Fri Night Vid Brad Gobright in conversation with Cedar Wright
This week's Friday Night Video features the late Brad Gobright in conversation with Cedar Wright. The pair talk through some of Brad's notorious ascents featured in the Reel Rock film Safety 3rd and his perspective afterwards.
Comments
I am almost lost for words to describe the pretentiousness, not to mention crass inaccuracy, of this film. As someone with experience of designing rock-climbing equipment, I can tell you that this breaks pretty much every rule of how you do it. I forced myself to watch the first half, but when we got to the bollocks about curves having energy I couldn't take any more.
I too was inspired by mountain goats and the desire to help people and so I invented a curved peg to fit on the nose.
Just need to get Arcthingy to pick up the marketing and jobsagoodun
Prententious? no more than 50% of other UKC articles. Most pretend more than we like to admit. I did not find this article excessively so.
As to breaking rules I did not expect a Design Manual even though the intro does use the phrase "explore the design process". "Design process"is somewhat misleading but not, I suggest, to a general reader.
The comments on curves and energy do suggest a misunderstanding of mechanics, statics and dynamics but this article is not an educational textbook.
I found the article interesting and a little bit thought provoking if not educational. But I assume it was not intended to be such.
I was interested to see the results and that it appeared (on the routes shown) that the climber seemed to be able to climb fairly naturally (whatever that might mean) with it. Wonder how it would do with smearing.
As for all the "design process" stuff, not got a view either way, maybe it was needed to flesh out the film for non-climbers. From a climbing perspective it would have been better to have more climbing showing the design in action and also to see what prosthetic he was climbing with before and how this was an improvement. Also how does it compare to Hugh Herr's bionic stuff.
When HH was climbing his prosthetics were extremely rudimentary, just rigid extensions of what was left of his limbs with various shaped, but immobile feet with a patch of rubber on the sole. Nowadays they're a little different...
This from 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsNZJTWw0w
And this from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLk8Pm_XBJE
Just brilliant.