Fletch wrote:Fatdad, I assume you're fat.
Who you calling fat? Just kidding. I'm certainly heavier than I used to be. I'm 5'7" and weigh about 148 or so, compared to the 130 lbs. I weighed before kids, marriage and work took their toll. I think I picked the moniker fatdad in a bout of self pity if I remember correctly. So there you go.
Also, I think I need to disagree about the statement that climbing wasn't harder back then. Sure people are climbing bigger numbers now and some climbers are also doing heady stuff, but apart from those examples, on the average I believe climbing was harder. It wasn't just a combination of technical difficulty but also the mental difficulty of the less sophisticated gear and fewer bolts.
Example: back in the day before the Tuolumne guidebook, you'd take either the Roper High Sierra guide or an old xerox of a Mountain mag article, walk around with a monocular and try to find the climbs since the bolts were so far apart and high off the ground. Most people nowadays simply would not climb under those conditions. The message boards are full of calls for adding additional bolts to existing routes (even to crack lines) in order to make them safer for "everybody." BITD, that just didn't happen. You sacked up or walked away. Doesn't that mean that everyone nowadays is light? No. But the
average climber back then (and I'm only 47 mind you) had the technical and mental fortitude to climb routes of that nature. Now, not so much.
(Edited for grammar)