Deliberately Dangerous?

Bouldering mats are a piece of gear, just as slider nuts and micro cams are. Using any gear changes the nature of the route, and leaving out gear to make it more dangerous and justify a higher grade seems pretty dumb. If I deliberately don't take a crucial number three cam on a route it doesn't increase by a grade, I've just made it more dangerous, and I think the same principle applies in a slightly different way to James Pearson's no mats ethic. 

The problem with ethical stances is that they often conflict with one another. There are many hard climbers doing routes in the mountains who are ardently 'free only'. Aiding is cheating and that's bad. And yet here they are, taking multiple falls onto bolts while redpointing a pitch. As far as I'm concerned if you're putting bolts into mountain crags then you're on pretty thin ground ethically. By all means go for it, (I've had some good times clipping bolts on big mountain routes) but try not to preach to others. 

James Pearson's approach is to use no pads, to draw the line between trad and 'pad trad' right there between the hard ground and one mat. And fair enough, that's an admirable ethic, but if you then go onto spend 10 days on it on a top rope you slightly lose the ethical high-ground.  

The idea that danger=ethical is a strange one which seems (from my experience of climbing around the world) to be a very British thing. Clipping that rusty as fuck peg on quarried grit is fine, but clipping a stainless bolt is somehow sacrosanct? Because you might die if you fell off? That's pretty stupid logic if you think about it. Both are damaging the rock, both make the climbing experience less natural, and yet one is tolerated because it might just kill you. How jolly British. 

In my opinion, a one day ground up ascent of a little padded out route is purer than a multi-day headpoint siege on the same objective. It just makes more sense, it's doing what climbers have always done - starting at the bottom and ending at the top, making it as safe as you feel comfortable with in the mean time. Deliberately taking a more dangerous approach, but then practicing enough to make it safer again seems illogical to me. 

I've kept out of all this grading furore until now, when my dissertaion deadline is 48 hours away and I'm embracing procrastination like never before. James Pearson seems like a genuine and really nice person, and it's a shame that there's been so much debate about such brilliant looking climbs. It should be admitted though, as good a climber as he is, the bottom line is he just can't grade routes very well; there's nothing wrong with that. 

If only he'd padded the hell out the Promise and given it Font 8a, I doubt any fuss would have been kicked up!