UKC

If you are off to the Costa Blanca over the next few months, are you interested in doing any small bits of guidebook research work?
Fame and fortune awaits any budding crag reasearch workers!

Email me if you are interested.

Alan

From the 22nd of January to the 18th of February, myself and five others will be visiting the Costa Blanca region of Spain, as part of our dissertation research for our third year of a degree in Adventure Tourism Management. We will be examining a number of different aspects of climbing in the area, such as the funding of bolts and crag development, and the perception and attitudes of climbers towards different forms of protection, namely bolts, trad and the ENP. Although our dissertation work obviously takes priority we would be happy to carry out any small scale research tasks.

"Adventure Tourism Management" - bloody hell - don't tell Chris Woodhead - he'll rescind his resignation and make you do physics instead!

Alex wrote:


Blinkin' flip! Where's the adventure in having your tourism managed?

MORE layers of bureaucracy, administration and commercialism in climbing. Just what it needs.

See ya,

al

Sounds like that scam a while back where some, er, "art students" had a trip to (Mallorca? somewhere exotic?) paid for as the very trip was deemed to be a work of art! Hmmmm

Nic

thing is the students from Hull didn't actually go abroad did they? their whole 'work of art' was to get the press worked up into the usual 'bloody students wasting taxpayers money' diatribe. bloody art students, eh Al?

I'm staying WELL out of that one, matey. I only work here.

See ya,

al

The course itself is not at all concerned with the overall management of the sport of climbing as a whole, it mainly concentrates on the effective and safe managementof commercial outdoor pursuit holidays,
However we do get to go climbing a lot as well.

Why not pay someone to go and do it? Then they would be research workers.

Who said there was no money on offer?

Alan

I'm still waiting for my cheque for the Dorset guide...

Alan,
I hope to be out there for a week over Christmas during which I'd like to get a few days cragging in with my nonclimbing girlfriend. I'm not a hard climber , 6a+ is good for me but I'm not gonna lead anywhere near that with my girlfriend belaying( might as well solo!) . I'd absolutely love to see some new crags. I've been out to spain at least once every year for the last four years , so if there are any mid grade routes on new crags you'd like opinions on then I'd love to know.
cheers
Priesty

we're off in march for the sixth trip to costa blanca area. I take it your new edition of the guide won't be out until then

It probably will be.

Alan

Do you ever ask local climbers what they have done since the last guide? I noticed in one of your guides routs with no names. Is this a common occurrence in Spain? Surely local climbers know more about climbing in Spain than visiting Brits, why don’t you ask them?

We try to, where possible, but Spanish climbers are very secretive about new areas. They usually wait until the crag is developed and then do a topo in Desnivel. I often get new information from that source.


Yes this is very common. Another common situation is where one route has two different names on two different topos produced by the smae people. I have actually managed to find a lot of route names for the new edition on the Spain guidebook.


We do ask them but they tend to be only active in small areas so it is a lot of work to contact all the climbers (especially since they seem to have an absurd number of inter-faction feuds with each other). When we do contact local climbers we only occassionaly get useful information, a) because of the secrecy thing mentioned above and, b) because the legacy of documenting climbing information is not very strong in Spain, so the quality of information is often poor or inconsistent. To be honest, it's quite a big can of worms which I am reluctant to open.

Alan

In the introduction to the local Sella guide they complain about foreign guidebooks which take the route details from the local books but then make no contribution to bolt funds etc. Might be an arguable case if they hadn't nicked the format of their guide from Rockfax.

This is actually quite a complex story which I don't really want to go into suffice to say that Jose and Nacho at Sella are using the ROCKFAX topo style WITH my permission, although they fail to credit ROCKFAX. They sell the guidebook locally and get return from that so in a way we have contributed. I have also offered them copies of Fax07 to sell from their refuge but these were turned down.

Alan

Fair enough, I just assumed the lack of credit meant lack of permission.