Dumb Things Climbers Complain About: Pink Points

I’ve thought about renaming this column “Dumb stuff I saw on Mountain Project this week,” but I’ll stick with this for now. Generally I consider MP to have a higher quality audience than Super Topo or Rock Rhyming.com, but every now and then the same tired arguments get resurrected over and over, only to be beat back into submission by the masses. Bolts next to “cracks”, tick marks, sport vs trad, etc. This time around, it was pink points, and one individual was complaining that people don’t differentiate between a pink point and a redpoint in sport climbing. This, of course, brings all the crazies out of the woods, as these threads often do, and you read a lot of things that will likely leave you feeling dumber in the end.

Now, it seems most of the time the people that start these recurring threads are looking for some kind of self-validation. They want to know that they are in the right, and those “others” are doing it right. Thankfully, we are talking about climbing, a recreational activity that, aside from a few loose rules, you can generally pursue as you see fit.  The accepted standard for the last 10 to 15 years, though, is that if you climb a sport route with the draws prehanging, it’s considered a redpoint. It has been so for a long time now, as climbers realized and agreed that sport climbing was all about the movement, not about the gear. “Pink point” is still a valid trad term, as you can send a route with all the gear pre-placed, and that definitely makes it easier.

Now if you want to go and make a sport climb more difficult for yourself, go ahead and hang the draws each time you get on your project. You can also climb it one armed, one legged, or naked with a watermelon hanging from your harness. Whatever floats your boat. It’s rock climbing, it’s all fun, and the silly little rules we impose upon ourselves are only there so we can have a little bit of a consensus on a few things when we get together and shoot the breeze around the campfire.

Just remember to smile and have fun and the rest should fall into place for you.