In this essay I will…

I’ll come out and say it: you can pre-hang draws on a mixed route and call it a redpoint

Now I should probably take a step back for the boo/hiss crowd to let it all out… which is fair in their own right. I definitely won’t argue that hanging the draws on lead is in better style. That being said, I also want somebody to acknowledge the merit of why mixed routes exist at all, and then from there expand on how they should be judged.

At the end of the day, a mixed route is any route that has both trad and sport elements. In other words, you’ll be placing gear and clipping bolts. I don’t think anyone will argue the fact that the placed gear fills the trad portion of the mix, and the bolts are the sport. This probably could be distinguished from the bolted trad of places like Joshua Tree, but I digress. If a route is most commonly climbed using a mix of bolts and placed protection, it is mixed.

In trad climbing we have this nifty distinction between a pinkpoint and a redpoint: if you are climbing on pre-placed gear it is a pinkpoint. In sport, we don’t make any such distinction! You just sent Predator, fully equipped with perma-draws, in Rumney? Sick redpoint bro!

Now is the part I’ll probably lose people: if the bolts on a mixed route make up the “sport” part of the mix, why would we apply trad rules to them? What stops me from slapping a perma-draw on the bolt if I really want to… and why would this make it any different?

At the end of the day climbing is nothing more than a battle of egos (both internal and external) so arguing about the specifics of climbing “rules” is a curious endeavor in and of itself. At the end of the day: just don’t be a jerk.