Rafa

Two things are going on, and the more interesting one is that the gym is the anomaly, not the crag.

Gyms are deliberately over-protected. They are commercial facilities with insurance, a duty of care to complete beginners, and an interest in nobody ever getting hurt on their floor. Dense clipping also means the rope is never far away, which suits a room full of people learning to lead. That is a design decision about a controlled environment, and it sets an expectation that outdoor climbing was never built to meet.

Outdoors, the person placing the bolts is usually a volunteer. Each bolt and hanger costs real money, the anchor costs more, and the labour is hours of hanging on a rope with a drill. A route with fifty percent more bolts costs fifty percent more and takes fifty percent longer, and nobody is reimbursing anyone.

There is also a practical dimension separate from the ethics, and it may be what actually annoyed the other party.

On a busy route, climbing without a rope means somebody moving through a space where ropes, other climbers and dropped gear are present. That is a genuine hazard to the unroped climber — a swinging rope or a dropped belay device is trivial to a roped climber and not to someone with no margin.

And it works the other way. Other parties may feel unable to climb normally, unwilling to lower, reluctant to shout, because of who is above or below them. That is a real imposition on how they use a shared venue, regardless of anybody's philosophy.

Most of the experienced climbers I know are relaxed about this activity in principle and would rather it happened somewhere without an audience or a queue — for the practical reasons as much as the ethical ones.

One thing worth knowing because it surprises people: susceptibility is not well predicted by fitness.

Very fit people get altitude illness, and unfit people frequently do not. The best available predictor is your own history — how you have responded at altitude before. Since you have not been up, you have no data, which is an argument for a conservative first outing rather than for worry.

There is also a common pattern where fit people fare worse in practice, for a behavioural reason rather than a physiological one: they go faster, higher and further because they can, which is exactly what you should not do on the first day at altitude.