In reply to UKC Articles:
A great reminiscence! I was born five years later than Ian but started climbing a year earlier, in 1957. I've had a modest but more or less continuous climbing career for 57 going on 58 years now. I was a high school teacher, then a graduate student, then a college professor, married and raised a wonderful daughter. There were years when I climbed almost every day in June, July, and August and almost every weekend the rest of the year. There were other years when I might have climbed just once a month. But something kept me at it, and still does, even as age and infirmity creep up and my abilities decline. The last few years have been the hardest, with a ruptured ACL (my first real climbing injury) and now a pinched nerve. But I think, god willing, there are some routes left to do still before I dodder off into the sunset.
It is true that things now are very different, but once you are on the rock, it doesn't seem as if all that much has changed, other than the fact that the grade at which gripping experiences occur keeps going down. I live near a climbing area, the Gunks in New York State, and although I can still find new things to do there, many climbs are old friends. There are days when I find myself pulling on a hold that first accepted my grasp half a century ago, and I remember it, and it remembers me, and we have a bit of a chuckle about how we can't keep meeting like this.
As for all the new stuff, I'm thankful for it. It has made climbing easier and safer, and so allowed me to keep going when I might have otherwise felt things were getting beyond me. Its a bit of a drive for me to get to any good sport climbing, but if it was closer I'm sure I'd do a lot, and climb better on everything for it.
I do miss many of the same things Ian misses. Avoiding crowds has become an increasing challenge, for example. But I've also met and enjoyed my time with parties on routes, so the solitude we prize is not the only way to be in the climbing world.
Of course one cannot return to one's youth in the present. But I think I'd love climbing just as much as a fourteen year-old today as I did on my first climb on the Grand Teton in 1957. Much about climbing has changed, and regrettably for those of us who had a different type of experience, but on the other hand the essence of the activity is really the same as ever.