That being said, many classic problems are glued and they kick ass. Like First Overhang. Others are reinforced, like Hagan’s…thank god, that problems rules but would’ve broken years ago with college freshman climbing in the rain.

Glued hold are like dating a woman with a boob job.

I always saw my potential modest contribution to discussions in this rocky field through shoe’s color coding. “Ships, shoes, slivers and sharp colors”, would have been my unique entry to the world of critical ethics in rock climbing.

I think one should not glue in the intent to repair (put things back as they were – impossible).

But one should feel free to create climbing sculptures of glue and little pieces of rock (or does this already happen?). Or mixes of blue holds and limestone. Or relics with pieces of fake bone: “So and so broke their leg and arm in this move…” and etc.
Build new walls that defy the limits of natural, artificial, crumbling…and chipping! And then run before the property owner’s gun.

And the reason for the naive fundamentalism (aren’t all fundamentalisms naive because of either ignorance or overload of understanding? I am channeling ignorance, certainly.) is that any classic (in any field: film, photography, etc) necessarily changes overtime. “Edges” naturally crumble out of classics and are constantly being viewed in that new light – one should be able to read how a “fallen edge” is part of the history of the reading of a subject. That is history on a classic: how many new differences time has made onto the classic but also how many great qualities a classic still has to withstand time.

Child climbers now can levitate and fly backwards, in so many new ways to dance around the history of these movement shaping problems. Let erosion – “natural” in some cases includes “man” – smooth out the way for new gestures to be created.

Call me Garcia Marquez X

Indeed, I have always found that debate over “morals mistaken for ethics” to be a really weak aspect of climbing culture. I have a passion for fine points, which is IMHO about all we have – climbing being one of the truly useless sports [I say that in the same manner I'd say that love is a useless emotion- with irony, and triple entendre, because I love passionately...] And in the middle of absolute uselessness- the beauty of a sport that does nothing but refine arbitrary lines of success- we can either become fanatics about the ‘right’ way to pursue it [weak and violent, IMHO] or maintain that passion while experimenting with alternate ways to pursue our passion.

I recently watched Jim Jarmusch’s film ‘The Limits of Control’. In it a character rephrases a quote many will be familiar with: ‘Nothing is true, everything is imagined’. I thought this was a great way to reinvigorate the idea of ‘permission’ which is how that quote usually ends.

Back in the late 80s with a number of other East Coast climbers I spent some years climbing and setting routes in Kingston- that illstarred / rumored quarry where almost every route is drilled and/or chipped. In the midst of a discussion about what we were doing at Kingston, one way to resolve the dilemma was to simply argue that since it was an old quarry we were free from the restrictions we would have encountered in other areas.

Another argument was our knowledge that many classic sport routes in both France and the States had been ‘cleaned’,
one way or another.

Another argument was, as Russ Clune put it- [Russ was very active there in the 90s]: the place is a bit of a choss pile and
not really a destination. We loved our drilled out toxic dump, but not many others would.
So: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. [the second line of this quote, for those of you who only got partway
through Mr Crowley, actually goes 'Love is the law, love under will'. There's a puzzle for us, eh?

The broader question became oriented around a search for skill, for me at least. Was the route well set? were the holds and sequences
sculpted with imagination? Was the SACRIFICE of a bit of rock worth the return?

And let's remember 'not to take ourselves too seriously, nor too lightly' [F. Nietzsche again....] since,
in climbing, the amount of change we create on the rock by cleaning, or even bolting and drilling, is so utterly trivial in
comparison to the ecological devastation taking place worldwide due to industries out of control, due to wars…
To wit: folks, just take a look at the Amazon jungle on Google Earth sometime, and then tell me that every bolt ever placed,
every hold EVER chipped, glued, customized or chiseled off, means anything at all. Or go to Beijing and walk around for a few
days on a high pollution day, and talk to me about bouldering ‘ethics’. Let’s keep things in perspective.

All the passion and energy expended in climbing, if it really is to be for an ethical cause, would be better directed
toward saving our ecosystems from rampant industry and the real evils of human presence.

With this said: I vote to leave Dreamtime in its new state, if Caminati says it’ll go.