"The first two days involved about 6,000 vertical feet of climbing, 60 meters of rope at a time."
Can someone explain to me, who is nytimes writing this article for, exactly? Only Brits mix units like this, but this is an American publication - so what gives? Why not just stick to meters or feet throughout and be consistent?
This is common in the American climbing community, rope lengths are always in meters but people often use feet for wall/mountain heights.
60m is a standard category of rope, so it would be confusing (for climbers at least) to call it 196ft or 200ft rope.
It's also common to talk about 4000-footers in New Hampshire and 13ers in Colorado, so I guess that's why (some) people stick to feet for mountain heights.
I agree it doesn't make sense because sometimes you have to convert in your head to see if your rope is long enough, but it's just the custom here for whatever reason.
More accurately: probably referring to the length of their rope (and thus max pitch lengths). With alpine climbing, the actual pitch length can be all over the place due to a variety of reasons.
The whole “feet” thing made it impossible to get any sort of scale/height thing right in my head, but it is hilarious that they mix the metric system into their crazy mess. I’m not sure the Brits would’ve done it though, I like climbing articles and I can’t recall ever being this height confused before.
I’m probably some sort of challenged but I really can’t internalise if 5000 feet is impressive or not. Like it could be 20 meters or it could be a 1000. Of course it’s fair that an American article uses their various “freedom” scales and I tend to just “give up” and ignore the numbers I don’t understand. The article itself does enough to impress the magnitude of these climbers achievement without the numbers.
Not necessarily proud, but the only thing that plays on my mind when I have to deal with feet (and inches since those are called “thumbs” in my country) is that guy in Braveheart going “some men are longer than others”.
Can someone explain to me, who is nytimes writing this article for, exactly? Only Brits mix units like this, but this is an American publication - so what gives? Why not just stick to meters or feet throughout and be consistent?