Comment by matheusmoreira
15 hours ago
> police arrested them and confiscated 102 bolts
That stood out to me... I understand that rock climbing is Serious Business to its practitioners and people on internet forums, but these two guys actually got arrested for removing those bolts, which is a whole new level of serious.
Was it really some kind of crime to do that? What happened to those guys after that?
In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got him on probation violation and had him extradited to his home state. The climbing community replaced all the removed bolts, and people went back to enjoying the rock climbing.
The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.
I can't find many details, but I had heard Hayden's name before, he sadly died of suicide after losing his partner in an avalanche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Kennedy_(climber) ). Jason Kruk appears to still be climbing to this day, so neither appeared to wind up in significant legal trouble after rightly or wrongly damaging a tourist destination.
I've heard a variation of the story where the police took them away (i.e., "arrested" them) to protect them from what was becoming an angry mob.
I think you’ll be sad if you look up Hayden Kennedy.
No serious legal consequences to them from this climb, though, and the route remains clean. There was a wonderful film in this year’s Mountains On Stage film tour called Patagonian Chimeras, about a team of women who climbed the new variation by fair means.
The route is not clean, the Red Bull film team added more bolts, when Lama did his climb there in 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/201 90530021810/http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web10x/newswire-lama-speaks-comp...
This couldn't happen in my climbing area, the Saechsische Schweiz, famous for creating the first Climbing regulations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Switzerland_climbing_reg... Police will arrest you for putting bolts in there for sure.
I want to know why they left them with some.
I imagined those just fell down while they were taking them out so they didn't took out 125, lost 20+, and got caught with 102.