In reply to jonny2vests:
> (In reply to Mick Ryan - UKC and UKH)
>
> Its a great read Mick, but do they record anything apart from accidents? Do they do any testing? Do they promote good practice? Do they offer advice for groups etc?
>
I think j2v's point is fair. The AAC is relatively small and still struggling to fully shed the air of an exclusive gentleman's club it started out as. Only relatively recently have they realized that membership numbers really matter. They make little or no attempt to attract hikers and other non-climbing outdoorspeople.
As a result, they don't have anything like the financial resources to mount the kind of serious testing programs one sees from the CAI and DAV, for example. Added to these structural defects is the sociological fact at Americans are not club joiners in general and climbing still has a rapidly fading but not entirely extinguished counter-culture aura.
The upshot is that climbing testing in the U.S. has been relegated to a few academics, rescue professionals, guide organizations, and individuals with varying degrees of grounding in the underlying physics of the phenomena they are testing, so that many so-called results are even contradictory and, in any case, hampered by a lack of statistical significance as well as being encumbered by unacknowledged assumptions and then interpreted in ways not supported by the original experimental conditions. In this general cacophony of "data," it is very hard to judge what is worth believing and what isn't.
Without any clearly authoritative voice, US climbers rely on folklore and tradition, and so are likely to confront j2v over his belaying choices without actually knowing much to justify their criticisms. And then more and more climbers are taught by guides and gyms, who necessarily have to standardize their approaches, in the process blunting many of the nuances that govern real climbing choices.
The clubs and organizations don't seem to be up to the task, or else are simply not interested in promulgating "best practices" to an anarchic group. No home-grown Jim Titt has shown up to confront long-held assumptions with hard analysis, and so we remain in many ways remarkably ignorant, relative to the amount of climbing and the expertise of our climbers, of the safest way to do things.
