Gunks Climbers, You May Find This Of Interest
|
again with the definitive opinions about something you've never seen or used? |
|
Kevin Heckeler wrote:Here's a little secret -- many of the holds on a Gunks climb are already painted for you. Just follow the chalk. There, I just saved a few iDrones $20.yeah but if you are lost and cant find the exact climb on your hit list then what? |
|
MJMobes wrote: yeah but if you are lost and cant find the exact climb on your hit list then what?There are hundreds of other climbers who probably can help you out. Can you say "Excuse me, but we're looking for The Last Will be First"? |
|
Gunkiemike wrote: There are hundreds of other climbers who probably can help you out. Can you say "Excuse me, but we're looking for The Last Will be First"?There is always this. For a bunch of "east coast d-bags" we are a very helpful lot. I've always gotten enthusiastic help when asking other climbers where i'm at and where I need to head for a route, and I'm happy to spend time with someone to get them sorted and on their way. Same goes for everyone I've ever climbed with in the gunks. |
|
rogerbenton wrote:I'm happy to spend time with someone to get them sorted and on their way.Doesn't even take a minute in most cases. This is the spirit at the Gunks. I've also shared a lot of ropes at rappels in the past few years. The community of actual climbers (not the tourons with guides or student groups) is actually very cool. |
|
rogerbenton wrote:you're defensive about your stupid phone - no one cares.My phone doesn't need me defending it. I'm actually heckling the app developers. Don't take personally what wasn't intended for you in the first place. Go away dOOd. |
|
Heckeler's gon' heckle! |
|
Kevin Heckeler wrote:This app is certainly in the spirit of painting holds [based on what's been shared], versus allowing people to learn route finding.I don't know...I actually think the app is a step in what I view as a better direction, away from "painting holds." Showing folks where the route goes but cutting out all the additional information that is often part of verbal descriptions actually leaves more up to the climber, not less. As for learning "route finding," you don't learn route finding, in the conventional sense of the term, in the Gunks, because many routes don't follow natural lines of least resistance. You aren't trying to pick out the best, most efficient, or easiest way, you are trying to replicate the path someone else took when they discovered the climb, and that someone else might have been trying to maximize difficulty or "interest," whatever that might mean. Someone skilled at route-finding who applies those skills in the Gunks would wander "off route" on many Gunks climbs. What constitutes "route-finding" in the Gunks is correctly keying verbal descriptions to cliff features so that you head the way the route, which might be quite contrived, is supposed to go. This may well be a skill, and since most guidebooks are still text-based, a useful skill, but it has little to do with navigation in the mountains, and a lot to do with the reading ability of the climber and the writing ability of the author. The Trapps App bypasses the entire (arguably irrelevant) process of text interpretation and correlation and just shows you where to go with a line. What makes it a substantial improvement over classical topos is that the line is drawn on a cliff photo that is zoomable, so that the climber can orient the line with respect to reasonably local cliff features. An important aspect of this, one the app developers understood, is that the photo has to be taken in a light that reveals rather than obscures local cliff detail. When Dick produced the cliff photos for his guide, the demands of aerial photography at the time required turbulence-free air to reduce vibration and so achieve reasonable sharpness. For the Trapps, this meant early-morning light, which, being flat, can and does obscure huge major features, not to mention smaller ones. The Trapps App developers managed to get afternoon aerial photos that are far better at delineating cliff details then the shots Dick had to work with. They are also in color, which I never thought mattered much until Jerry Handren's Red Rocks guide came out and I saw how much easier it is to correlate color photos with crag features. The result is a wordless topo which, as far as I can tell from so far very limited experience, gives the climber an excellent chance of figuring out the general direction of the route, for all pitches. I see this as a reversion to the most basic goal of guidebooks, to show you where to go without also revealing the mysteries that have to be resolved on the way, and not, as many are saying, some new layer of simplification that "dumbs down" the climbing process even more. It's really the opposite, and if it does not catch on, it will be because a significant number of climbers demand more specific and detailed information, in other words because the climbing community now demands more "paint" on the route than the app provides. As for the stupid innuendo about motivations for iPhone vs. Android development, the reality is that Chris is a physics teacher, not a programmer or developer, and when he decided to do this, he naturally chose for his initial efforts the smoothest, easiest system to learn, and that is, by a reasonably large margin, the iPhone platform. (I am not suggesting, by the way, that learning smart phone programming from scratch is anything like "smooth" or "easy." I'd hazard that there are extremely few posters on this site who aren't already skilled programmers who would have a snowball's chance in hell of managing this really quite impressive feat while holding down a full-time job and climbing at a high standard.) |
|
Of course Dick "borrowed" from previous versions of his own guidebook. I imagine he looked at the Swain book but do not think he used anything from it (the reverse is closer to the truth). I think there was a point at which Ivan Rezucha had a brief account of routes that were new at the time that Ivan turned over to Dick. Dick certainly spoke to many climbers in order to make the information and grading as good as possible, so many contributed to the effort. And of course both the concept and the content of Dick's guides was firmly based on the original text by Art Gran---it all goes back to him. |
|
$15! |
|
Dana Bartlett wrote:I disagree, Rich. Fair enough Dana. Care to explain? |
|
A few thoughts after playing with the app for a little bit: |
|
I've been looking over the app too and I think more and more highly of it. My review follows. |
|
Aid |
|
rgold wrote:As for the stupid innuendo about motivations for iPhone vs. Android development, the reality is that Chris is a physics teacher, not a programmer or developer, and when he decided to do this, he naturally chose for his initial efforts the smoothest, easiest system to learn, and that is, by a reasonably large margin, the iPhone platform.Here we are less than 2 months later and the android version is now released. So is it hype regarding the android platform being difficult for developers? Or maybe they were just eager to get the app out the door? play.google.com/store/apps/… I'll wait for the price to drop in a few months/year, but at least now I can't bitch about exclusiveness! ;) And yes, this app has good topos. In the end, the app's sales will determine if it's worthy of any recognition and serves any use. I know I've seen more and more climbers with their phones out in recent years. The market is there. We've also seen climbers with the wrong guide looking for climbs (Near Trapps at the Mac Wall). I don't think any app can fix stupid. |
|
why not just parlay these new aerial photos into a totally new complete guidebook(includes zoomable topos for smart phone). The developers of the app seem experienced enough. They are offering some new grades. They are adding some new climbs. They are drawing routes in to reflect how they are currently being climbed (or not climbed). I personally dont think there is anything wrong with the guide i have (williams'), but it clearly isnt as modern as ADK Rock or Red Rocks by Handren. rgold bring up a good point about the old aerial photos - sometimes they are helpful, often times for not much more than finding the start. And he is right - the route finding in the gunks is being able to translate what williams writes onto the climb at hand. It can be tricky at times, but works out for me the vast majority of the time. |
|
The photos in the Gunks app are taken from the base of the route. |
|
Bill, if you tap past the base photo you will get an aerial photo taken from a helicopter |
|
BigA wrote:Kevin, I don't think the android programming difficulties were hype; they hired someone versed in android developmentOuch! I probably need to give them a pity purchase at some point then. [my prior posts were a bit disingenuous since I haven't really the need for the guide, but now that I stuck my big foot in my mouth I mind as well pay up, right?] |
|
So the app is okay, for a visitor probably makes life a lot easier. Biggest complaint aside from the the price is the lack of a few routes, most notably Hans Puss and The Nose. Hans is a high quality, popular climb, and The Nose is a quality climb (certainly better than some of what was included in the app). There's probably plenty more examples, as the app doesn't break 300 routes and there's more than 300 in the Trapps. |