Those of you that read this that have never been to the Red River Gorge probably don’t find these Muir Valley updates that interesting but among people that climb at the Red MV seems to generate a disproportionate amount of controversy.
I can’t even begin to summarize this thread at redriverclimbing.com but I will try to give a brief summary as it is already 12 pages long at the time of this posting.
Basically someone posted about a 3rd hand story they had heard of someone seeing someone else “sculpting” a hold on a route at Muir Valley. Not surprisingly this devolves into a mudslinging debate about what constitutes chipping and whether or not private landowners have the right to chip on their own land. MV owner Rick Weber comes in and defends himself against any chipping allegations (the original post was vague but implied that the “sculptor” might have been Rick) and asserts his rights as a property owner. This of course leads to a couple of pages of people piling on with more negativity about climbing at MV. Along the way there is a debate over whether or not Rick has banned someone from MV.
The whole thread is somewhat sophomoric in nature but is worth reading if you are wasting away the hours until you get to leave work. It does manage to shed some more light on the seemingly endless stream of negativity people direct towards the Weber’s even though they are providing access to hundreds of routes on private land at no cost to the public. Perhaps I need to reevaluate my own pessimism on the subject….
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