Ken, Do you know anything about the dome that is out of the frame to the left? I stared at it for a couple (non-climbing) days, and it holds some pretty obvious lines. Haven't been back with gear to find out though ....
Peter Williams and Keith Schoepflin showed me their slides from a route bagging trip they did in the '80s. If my memory serves me right, they did the sinuous crack that diagonals up left on the biggest dome, same dome you're referring to. They may have done another bolted friction route on the dome. For sure, they climbed an impressive flying buttress nearby, 5.10 r/x, all drilled on lead.
Lots to do, especially for those who don't mind a good crack-bruising!
Well, it all began when people started bolting... while climbing on lead. First of all it takes about 30 minutes to hand drill a bolt (in good conditions, much less milking a barely-no-hands rest). This kind of didn't lend itself to placing a bolt every 5 feet. So, the climber would try to go as far as possible before placing another bolt. Another factor (a key one actually) is that sometimes there wouldn't be an adequate stance for quite a ways.
After a while, it became kind of cool to go even further than possible. Somebody else dying on your route would make your route legendary.
Then, when people first began rap bolting they generally just placed enough bolts to "adequately" protect the hard climbing. Some of these routes are kind of scarier than the bolted on lead stuff in some ways. Often steep, pumpy, and no chance to freeze up in fear at one stance for 30 minutes or more.
Finally, rap drilling started leaning towards providing a generally safe route.
To me, none of these are wrong or right. Just different. I like them all in their own ways.
Another example would be if you just finished a pretty healthy runout, and went to clip into a buttonhead... only to have it bust off on your biner. Don't laugh, this has happened to me and it went from R to X in a pretty big hurry.
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