Climber Nov/Dec 22

WEAR AND TEAR
As we all get older, wear and tear becomes an issue and the same canbe said for our most popular crags. Recently I was up at the Popular End of Stanage Edge ticking a few routes that I’d not climbed in many years and was pretty shocked at how badly some of these routes were wearing; super polished rock, badly worn and sometimes blown placements. The routes feel harder and some bolder now with the gear placement issues. Perhaps it’s time to start looking at the grade of these routes and re-align them to what they are now and not what they were? Of course, it’s inevitable given the popularity of climbing
nowadays and, yes, having a magazine that publicises climbing is
perhaps part of the issue. I guess there’s no real solution to it other than encouraging people to look at less popular venues.
A case in point is the mountain crags in the Lake District. I’ve spent
a lot of time there over the last three years or so helping the Fell and Rock Climbing Club get new action images for forthcoming guidebooks and I’m surprised how overgrown some of the three-star classics are becoming, let alone the ‘non-classics’, especially the ones where you have to walk for more than an hour to get there. Have we become a little lazy in our approach to climbing, or perhaps we are now time poor and need a quick hit? Maybe so, but the solution to polished rock and wear and tear is to aim
to climb at further afield venues away from the easily approached popular crags.