I noticed a funny thread on Mountain Project last week titled “Dear Douche (Otto’s Route, Independence Monument, Chopped).” I clicked on it, and the poster, “Grog M,” gave us this first sentence:

In short: thanks for chopping bolts, filling in JOHN OTTO’s HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT HANDHOLDS, and removing the stepping bar at the top of the monument. You must be the God of climbing. 

Since I grew up in the zeitgeist of utter cynicism, I know never to believe anything I read, especially not online and especially not on a climbing forum. I don’t know for sure that this is a troll, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t.

I climbed Otto’s Route about a month ago with my wife. It was her first time up it, and my first time up it in almost a decade. It’s hard to call what you do on Otto’s route “climbing,” but it’s a fun, unique way to do some vertical hiking.

That day, we passed about a dozen people—most of them high-school students out for an adventure with their teacher. The whole thing added an element of ridiculousness that I’ve come to associate with Otto’s Route.

But Otto’s Route, as absurd a folly as it is, actually saved my life. It entered my life at a time when I needed it most, buoying me above the quicksands of depression trapping me back then. I wrote about this, in my own weird way, for this year’s issue of ASCENT (be sure to check it out).

I have so many fond memories of Otto’s Route. My friend Dave Roy and I would run in to the Monument after doing manual labor all day in a vineyard, and try to climb this strange and heavily manufactured 5.8 as fast as possible, car-to-car. I think our best time car to car was 1 hour 20 minutes. It was more of a running, not a climbing, challenge. We brought six draws and one number 9 nut for protection, and a single 60 meter rope that wasn’t quite long enough to get us all the way to the ground off the final rappel—we’d just rap off the ends and fall 15 feet into the ground, with the last person taking care to hold onto one end of the rope as he fell, which would zip the rope all the way through the anchor, too.

John Otto was a total freak who loved the Monument probably more than anyone who has ever lived. He spent months working his way to the top of Independence Monument, while his wife (who didn’t stay with Otto for very long) remained at the base and started carving the Declaration of Independence into a giant flat rock in the shadow of the tower.

By this year, 1911, people were climbing much harder and in much better style in the Dolomites. But these people were professional mountain guides hired by prominent aristocrats with a hankering for adventure. Otto was a miner, and he used the tools he knew to solve the problem of climbing this tower as best he could.

At the time, no one thought standing atop Independence Monument would be possible, and after Otto proved everyone wrong, the Grand Junction Sentinel said that the climb was so hard it might never be repeated.

Otto’s Route is one of the only tower climbs that Layton Kor did more than once—because it was that good.

It would be a shame if Otto’s Route was actually chopped. It would stupid more than anything. To do all that work just to make people climb the whopping grade of 5.10 as opposed to 5.8 would be dumb, to say the least. It wouldn’t really change anything.

That said, I am not opposed to historically significant climbs being altered to suite the needs of a new generation. We should never be held back by history, though it’s also important to respect history in its context. To me, changing Otto’s Route wouldn’t bring anything new or interesting to the table, but it would severely take away from one of the cooler bits of climbing history we have in Colorado.

Otto’s Route wasn’t chipped, per se. But he did drill pipe into the rock to sit on and aid his way up the tower. Imagine sitting on a pipe barely drilled more than a couple inches deep into soft sandstone, and trusting your life to it 400 feet up a desert tower. Jeepers!

The park service eventually removed the pipe for the safety of other climbers in the 1970s, and the bore holes remaining have become handholds used on the route.

Another observation. Had this route not been “manufactured,” it might’ve been a natural 5.10+. But chipping the route down to 5.8 didn’t “steal from the future”—the argument you most often hear against chipping. If anything, Otto’s Route bolstered the progression and development of desert climbing.

So in conclusion, the “stealing from the future” argument is dumb. I’m not condoning chipping by saying that. But I am saying that in the grand scheme, manufacturing routes doesn’t take away from future generations.

For more on this point, I would refer you to Bill Ramsey’s excellent, if controversial exploration of why the most common reasons against chipping fail to support a compelling reason not to chip:

Reason 3: Hold Manufacturing Harms Future Generations of Good Climbers

… A stronger response to this concern is to recognize that a general acceptance of hold manufacturing will significantly help, rather than hinder, future generations of climbers. At any given point in time, including future points in time, there is a lot more unclimbable rock in the world than just barely climbable rock. Pick whatever grade you think might be the cutting edge for some future generation. 5.17d? Okay, there is a great, great deal more rock out there in the harder-than-5.17d range that could be converted into a 5.17d than there is rock that  is naturally 5.17d. So, if your concern is that the future 5.17d climber won’t have enough routes to do, then you should endorse a pro-manufacturing attitude. Note, this point applies to any future grade and any future generation. While I’m not suggesting that this is an especially good argument for manufacturing, I am claiming that the concern-for-future-climbers argument is a bad argument for opposing all hold manufacturing.

Finally, this criticism of rock modification is partly grounded in the assumption that it is always done to make the climbing easier—to bring the rock “down” to a lesser climber’s ability. In truth, there are lots of climbs where holds have been chipped off a route to make it harder. Here again, rock modification beyond the removal of loose material actually benefits, rather than hinders, the top climbers.