Pre-placed fixed gear for speed ascents?
Recently I saw two items that pretain to pre-placed fix gear as an aid to speed ascents. First, in a Sportiva email newsletter, I read about Brian Law cleaning up the Zodiac of tons of fixed heads, rurps, slings, etc. The route will be considerably more challenging to climb now, but Law claims it will be quite a bit safer as well, presumably because people won't be blindly trusted fixed mank. I'm sure the Huber brother's sub 2-hour ascent greatly benefited from all this fixed gear. Most of the hard free pitches on El Capitan have not been redpointed, but have been pinkpointed with fixed gear. In fact, Jim Herson did the first redpoint ascents of a number of the 5.12 crack pitches on Lurking Fear, after Caldwell and Rodden's first free ascent and before Yuji's onsight attempts. Anyway, I wonder how much of this fixed free climbing gear was left behind for the Huber's ascent... This would greatly speed things up for the Hubers, but it doesn't change the fact that awesome, bold, free and aid climbing is required to even approach the speeds they are moving at, even with lots of fixed gear.
The second reference to such tactics was the recent article in Climbing #234 by Vera Schulte-Pelkum concerning her record-breaking all-female ascent of the Nose. At the end of the article she makes a reference that the top speed climber's pre-fix gear before speed ascents. I'm not sure who she is referring to, but it is an unjustified slam against many of the top speed climbers, including the king himself: Hans Florine. Hans is a friend of mine and I witnessed his record-breaking Nose ascent with Yuji. He has NEVER pre-fixed gear for a speed ascent and is scrupulously ethical and honest about ever detail of his ascents. I've met Schulte-Pelkum a couple of times and she seems nice, but that comment greatly reduced my opinion of her. Total bush league.
Bill
posted by Bill Wright | 8:20 PM
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