In reply to M. Edwards:
Thank you for your reply. I am actually very interested to find out what your views are about this, so I hope you won't mind if I press you a bit.
First, I'm delighted to hear that you have repaired Red Rose. May I ask when you did this? The last time I looked was probably about 2001, but then the holes, the sleeves and of course the rust marks were still plainly visible. And when you say you have reclimbed it, I assume you mean that you top-roped it again after repairing the chipping, rather than leading it without the bolts?
I don't think even now you really understand the horror that what you did inspired in many people. I remember when I first heard that someone had bolted the Red Rose wall I simply couldn't believe it. Literally. I couldn't understand how any climber could look at such a magnificent piece of rock, facing the ocean, and decide that the thing to do was to attack it with a drill. I still can't. I felt exactly like many of the posters above about these slacklining people, only worse - after all these people aren't climbers and in a sense one can't expect any better, but you were a climber. Even now, 20 odd years later, I get a distinct mix of emotions every time I go to Sennen and pass underneath it - sadness, outrage, disbelief, anger, embarrassment that the climbing community couldn't look after its crags better.
As to 'putting it behind us and moving forward', it depends what you want to achieve. If all you mean that is we should all think about other things, then fine. Personally I don't think I'll ever stop thinking about it when I see the bit of rock, but that's my problem. But if you're interested in your legacy, then it's different. You ought to be someone who is seen as somewhere between a minor major figure and a major minor figure in UK climbing history, and a major one in Cornish climbing history. Obviously that means something to you - you're always very interested in threads about your routes, and proud of them, and to a certain extent rightly so. To my mind and that of a lot of other people, though, you're in fact going to be remembered only, or certainly mainly, as the guy whose ambition outran his talent and behaved appallingly. If you want to avoid that, then you need to make your position clearer (and I suspect different).
And the fact is I really don't think you've put it behind you yourself, because you're still fighting the war in the above post, which contains a number of half-truths at best, as it seems to me, and I'm happy to be corrected.
>As for other bolts on granite... remember these where placed pre-agreement.
Obviously all of your bolts were placed "pre-agreement", because before you came along it never occurred to anyone that it might be necessary to agree that bolts shouldn't be placed on the Cornish sea cliffs. There was never anyone to reach an agreement with but you (and your father and perhaps the odd employee), and agreement was only reached when you more or less unilaterally decided to stop placing bolts. But every one of them was placed in the full knowledge that a majority of climbers both locally and nationally thought they shouldn't be.
>Most are placed to stop cracks from being widened from repeated peg placement(like Suicide Wall).
Hmm. I'm not very sure which bit of SW you mean, but in any case this surely isn't true of at least, for example, the Question Mark bolts, or the one on Silence of the Lambs?
>They where place with the idea that someone would chop them when they climbed them without (not just abseil down and chop them).
So if I understand you rightly, you couldn't do these routes yourself without the bolts or pegs in the same position, and you placed bolts rather than either leave the routes for someone who could do them, or placing a peg, the latter because you believed that the peg would rust and need to be replaced? And you believed that sooner or later someone would do the routes without the bolt, and they would then have the trouble of removing the bolts and making good the damage.
Is that right? And if I may ask, does that still strike you today as a good way to have gone about things? It wasn't what you said at the time in your article in which you explained that you had now taken out the bolts from some of your routes on the grounds that 'you'd had your fun', but perhaps that was at a later stage.
I take it also that the answer is that you haven't gone back and repaired the damage where these were placed.
>Those that where placed for environmental reasons, like lower-offs to protect the delicate crag edge above, they unfortunately (in my opinion) again got chopped by abseil. These I stand by the reasons for still being there (you and others may disagree and I respect that). They have nothing to do with climbing ethics. (Isis lower-off, Flash Control lower-off etc.)
I do disagree - the best course if you were concerned about this would have been either not to climb the routes at all or not to record them once you had. But this is obviously where you had the best case; indeed I suspect that had it not been for your other activities these bolts might well still be there and Isis might be a popular classic.
>The pure sport-route bolts (Red Rose and Scandals, only two)
Really? Surely at least 29 Palms (four drilled pegs in, what, 40-50 feet?) was more or less a sport route, and indeed Art of the Slate (five bolts in 70 or so?).
>I personally have respected the masses views.
If I may say so, calling the overwhelming majority of your fellow climbers 'the masses' doesn't sound to me as though you have respected their views. And in any case, you always knew that what you were doing was against the view of the masses. What was it that changed so that you started to respect that view after such a long period of not doing so?
I suppose the big question really is whether you now accept that bolting Red Rose in particular, and/or the whole bolt/drilled peg ethic you sought to introduce, was a huge mistake. Until you do, really you're no better than Yogaslackers, and I fear your niche in British climbing history will reflect that.
jcm