) where a mixture of removable gear and permanent gear is most appropriate and in those cases, the general rule of 'removable gear where possible, fixed gear where necessary' is also well agreed upon.

What you're talking about with Harding and Robbins on the Dawn Wall is a clash of ethics that is long in the past. Very few people consider it worthwhile hammering pitons into a slice of blank rock in order to ascend it and aid climbing in itself is less popular with respect to free climbing.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#102

Post by takk309 »

justinator wrote: post #29
carsonbaker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth mentioning that 95% of the Nose can be free-climbed by just about anyone that really trains for it. It's hard, but it's not that hard. The Dawn Wall, in contrast, is basically off limits for your average free climber -- especially the middle pitches -- unless you're among the best of the very best. You can check out the topos for each climb. This is the nose ( http://www.supertopo.com/topos/yosemite/t…

It's much, much harder, particularly when you realize that the Yosemite Decimal System progresses like the Richter scale, in the sense that a step from 5.13a to 5.13b (an increase of 1 grade unit) is leaps and bounds harder to achieve than improving from, say, 5.8 to 5.9. Although this was the myth I was taught (or what us precocious kids must have made ourselves believed, since obv. we were progressing so well/so po…

Don't forget about the time honored tradition of sandbagging! You alluded to it a bit with the 5.11d/5.12a comment.

http://www.climbing.com/people/the-wright-stuff-the-art-of-t...

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#103

Post by geephroh »

robin_reala wrote: post #34
Jaruzel wrote: post #31

What amazes me more, right now, is that there are people on HN who not only KNOW about climbing, but actually DO it. By comparison, I tend to consider a brisk walk too much exercise.

Climbing seems to be the developer’s sport. It’s not team based (beyond your belayer), there’s no schedule so you can fit it in around other things, and especially with bouldering it’s split into short challenges that are as much mental as physical.

I've seen it posted on HN before, but worth mentioning again that climbing also has a culture of open evaluation and continuous improvement as well. Detailed accident reports and analysis from the American Alpine Club are available in an online database (http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/search). Rock and Ice, one of the leading media outlets for climbers, has a regular "Climbing Accidents and Prevention" column (http://www.rockandice.com/climbing-accident-reports) as well as failure testing for gear. Given the "dirtbag extreme sport" image that is often projected on climbing, the vast majority of folks I know are keenly aware of the risks and have an engineer's mindset when thinking about ways to reduce the chance of failure.

Hmmm...actually, that's very unlike many of the developers I know... ;-)

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#104

Post by spuz »

sbisson wrote: post #57

Back the end of September I was photographing folk on the Dawn Wall from down the valley, as we were passing through from the Bay to Park City, heading to a futurist conference... https://flic.kr/p/N3KDST

This is not a photo of the Dawn Wall. These climbers are climbing a route called Tangerine Trip (I believe) which is significantly easier than the Dawn Wall. Climbers climb to the top of El Cap every day, the Dawn Wall has only had 2 ascents.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#105

Post by sbisson »

spuz wrote: post #104
sbisson wrote: post #57

Back the end of September I was photographing folk on the Dawn Wall from down the valley, as we were passing through from the Bay to Park City, heading to a futurist conference... https://flic.kr/p/N3KDST

This is not a photo of the Dawn Wall. These climbers are climbing a route called Tangerine Trip (I believe) which is significantly easier than the Dawn Wall. Climbers climb to the top of El Cap every day, the Dawn Wall has only had 2 ascents.

Thanks! I'll correct it.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#106

Post by JadeNB »

jdietrich wrote: post #71
avar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4zuO1XSxQ Who: Aside from Yosemite, the answer is "it depends", a lot of these are just set up by enterprising enthusiasts, often technically illegally, but few care enough to bother them. In some parks & locations they're set up by whoever manages the park / owns the area to attract climbers & the business that comes with it. Some people in the mountaineering / climbing communi…

Dislike is something of an understatement. For many decades, there has been a tit-for-tat war between sport and trad climbers. Sport climbers bolt a route, then trad climbers come along with bolt croppers and remove the protection. In many areas, bolting is carried out under cover of darkness, for fear of violent confrontation with traditionalists. The Dawn Wall has been a significant battleground in this war. The fi…

> A year later, Royal Robbins made the second ascent, chopping off the bolts as he went.

un-devmox said that Royal Robbins stopped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13015150), and Wikipedia agrees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Robbins#Dawn_Wall). (Technically, I guess neither of those contradicts what you said.)

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#107

Post by JadeNB »

psyc wrote: post #58
toppy wrote: post #15

How it compares to what Alex Honnold achieved on The Nose? Difficulty or size is different?

Here's Alex Honnold saying "nope": http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/races-sports/alex-honno...

Since the original question wasn't yes or no, I was confused by what "saying 'nope'" meant. Here's a quote (from Honnold, but about a different Dawn Wall ascent) from your link that might be relevant:

> People just assume I must be some great climber but I'm like, 'yeah but this is even harder than anything I've done.' It's really, really hard. The holds are just a little bit smaller and [a] little bit further apart.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#108

Post by 24gttghh »

takk309 wrote: post #94
mmartinson wrote: post #91

Every time time someone uses the world "conquer" to describe a climbing accomplishment, a million climbers face palm. That said, this is a pretty descriptive article describing what happened in a way accessible to fairly general audience. I particularly liked the comparison "it's akin to Usain Bolt also being the fastest marathoner alive. That’s the hold Ondra has on climbing." It's incredible to imagine how far this…

For the non-climbers, conquer is much easier to understand than send.

Especially since 'to send it' in other sports like snowboarding or skateboarding means "to get air" i.e. freefall.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#109

Post by JadeNB »

a-l-c-o wrote: post #48

In what way is this a hacker piece of news ? What's next ? "This cat completes Record Backflip" ? Please refrain, Thx

> In what way is this a hacker piece of news ?

As always when someone asks such questions (including when I asked one a week or so ago), the answer is that this is a site for news of interest to hackers, not necessarily news about hacking. If you want to judge whether this is of interest to hackers, then just look at the lively activity of the rest of the thread; it compares quite favourably to even some quieter front-page discussions.

Re: Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time

#110

Post by Someone »

mattnumbe wrote: post #27
Someone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been getting a bit easier, emotionally. He had a phone and Internet (he posted on Instagram from the wall, if I read the article correctly)

No amount of internet would change my mental state when trying to sleep on a tiny platform 2,000 feet above the ground.

The people who do this probably know, not only rationally but also emotionally, that the difference between 100 and 2000 feet is only a few seconds: the seconds that you stay alive longer if you fall from the latter height.
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