I was on Devil's Backbone yesterday, and I noticed a series of three bolts where the trail traverses a steep south-facing talus slope. By "bolts," I mean the kind of hardware you see on sport climbing routes, with hangers to clip a carabiner into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_%28climbing%29 I can't remember if I've seen them there before. Haven't been on that trail since last October.
Does anyone know anything about who put them there or why? Anyone seen anyone actually use them?
Two of the three were placed in fairly small boulders, like maybe the size of a microwave oven or two microwave ovens. Also, one of the bolts wasn't done correctly -- they didn't get it all the way in.
I can't quite imagine how bolting this traverse in this way could be a useful thing to do. Maybe in winter or early spring you could have patches of snow on the trail, and the conditions could be such that the snow was slushy, and crampons wouldn't work. I would just think that the solution then would be to take a different route, like the ski hut trail or Register Ridge. If the intention was to put in a fixed line, then that seems like a Darwin Award maneuver, since in that configuration the nearly 180-degree angle between the strands would result in massive leverage, almost certainly resulting in those small blocks popping out if someone weighted the rope.
This smells like one of those cases where random people come to the Baldy area and do unwise things to modify the landscape, such as the people who marked the ski hut trail and Icehouse Canyon trail with spray paint on rocks. Or maybe there's a purpose for these bolts that I just don't understand. Maybe they're useful for search and rescue operations in that area? E.g., if someone was hurt or stranded on the slope down below the trail, I can imagine belaying off of one of those things -- if there was no other option.
