Policy on onsighting extensions?

The problem is when you reverse systematically. In the video On the edge, there is actually one guy who jumped down to the ground claiming that he because of that could start with pre-clipped gear. Because all of these different approaches, we have made a "yellow card", grey zone, definition. It is impossible to make clear rules and I do not think we need them.

Onsighting is to climb a route with no knowledge...so if i climb 7b onsight i need to have knowlede about sections which are 6c and above...so it doesnt matter for me if have knowledge around 5m of a 6a section.  If it makes no difference if I know the route or not to save power it doesnt make sense to not claim it onsight. If you do it systemaitcally it´s not fair to claim it onsight. every climber has to judge for himself, i.e. i didnt judge routes as an onsight cause i knew the first parts (really easy) but if you climb it for the first time you have to search for a hidden hold, so it made a difference even though it was really easy, but it cost power...so it´s a flexible system and please everybody should be honest, otherwise nobody is to trust anymore

If your onsighting lets say an extended route which consists of two sections a 6a + 7a, you proceed to climb the first 6a onsight to the anchors an lower of, you have onsighted the first section. If you then proceed (whenever) to onsight the full extended route, then you can only say that you have onsighted the 7a part of the route, not the full route, because you have already climbed the first part of the route. Thus if you mark it here in 8a.nu, then you should say that it was only the extended part which you onsighted, and not the whole route, and grade it appropriately. @Jens, no real rules are necessary, but this is simple logic, a route cannot be onsighted if parts of it have been climbed. In other words, you cannot claim that you have climbed such and such a route for the first time without prior knowledge (which is the definiton of onsight generally held by the community) if you already, not only have prior knowledge of the route but have climbed a part of it. The inference of you logic is the disapearance of the community held definition for "onsight".

@ Timo: The 8a recommendated Ethics and Practice are based on opinions of the climbing community. If you check the votings, close to 40 % think you can onsight an extension/variation. This is not my logic mut the understanding of how the community thinks. What should we do when reporting hard core onsights where we know that the climber has climbed the first meters before? Should we say that the XX climbers cheats?

@ Jens. Well yes, that is what it says, but when you actually LOOK at it, you can see that 61.44% of the poeple who voted said NO, and that by all counts this percentage IS the majority, and by your counts of populistic democracy where by the majority is always right, which means that it is NOT ok to say that it is "onsight" if you have already climbed a previous section of the route. You should say that they onsighted the extension, which is the truth.

So what do you think what we should do when climbers report hard core onsights of extensions/variations? 8a often gives recommendations but we can of course not be a global referee. I repeat, some famous onsights have been done it in this way...should we call them cheaters?

You don't have to call them anything Jens. You just have to tell the (full) truth. If they did not truly onsight the route, just the extension, then just post the news as: "So-and-So climbed such-and-such climb, onsighting the extension." You don't need to call anyone out. Just as you don't need to call people out for taking inflated grades. Just post the news ACCURATELY and if the person in question is not bring truthful the community will be aware of it. Unbiased, informative, and factual reporting.

Having start this thread, I thought I'd round it up too. First of all, thanks for all the responses. Great news, that we (for once) could discuss the subject itself and not the style of debate, personal attacks/criticism etc. To sum it up, I tend to agree with the hard-liners here. Having done the lower pitch once, it is not possible to onsight the entire extension route. However, it would be possible, as Tye writes, to reclimb the lower part and continue to onsight the extension. So, to return to the case of Aeolia Extension, I would climb it again and only claim onsight of the extension part (giving some personal grade to it) and a repeat of the first part. I any case, I'd reclimb it just because the lower part is awesome and the upper part looked great - so I'll climb it simply for the pure enjoyment :-) 

@ Tye: It is not as easy as that because we have the data base. We do not normally report 8b onsights and we can not go in and change data in scorecards. I know for sure many hard core onsights in the 8a data base are in fact onsights of extensions/variations and I am fine whit that. If some hard core climbers think this is correct and actually 40 % of all the votes, why should 8a go in and act as a referee?

Jens, if you took another poll: Should 8a.nu act as a referee or the scorecard police? I don't think anyone would vote in favor of that! ha ha.. But, as someone I respect has said lately, (paraphrase)-  The higher the standard that one holds themself to, the higher standard of climber they are! Everyone knows what this means!

I think one of the questions here to be asked is whether the first part is climbed onsight, or redpointed. Because if it is onsight, then the extention, which makes up the whole route is climbed Second GO, which is still a very good achievement in it's self. On the other hand, if the first part is redpointed, this seems to me a blurry area, since it opens the possibility for endless practice of the first part, after which the "onsight" of the upper part is attempted, in which case I'd have to go further and say that it would seem that the ascent is redpoint rather than onsighting an extension. But it's blurry, the possibilities of interpretation really come in here. @Jens, 60% is still the majority. You have agrued elswhere on the need for the majority opinion to be respected as the communities opinion, why not now?

@ Timo: If you do something as you suggest to systematically work on the lower part before you go for the extension it is of course not onsight. The 8a recommendation is done in order to create the most fun for the climbers and also to accept different opinions of the community. 60 % is a majority but we can based on that not act like a referee judgeing ascents. We can only give recommendations as it is, as you say, "blurry" :-)

What you could in situations where some has after redpointing a route, climbed the extension first try, is say: Such and such climbed the extension of such and such a route on their first attempt of the extension. That sounds semi reasonable. But at most an extension can climbed, following the definition of onsight, and when the first part is already climbed, second try. I have to agree with Tye here, it's not really about judging, but about reporting facts, leave judgement out of reporting, as sad as it is you cannot be both in a community and reporting of that same community, because to describe always requires one to step out of the situation where one is in, and you should leave judging for the haters, who'll hate regardless. I think this is a great opportunity to see the difference between reporting what someone did in fact, and how they, the climbing media, and sponsors want to us, or whoever, wants the people buying products to see an ascent. What becomes blurry is if we say that it is ok to climb the first part say once, twice or three times, and still get an onsight on the extensionl this is blurry because it is against the definitions of how "onsight" is defined. If on the other hand we accept that onsight is no previous knowledge of a route, keeping in mind that an extension is a part of a whole and not a entity on it's own, we can clearly see that it is only possible to osight an extension under one condition, that you climb the whole route, including the extension, onsight. What I was implying by blurry, is that we make it blurry because we want the image of the ascent to be something which it in fact isn't, but at the same time, and unfortunately I cannot see many other reasons for this besides fame and points. If it were only for fun, there would be no need to discuss the possibility of onsighting extensions, when in the description of what "onsight" means it is not possible.

I understand what you say but we can not go in and comment this since for 99.9 % of the time we do not know if it is an onsight extension/variation or just an onsight. Further more, there is no such thing as an official description on what onsight is. Just 10 years ago, you could not claim onsight if you did not put up the drawers by yourself, otherwise it was called pinkpoint. Can you see that this is more or less the same thing and 8a can not act like referee reporting pinkpoint when the community says onsight.

Why not ask your source? Someone tells you that a climb has occured, no? You cannot give policy to the community no, that is not your job, but you can give policy to the people who work for you in reporting and creating this website. That is your job. I completely disagree, putting up quickdraws versus having them already there as you climb, and having climbed half of the route before hand after which you say onsight the whole route, of which only the second part is unknown, is just not comparable, in any way. These things are two completely different things.

I'll clarify why I think they are two different things. Firstly onsight, at its most simplest is still no previous knowledge of route, this has not changed. Whether you put quickdraws in as you climb or if they are already in place is a matter of endurance, the time spent on the climb becomes longer, and it is purely a physical factor of can you handle the time, of course onsighting becomes easier when you have to be on the wall for less time. (I am deliberately not touching the possibility of the climber lowering and putting the draws in himself), but the main point is the amount of time you have to spend climbing. This you can clearly see, has no bearing on knowing anything about the route before climbing it, only on the time and thus affecting the difficulty of climbing the route. Climbing a section of a route, means that you have climbed a part of that route, and climbing a part of a route means that you have knowledge of that part of the route, which means that you cannot climb the route again, and say that it was the first time that you have climbed the route. It by default, makes you knowledgeable of part of the route you are wanting to climb, and an extension, regardgelss of the fact that it might have a different name, or a different or separate grade, is still, only an extension, a part, or subcategory of a already existing route. Do you understand the difference I am trying to explain? One, pinkpointing and redpointing effect difficulty by forcing the climber to be on the wall for different periods of time. And an extension effects difficulty by adding X amounts of moves to a previous route. They are not comparable. With this logic, taking the definition of no knowledge, it makes no difference if you are putting in draws while or before you climb, but it makes a huge difference if you have already climbed halfway up the route.

10 years ago, many climbers were upset like you if an onsight was reported even if the quickdraws already were in place. Today, nobody care. I guess it will be the same for onsighting extensions/variations with a big difference in difficulty on the upper part. It is just a natural development of our sport in order to have more fun onsight possibilities. I mean, let us say three different 8a's shares the same 6a scrambling, of course you could onsight them all? It is just a matter of define how many grades differences we will accept. Do you get my point, we can not say that one shared 5a move of two 8a's disqualifies you from trying two onsights.

I am not upset, it is just that your logic is erroneous. 6a is not "scrambling", scrambling is scrambling, hence earlier I defined climbing as something in which you have to clip quickdraws. Now if those three 8a's all have a scrambling start where there is no need to clip, then it is possible to onsight them all, yet, if they all have a 6a route which you have to climb, after which, you get to climb your 8a, then by the definition of no previous knowledge, no, you can only onsight one, and the other two are second and third go, respectively. It is unfortunate but that is the logic. What I do not uderstand is how saying that you can onsight several different routes which are variations of a single start is more fun than just climbing them, unless, that is, you have points, in that case I can understand it. I also said previously, as a semi-joke, but in all seriousness, that if it is so easy, why not climb using different holds? In which case you are not climbing the same route three times to get to the harder routes and by our own definition, you can onsight all three.

If I would have written the example as a 6a coming into three 8a's, I am sure, the majority would have said that this is OK. If you did see this at the crag and then you were sitting at the same table as the guy who said he onsighted the three 8a's, I am sure you would not have said - No this is not correct, you just onsighted one route the others you did redpoint. If you do not spit it óut why should 8a do it? PS This is my last comment to you trying to explain why 40 % thinks it is OK to do multiple onsights if they share an easier start. I fully understand your position but you have to understand that different opinions are possible and 8a can not and will not act like a police.

I would have.