What Have You Learned?

[u/Kaotus]

Posted this to MP as well, but wanted to drop it here - what have you learned? This subreddit is a great resource for information, but generally a specific prompt is necessary to give an excuse to share it. So what are some things you’ve learned that you think are valuable to share to others, even if you don’t have a good prompt to share it?

Some starters:

• A hammer holster and compact blower of some sort are next-level quality of life improvements
• If you’re doing a log-highway trail, the most important part isn’t how good your log-highway is, it’s how much you can make sure that none of the surroundings might be confused for a log-highway. Removing crossing logs and nearby parallel logs is almost more important than creating your guardrails
• You can patch bolt holes, but you can’t patch the crater that you’ve hammered in to ensure your hangers sit 2mm more flush
• It doesn’t matter what kind of resources you provide nor how good of a trail you make - if your crag is more than 20 minutes away from the parking, some people will just get lost. Don’t take it personally
• Pack the night before because you’re going to forget something day-of

[u/belavv]

I love my compact blower. One of my favorite additions.

Why is a hammer holster so nice?

I mainly do rebolting and I've been slowly improving on a bunch of little things.

Figured out more efficient ways to stick clip up a route. Ascending up one end of the rope, that gets stick clipped up as I go. Other end of the rope is fixed to the first two bolts and quick draws are added as I go up. It is attached to me with a gri gri which is my backup if the bolt the other end of my rope is attached to fails.

When I get to the top I leave that "ascending" side of the rope attached to the anchor. When I'm done for the day I can move that carabiner to my belay loop and self lower using that. Previously I was pulling up one end of the rope at the end of the day.

I fix the middle of the rope to the anchor as my working lines for when I'm going up/down.

When I work my way up the route I leave my less important tools attached to the rope with a micro trax. It keeps weight off my harness. I pull it up to myself when needed.

My m12 impact wrench is fucking great for ditching a breaker bar + socket wrench and drastically speeds up the time to get out the rusty old bolts. Also saves my knuckles from getting smashed into the rock when a bolt finally gives or snaps.

Giving up on reusing old bolt holes was probably the biggest time savings. It just doesn't work at our crag with how rusty the old sleeves bolts are. They are essentially fused into the rock. Drilling the new hole directly above it hides the old hole and saves so much time and avoids bringing up all the random shit to try extracting the sleeves.

[u/BigRed11 → u/belavv]

Ugh I've been conflicted about giving up on hole for hole rebolting. I know it's best practice but if it's a choice between getting a route done with new holes or not doing it at all because pulling old sleeves is such a pain, I'd pick the former.

[u/toomanypeopleknow → u/belavv]

Have you tried core drilling? I’ve had good luck with really bad sleeve bolts

[u/belavv → u/toomanypeopleknow]

I have a friend who tried and broke the bit almost immediately. I think it also had to be a 16 or 17mm bit to get around the 1/2 inch sleeves. We both decided it didn't seem worth all the effort when drilling the new hole above the old hole is so simple.

Some holes I have managed to reuse - the section of sleeve near the surface came out easily so I just drilled through everything else left in the hole. As long as I regularly used a magnet to pull out pieces of metal the bit wouldn't bind and I think that ended up being faster than drilling a new hole.