This one is going to be short. Virtually every climbing area in Europe or North America is located in a jurisdiction under "shelter-in-place" at this point. There are various interpretations of this but the emphasis on staying local and avoiding crowds is universal. Rural communities where most climbing sectors are found are pleading for visitors to stay away from them. Climbing organizations are echoing the same theme. Yet every day I see fresh ascents logged in these days and posted on the 8a website and elsewhere for all to see. This is not appropriate for too many reasons to count.
So I am asking these websites to look again at their actions and make changes. It's very easy to put the message out there that public posting of climbs is not helpful at this time. It's also easy to change the settings on the website to make such posting impossible for the time being. For guidance on this, check out UKC's proactive attitude. They locked down their logbooks March 18.
Here are the two primary sources for such posts.
REI owns Mountain Project. No more publicly available ticks of routes please.
8a.nu please just stop. We get that Sweden, for now, is more relaxed about restrictions. How much longer?
Climbers, if you really think that going climbing is okay right now, I can't alter that attitude but I will ask you to stop posting about your sick sends on social media and elsewhere and I can guarantee that if you are sponsored, others are taking note of your lack of awareness, including athlete and brand managers. Times for climbing brands are going to be very tough going forward and failure to grasp the need for everyone to get on board with true social distancing will have consequences.
Thank you.
Those ticks could be useful for finding idiots to shun in future. I'm a Brit expat, and I often use the ukc partners forum to find people to climb with for a couple of days when I'm over visiting family. My list of people not to climb with grew considerably during the last week of pre-lockdown discussions.
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