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JMC: Quality Control

You know what Jams My Cams?  Poor Quality. Quality matters. Where I work, our priorities are, in order: employee safety, part quality, and delivery schedule.  When I climb those priorities become sending, quality, and safety, in some order that shifts depending on the mood (or the moon?).  I have recently been made more and more aware of mediocre and low quality boulder problems. I’m not talking choss. I’m not talking scummy lowballing. I’m talking superfluous lines and over-prescribed eliminates, or worse, anti-eliminates.

A top quality line is striking. It has beautiful movement on bullet-hard stone. It’s the kind of line that you talk about with friends and strangers when the area comes up. It stands alone on a face, the obvious and only way up – “God Module would have been a legit 5 star line, but it was just too close to another lesser line, and therefore will have to settle for 4.”
Over at Northwest Branch Creek, you can view one of the few examples of a boulder with negative stars!

A good line should only need the beginning and end prescribed. Starts here, goes there, the end.  Once conditions apply, stars start coming off:

I’m torn, genuinely. Having been spoiled in travelling to high quality boulder fields where hundreds of legit lines dot the landscape, I’ve seen what quality can be. Having also grown up somewhere that the boulders in an hour’s radius are few and far between, I get the need to keep variety up. Over the years, once you’ve picked the plums, you start doing goofy things: eliminates, link-ups, inverted toe-hook ascents.

While those things are fun, I don’t feel like those sorts of lower quality contrivances need their own names, grades, or entries in Mountain Project. The difference between going straight up an 8′ tall boulder, and pulling the crux and heading 4′ to the right to top out around a corner is moot. One is the line, and (at best) the other is a footnote. I write this knowing full-well the guide-pamphlet I helped author contained a few contrivances, which I vow to resolve as I transfer them to Mountain Project.  The more I think about what stays and what goes, I think I’m willing to give a pass to variations that might share the start but diverge into unique cruxes.

I understand that places exist where the history and ethic dictates lines stacked in tightly (see: Sissy Crag) separated by a matrix of starts and exits and eliminates and contrivances. But seeing absolute microbeta dictated on MP so that a V0 line can become a V2 rustled me, not because it was written, but because two neophytes ( 1 , 2 ) posted videos of them doing BBCC and took some lumps for posting such a contrived “line”. They were too new to know it wasn’t normal, or that artificially making something harder isn’t something you post about with a straight face.

I love that new people are getting out there and getting after it, but hardcore contrivances being awarded the validity that a name and grade brings rubs me the wrong way. I was there once myself, and after years of being on the same few stones have worked out all sorts of skips, alternates, and “swag” beta on my warm-up circuit.  These variations are not recorded anywhere because is just for fun.  The outdoors is not a gym, and forcing beta or calling obvious holds “off” only serves to water down the already ridiculous sport of finding the easiest way up the hardest side of a stone.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go double the number of lines in my neck of the woods with a series of one-handed, heel-hook free ascents, all named ‘Captain Hook’.

Justin Meserve is a grumpy old man that doesn’t give a hoot what beta you use, so long as you do a proper sit-start off a carpet square and top out at the highest point without dabbing on anything, and take the lowest grade you can say with a straight face.