Bolting guidelines?

Glad the OP had a chance to go explore and discover the area for himself. Mt. Morrison looks crazy good from afar but the rock is junk unfortunately. You have years of fun exploring ahead of you. Enjoy. As for:

Todd Townsend wrote: Whitney Portal, Little Egypt, Cardinal Pinnacle, Pine Creek, The Gong Show Crag, Patricia Bowl, The Benton Crags, The Mammoth Crest, and Granite Basin all have trad routes that you descend via bolted anchor stations.

Your response if misleading since some of the crags you mention top out on top on longer cliff bands with no easy descent, if they top out at all, making fixed anchors necessary. Also, what you don't appear to realize is that the norm you're referring to, at least at some of the crags, is a newer development than you might suppose. One of the most active developers in the area, Marty Lewis, pretty much bolts everything, even cracks. He hangs chains on some routes so folks don't need draws, etc. However, given the amount of rock and routes he's opened, most folks are clearly cool with that and it's probably safe to say that his methods have been adopted as an acceptable practice by most (though not all). As such, it's hard to characterize some of these places as trad. With the exception of a few older routes like Pratt's Crack, Pine Creek is a newer crag developed with more of a sport ethic than a trad one. Had you visited the Eastside 20 yrs. ago, you would not have seen anchors lining every route, nor the type of convenience bolting at place like Patricia Bowl. Compare the number of bolts in nearby places like Tuolumne, the Valley and Tahoe for a more representative picture of trad bolting standards.

As for the notion that 'we care about our impact on fauna, so we bolt'. Puuleeeze. It's for convenience. Let's not misrepresent our true intentions because of an incidental benefit.

Fat Dad wrote:Your response is misleading since some of the crags you mention top out on top on longer cliff bands with no easy descent, if they top out at all, making fixed anchors necessary. Also, what you don't appear to realize is that the norm you're referring to, at least at some of the crags, is a newer development than you might suppose...

Actually, I'm personally quite aware of those facts.

In Pine Creek, Pratt's Crack and Sheila both originally went to the top of their formation and then you would rap off a bolted anchor on the back side which deposits you at the base of the Bighorn Wall. The rusty 1/4 inchers are still there if you want to use 'em. I think Rites of Spring was always descended by rapping off of the current stations and the PSOM Pinnacle is descended via rappel too.

I'd assume that Cardinal was originally a walk off, but I don't know anyone who hasn't rapped it in the past 6 years that I've lived in Bishop.

There are some routes at the Benton Crags and Little Egypt without top anchors, but folks usually traverse over to neighboring lines with anchors to descend.

I'm not sure how Marty factors into this, as he's mainly put up sport climbs and we're talking about trad routes.

Anyway, my reply was mainly just to show that by no means is walking off the CURRENT norm or ethic on the Eastside w.r.t. new and established gear routes, as had been implied by another poster.