Shawn Snyder Speaks Out!

Since I like to break test things to find their limits, thought I would test my ego. Sean Snyder and I met in Yosemite, in front of El Capitan with a handful of friends, both his camp and my camp. And we talked for several hours about bolts, our feelings towards each other, and got to finally meet. Him and I have never met before, and we only know each other through our online presence. And he's very aggressive online, and I'm very obnoxious, you can say online. But it was nice to meet a person in person, to hear their thoughts thoroughly and not interrupt them, and fully understand why he's so passionate about what he is. He is super passionate about bolting. He has done a lot of research, a lot of bolting, and he brought a lot of his bolts. I was quite impressed. The guy's got more bolts than I do. Now, Sean is the person who, I said in a previous video that we ended up taking down, smashed the bolts in Yosemite. Now to clarify, he said he did not do that, and so took the video down. I'm saying that he said he didn't do that here, and that's not the point of this video. But I want to connect who Sean Snyder is, to understand why this meeting is quite important. Those who found out about the meeting were not quite sure how they felt about it, because Sean Snyder's done some pretty up things, and he's done some legal obnoxious stuff. But I do appreciate him meeting me in person, and trying to work on this towards a more productive future. Because at the end of the day, I think him and I pretty much want the same thing, we just go about it differently. But since I have such a dominating voice on YouTube, about bolts, and my thoughts on bolts, I wanted to try to even the playing ground a little bit, by sharing his thoughts. Even though I don't agree on some of them, but I do agree on some other parts. I do want How Not To Highline to be about good information between either bolting, or gear for extreme sports, and if people don't have the same opinion as me, that's okay. I do want How Not To Highline to be a resource where a lot of information, of even opposing views can come in, so people can think for themselves. I don't wanna teach people what to think, I wanna teach people how to think. And having Sean share his views on things, might give more a broader view, than if it's just me or Bobby talking about bolting. Since I started bolting about five years ago in Yosemite, Sean and I have been kind of like this together, and he doesn't like me very much. But he came, and he was respectful, and he met me, and I came, and I listened, and I am hoping and expecting you guys to do the same, if you choose to continue watching. We are gonna leave the comment section open for now, and I am going to monitor that thing, for any inappropriate comments. You do not have to agree with him or I, or both, or neither. But, I do expect the comments to be respectful, and keep in mind, some of the things that were done on the internet were copycats, some of the things were not. But, please be respectful, listen to his thoughts, put in comments what you think about this interview, and letting people share things that may not agree with me, or you, or whatever. Enjoy the show. Ah! I have a question. Do you want bolting regulation, or do you just want highliners and climbers to just do better? What would you like to see in a perfect world? We've all proven as climbers and slackliners that we can't regulate ourselves. We tried, and tried, and tried for decades now, and we have failed. As much as I am against regulations, because regulations limit your access, and limit your freedoms, because most of the time, when people create rules, the people that create them have no idea, or nothing to do with the activity in which they're creating the rule for. And so, the activity seekers suffer. And so, no, I don't like rules, but unfortunately, sometimes when people don't regulate themselves, and have proven to be irresponsible and entitled, then there comes a point to where you have to really look in the mirror and own that, hey, for sustainability, for the future, we have failed, we need rules, and I feel that that's where we're at. What rules would you want to see? From removing bolts for as long as I have now, I've learned that if someone's gonna be at the table to create these rules of what needs to be for the future of sustainability for our majestic areas, they have to have qualified skills to be there. We have many organizations today. We have the Access Fund, we have climbing coalitions all over the place. And the more climbing coalitions, and the more organizations that we have formed to try to regulate the problem that we all know is there, hasn't worked. Every one of our areas is over-ran, every year it's getting worse and worse and worse, so my mind says that they're not working. When you go to Smith Rock and you park in the parking lot, they've done an amazing job. From the parking lot to the wall, it's basically a red carpet, and I commend everybody on all the hard work that they've done for quite some time, and that place and everybody else that's done the same. But it's basically a red carpet to a shit show, because nobody is willing to take care of the vertical world. The vertical world is somewhere to where all of these people, for decades now, have not wanted to own it. You have them making money, they are advertising it, they got those binoculars over there where people can look and check it out and see what everybody's doing. But when it comes to the actual vertical world in the books, they say, oh, no, we can't, because it's liability issues, so they can't get involved. And so it's got to the point to where we have to regulate ourselves. And so through self-regulation, through the amount of re-bolting I've done, I started to realize that there's all kinds of aspects to re-bolting, that re-bolters need to be at the table when these rules are being made, because once you start to re-bolt and have a lot of experience re-bolting, you see how complicated things can be and how diverse it is from the different type of tooling that you need. For example, I'll try to be brief here. It's hard for me to do that, but we'll try. You have a client, Beard of Cabbage, Joshua Tree. You say, Bernadette calls and says, hey, bolt number four, his destination has been replaced. You go out and replace it and you put in a five-piece wall. Next year, you're not there, so she calls Tom. Bolt number six needs to be replaced. Tom comes and he puts in whatever. So you got all these different style of bolts somewhere. And a re-bolter needs to come, and if they're re-bolting the whole route and there's four different styles of bolts, there's several different styles of tooling and different things you need. So it really creates your backpack to be really heavy. It's really hard just to go down, charge down, remove those bolts that need to be done efficiently, quickly, and move out. It's this big procedure. And that's why a lot of people don't replace these bolts because it takes a lot of tooling, a lot of time and energy to do it right. Anybody that's gonna come into a majestic area and wants to put a permanent bolt in needs to know how to remove said bolt before they are able to install it. It should be part of, whether it's a permit process or if it's just a good faith. It doesn't matter what it is, whatever bolt they're installing, look at all the bolts when you go climbing. You go to an anchor, you go to a specific bolt, and you see another bolt that's been chopped. And I don't think people really look at the bolts and say, why has that bolt been chopped? I've been re-bolting long enough to know why the bolt was chopped because someone didn't know how to remove it. And so they chopped it. And so we have all these scars now because people are chopping bolts everywhere. If you wanna go get a gun and own a gun, you gotta qualify that you're someone's responsible to own a gun. But today, anybody can go out and just grab a bolt from Home Depot and go up and put it in and put it in crooked. One of the number one things, like I said, I'm gonna jump all around here. And the number one things I'm noticing is the very, very basic concept of putting a bolt in is being ignored. And so I'm like, if you can't even, if you can't even do this very first step, the very first step of putting in a bolt, if you fail at that, then you have no right putting a bolt in. And so when you put a bolt in, it doesn't matter where you go, how you are, what you're doing. See what I'm saying? And so why are we putting bolts in? They're like this, they're like this, they're like this. And you see the hanger that's on there, there's a gap around the hanger because they didn't put the bolt in right. So the hanger's not gonna sit flush and the nut's not gonna sit flush on the hanger. And so just basic, so where is the dead body, Sean? You're bitching, there's no dead bodies. That's not the point. This is a majestic area. When you look at like the rules, if you wanted to come here and say, hey, I wanna put a bolt in, and you look online, you go to nationalpark.com, whatever, it comes up and says, you know, yada, yada, but it basically says that, no, we don't get involved, but there is these ethics or these whatever, you know, and then you read those. And if you read those, I'm like, wow, these guys, they're not following, you know, they're not even following these ethics. So we need to figure out what the best bolt is for Yosemite, the best bolt for sustainability here, and not dictate and say, oh, you can only put this bolt in, give a few choices and have facts of why these bolts here are good for this area and why these other bolts are not, but also in the standpoint, because a lot of people are looking at it as an installation and they say, well, these are fine here because they installed fine. But once you start removing bolts in different styles of rock, you take a five-piece raw and you put it in five different styles of rocks and remove it, you take different other bolts and put them in five different styles of rock and remove it, and you find that there's some different variables and you use different tools and different techniques. And so we need to figure out, which I think a lot of us have already done now, we're at that stage, and now those people need to set aside their differences, come together and say, hey, you share what you've learned, we'll share what I learned, and figure out, because we're here in Yosemite right now, so let's just kind of try to focus on here right now. What's the best bolts for here? I would suggest today, gluons. The reason why is because we have already proven that we can't take care of things. You go to this place, that place, and wherever you want to point the finger, that finger, there's always hangers missing, whoever's doing it, whatever, it's being done. But then people started putting gluons in that shouldn't be putting gluons in, and I started getting mad because a gluon's permanent. You put in a normal bolt messed up and someone knows how to remove bolts, they can go remove it and fix it, and you never knew that the person made a mistake. But you put a gluon in wrong, there it is. And so we need to figure out the right way to put gluons in, what looks clean, because so far, nobody, and I'll say it again, nobody, other than, I don't know, truthfully, the ones that you guys put in Joshua Tree, what really happened with those bolts up top. I'm sure they're safe. But I've never heard of someone putting a gluon bolt in that wasn't, that killed somebody or pulled or, you know. But nevertheless, if this is a national and a state park, I think that we should take the same amount of respect as if I'm gonna be at your house and lay hardwood floors at your house for your wife or her anniversary, you would want me to pay attention to detail and not have the seams that I'm supposed to glue just to speak a lot of glue and shit everywhere. And so we're taking, now out into a national and state park, I would like people to take that same responsibility and same, you know, attention to detail in this majestic area that deserves it just as much, if not way more, than your beautiful home and hardwood floors if you do it for your wife. I have a theory that anybody spending money and time on bolts typically wants to do it right. Yeah. And I have a theory the more information people have available, if you, he just shared with me that two notch less is more. I think there's a lot of misconceptions when people see an internet version of anybody. Especially when it's exploded by people like you. I wanted to meet you and the human side of you. And I wanted you to meet the chilled out, Ryan, everybody thinks I'm over amped up on the internet. It's a YouTube thing. This is the guy I'm gonna go meet right now and give all my techniques and all my shit to that's gonna lead us all. No, I'm not your leader. I'm a hoarder of information and I love organizing shit. I'm not the master bolter. No, dude. There's people all over the internet and all over places talking about like bolting. Oh, Ryan Jenkins, how it's a highlight. Ryan Jenkins. I'm like, are you kidding me? No, no. You're just like, so I got the point in. So I'm joining the party. Here I am. So here's the deal. If you're gonna put a bolt in for the bigger picture, if you've been involved in all the aspects of a bolt being put in to a bolt being completely removed successfully, and you've actually done that for years on hand, you realize this bigger picture that a lot of other people don't really grasp and see. And if there is these few basic rules, it would help the bigger picture for the bolts being put in. If these few rules of what bolts can be put in, how they need to be put in, those three bolts that you came and chopped. And when I say chopped, because you didn't technically chop them, but those are the very, very, very, very, very, very, did I say very enough? Very first Highline bolts to ever, ever be placed. Ever, ever, ever, ever. So if you care about history, which I really do, I really care about the history of Highline because the people that originated it, besides Scott Balcombe, me and him never connected, he was not my flavor at all. But everybody else, oh yeah, dude. All the other originators of Highlining were my friends. So when you went up there, what you did was, is you took the very, very first bolts to ever be placed for Highline and in Yosemite, and you didn't remove them properly, which they didn't need to be removed. And if you had the skills, which you didn't have at the time, you guys posted all these things because I was calling you out. Instead of just owning it, you kept trying to defend something that was undefendable. And then it escalated me, or I will own it, to go to a place that I chose to go to, which was this dude, Ron Ward. You went there and you removed, I have this video. And have you seen the video that I placed? And I'm talking to you. Look at this, this is it. Right in front of these other holes. So point being, the very, very first, most iconic bolts to what you preach to be your life right now. Ron, I have to be honest, I'm not here to break you down. I'm here to be honest, but I'm here also to build you up. I think you've done an amazing amount of work to prove you're very knowledgeable today, and you're at a position to where you really seem to want to be able to take on the hard work of trying to set a pace. Let's say you need something, like set a pace, set a standard. So what you did up there was in no way, shape, or form of any kind of somebody setting a pace or setting a standard. When you come into a national park or a state park and you have bolts, you automatically have to remember that we're not Ortega Falls. Are you familiar with this area? Okay, so we're not in Ortega Falls with baby diapers and graffiti everywhere, bullshit. You've been there, obviously, because you like it. Okay, so you know. You always carry around a whole bunch of trash. Yeah, so okay, so good you know. So that means our behavior, the way we act, automatically has to be different. We have to have some more care. And so you go to a place like that and you see these bolts. And whatever reason you had, even though I know there was a little bit of that, let's just say for argument's sake, you went there at a pure, pure, pure heart. You had no idea who I was. Nobody was. First time, yes. So you come there and there's these three bolts there. And you think that they need to be removed. But you don't remove them all the way. Yes, I'm anal. I can't expect everybody to be up to my standards. You didn't technically chop them. But in my standard, and a standard that needs to be in a majestic area like this, once again, look at this. Oops, look at this, you've seen it. Okay, so remember where we are here. In a place like this, we need to realize that when you remove those bolts and you didn't remove the rest of them, that just coming right in front, not even behind, it's like you made a statement. Whether you even knew it or not, I'm letting you know what you did from everybody here and all different flavors agree. What you did is, is you came and you removed somebody's bolts and you went in front of somebody and you drilled, put new gluons in and you left the holes and you left metal inside there when I showed up. And so when someone comes up, because we're back to the, I don't know you, we're not doing this. I have no idea you were there for the first time. I come up and I say, this right here, whatever this is, this is war. So I do want the world to know. He gave me shit for bolting the Rostrum when I tried hard with the knowledge I had. And because I couldn't defend myself, I didn't have anything. I was just the best knowledge I had. It was the original reason that inspired me to make the bolting lever. And so I researched everything online. And when you did the 12 millimeter quick link that wouldn't go in our bolt, I never over notched again, depth wise. And so I took what you taught in that video, every bolt after that was never, ever over notched depth wise again. The glue issue that you came across where it got all foamy, never use that shit again. We chiseled it off with a flathead screwdriver, cleaned it up a lot, chiseled off the thing. So the 12 millimeter quick link, we care. We just didn't know a lot. We had a reason for everything we did. We just didn't know enough. So I'm looking forward to you showing us more because everything you've shown us, we have taken to heart. One of the things that we can't do in this community, climbing wise or slackline wise, is go up to anybody else's bolts and remove them without doing some sort of research. You guys are amazing people. But at the time I thought you were complete douchebags because the shit that you were doing was unacceptable. So you mentioned you don't like the idea of putting a glue in next to another stud to bury it, which we have tested. So what is your issue with the hiding it under the peak, the old stud? Once again, there's a lot of things that people would argue where's the dead bodies because we're going down with safety. I don't really go down the safety thing because a lot of these shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty bolts, like some of them might even take a fall off. I would take a fall on anything now that I've tested bolts. Yeah, so it's not dead body issues. When are we going to get to the point to where we realize, once again, because I've done it many times, can we all take a look again? Because look, now the sun's changed. Look at that. Does that deserve something special? Dude, this deserves more than what we're giving you, okay? And everything around it deserves more. We need to get control of the vertical world. The vertical world is being neglected. And even though the rostrum is flat, it's the vertical world. And what I'm fighting for is the sustainability for this park, okay? And these areas deserve better. And the standard that we have today is unacceptable. I'm not shocked if there's permits because you need a permit to breathe here. You need a permit to get in the damn park, okay? So I'm not shocked. How do they regulate it? What are the rules? We need to regulate ourselves because they're not interested right now. They really don't want to get in our sandbox. No. So we need to, because I've been doing that and you've been doing that. And I've hoped that I've proved now for all you mother too, that that, sorry, me doing that, that if you want to play, I don't want to play. I want everybody to get along in the sandbox. And so much so that if we play and get along, you can learn how friendly I really am and how loving and what a good, solid friend I really can be. You seem to have stepped up and want to be the guy to lead the pace. Lead it, dude. Just learn your shit the right way and teach it to others in the right way. When you have students, you want your students to look up to you in the right way and be a role model. Tune it up. This needs a little bit of tuning. Tune that shit up and I'll give you everything you need that I have. And I'll step back, dude, and walk away. It's obviously, I'm an old man. It's time for me to step down. I look forward to that. Step up, but step up in the right way because I'm not going to pass the torch and trust and believe I earned the torch. I earned it. Dean's dead. Darren's dead. Who else? I'm the only one else that's here that earned to be able to hold that torch. And I've been holding it. I've done that enough to say, I'm holding the torch, dude, and I'll shut this shit down. If you guys don't want to come and respect and give me a little bit of what I deserve and quit doing this to me, I've been wanting to give the torch away a long time ago to the right people. But I haven't seen the right people that have earned it in the right way. Just swelling my pride here. Today's video is sponsored by Humility. I have not used Humility very often, but the few times I have, I found it to be quite satisfying. And usually everybody around me usually enjoys when I use Humility as well. If you'd like to grab some Humility, all you have to do is push the like button and then you can practice using the product in the comment section below. All right, that took me seven tries. That was great. But on a serious note now, I want good bolts installed in a good way. And that's why I wrote the Bolting Bible. I think Sean wants that too. And it was really awesome that he came, he met, we talked, shook hands and hugged. So if Sean and I can start to work out our differences and work towards a more productive future, even if we don't agree now and not even on every point in the future. But I feel like this is going to move us in the right direction. And hopefully we'll get better bolts as a result of it. Sean and I have talked about doing future videos. Please let us know in the comments below what you want to see, how you want to see those. And if you want to see them. Thanks for watching. Cheers.