Esoterica...

I think, pretty much definitely, that summer is over. The wind has an autumnal chill, the leaves are yellowing and crisping around the edges, and the air has that earthy, moist smell of decomposition that marks the start of the autumn. It's been quite a summer of climbing, and I've been seeking out quality routes here there and everywhere, chasing the stars like some sort of crazed paparazzo drooling at the mouth: four star classics in Glen Etive; viciously coarse gabbro on Skye; perfect granite cracks and sinuous razor ridges in the alps; lazy roadside granite in Cornwall; and breathtaking sea cliffs on Lundy. 

I need a break. I need some back of the guidebook obscurity. I need to feel the pithy grit of lichen under my fingernails, and the fractured thud of loose rock cratering into the ground below. I need the dry, fluffy feeling between my lips of a mouth too scared to salivate.  I need blast-shattered limestone and green-cloaked gritstone and flakey shale. I want to do routes that no one has climbed before, and never will again. I want whimsical adventure and giggly days out that other people don't understand. And I need it to stop raining so I can go out and find this all, because, as I've found out, you really can have too much of a good thing.

Glen Etive

Wow, Glen Etive is a beautiful place. Of the big Scottish valleys, Glencoe probably has the edge in jaw-dropping, crane your neck, sharp inward breath, rocky mountains, but Glen Etive is right up there in the wide-eyed, looking around, ‘why haven’t I been here before’ stakes. The road, as you follow it along the crystal, tumbling waters of the river Etive, winds and turns, each corner peeling back a layer to reveal more of the valley. Not for Glen Etive the all out flash of Glencoe, here the valley reveals itself with a progressive, teasing strip. As you slip around the back of Buchaille Etive Mor the glen tightens, narrowing its passage way as if driving through a castle entrance.

I’d seen the glen from the summits of the famous Glen Coe peaks, seen the pewter glint of wintry sun reflecting off the loch that curls lazily to the sea. I’d seen it and I thought it was just another valley, just another gap between hills to climb: usual trees, usual loch, usual river. But it isn’t. Along the valley floor, the muted tweed greens are picked out with the vibrant stinging pink of invading rhododendrons. From this angle, the usually iconic Buchaille is a defiantly lumpy mountain, not the shapely rock as seen from the north. And yet, it’s still rather beautiful, still an appealing target. You feel you are seeing the hidden side of the mountain. You are seeing something special beyond the calendar shots. 

The road winds along, unfurling the glen in its oil painting beauty, and there, at what feels like it should be the head of the valley, but is really the sea, starts the loch. On the right, up on the hillside, are the Etive slabs - a sliding stack of granite offering routes of the highest quality with the barest mention of polish or wear and tear. To look back up the valley from the top of the slabs you are blessed with one of the best views in Scotland. 

It was a stuffy, warm day when we climbed there at the start of June and we finished with a skinny dip in the Loch to wash off the grease of the day. 

Epic Weekend

It's early. Or late. One or the other depending on your life outlook. Rusko, the no-prisoners, mohican-ed, gun finger toting, dubstep God is dropping insanely heavy tunes, the sort of tunes which make grown men and women convulse in involuntary orgasmic spasm. I'm one of those grown men, and it's late. Just so you know.

It's early now. Definitely. Too early, that's for sure. In a sleepy haze, I consider hitting 'off' on the alarm clock and grabbing some more zeds before a guilty trip to the cliff in the afternoon to touch rock. The sun has other ideas, and the climbing lobe in my confused and tired brain is in overdrive, motivating leaden limbs into lakes-ward motion, blocking out the reality of 2 hours sleep and concentrating on the important things: bacon sandwich, some rope and the mountains. I sit in the back for the drive, in a daze which starts with sun rise in Leeds and ends in mist fall in Langdale. The ground is wet, the crag is somewhere in the mist, and I am not impressed. Neither is Tom. Balls.

Pavey Ark under a thin veil of cloud.

My body is rebelling against me. I am trying to do all day climbing after all night raving and it is objecting in no uncertain terms. "Easy day today Tom". The sun starts to shine. We climb gradually away from the teams on Jack's Rake, and end up at the top with a picnic of cous cous and licorice.

Belay on Stoat's Crack in the sun

I'm not sure of quite how it happened, but one of us must have suggested going to Bowfell Buttress. It definitely happened. Perhaps I was still drunk.

Slip, slip sliding, down the scree slope, bundling down to the river, across, and then up, steaming up the grassy slope, neglected calfs burning, quads screaming in pain, dissolving in lactic acid. Ground is churned up, the direct route is quick, like, and we arrive a sweaty mess at the Buttress. Bowfell. My tiredness is no more, and other than the ache in my feet from a long night dancing, I feel - almost - human.

The climb wasn't much to write home about. Not much to write to a blog about either, so I won't bother. We did it though, and ended up on top, and subsequently back in the valley, two flogged bodies in tights and rucksacks.

It turns out you don't need to sleep to climb.

Blogs that I like...

I thought that I would make a list of climbing related blogs that are actually good. If climbing blogs were a genre, the genre would be branded 'crap': most climbing related blogs are the pre-pubescent blatherings of super-hyper-uber-keen-youths, describing the tedious minutiae of their climbing related life, like some sort of log. A log on the web, a web log. Surely that's not what blogs are for?

And so, in the spirit of blogging the way it should be (like magazines but free-er and without pages) here is my top list of blogs with words on which are worth reading, and pictures that are worth viewing...

Niall Grimes

The Irish funny man and BMC guidebook writer has a very good, though rarely updated blog. The archives are well worth a scroll through on a rainy day, and his Jonny Dawes story is an awesome bit of storytelling.

Nick Bullock

A proper climber's proper climber. Expect bracing ethics, gripping tales and dry humour...

Anti-social Climber

Only recently brought to my attention: a west-country bloke who can certainly turn a phrase. Possibly the only blog in history to be able to record ordinary day's climbing with verbosity and hilarity combined. 

Life in the Vertical

Despite starting almost every post with the word 'well', and dubious grammar skills, Mark Reeves has got some very interesting stuff on his blog. There are some really nice photos, tales from Wales and interesting insight into life on the Llanberis MRT. There's some dross too, but you don't need to read it.

Misty Murphy

Some pretty funny stuff here by singer/climber Murphy. Worth it 'cos she uses the phrase 'another petite, rad little bitch', which is pretty funny.

Ian Parnell Photography

Consistently good photos from one of the best, together with some entertaining tales make this blog one worth reading.

Andy Kirkpatrick

Quality tales and funnies.

So yeah, that's the sort of thing I like to read. Hope someone finds those links useful.

Shades apart.

If grit was a colour it would be pink. Fact. 

There's no special name for green when you mix some white in. Well, there is - it's called Paradise Green according to Dulux, but I bet you didn't know that. If you're not going to get technical, then green is always green, no matter how much white you put in. All the colours are like that, except for red, which suddenly becomes pink with the addition of some white. 

It's called an anomaly.

Someone, somewhere, obviously thought that 'pale red' wasn't sufficient a monicker, and came up with the word pink. I don't know who that person was, but I do know who first used the term Millstone Grit: it was John Whitehurst, and he wasn't a rock tapper by trade but a mechanical engineer from Cheshire. Like pink, gritstone is something of an oddity, just a shade of sandstone with a special name. Lots of sandstones have their own names, just like Paradise Green, but none of them are quite as ingrained in our language as the ubiquitous 'grit'. It's a climber thing really - the sticky, abrasive brown stuff seems to deserve it's own name, it's definitely worth it.

Red, the much celebrated colour of danger hasn't suffered from pink's separatist tendencies. Probably because it makes you go faster. Poor old sandstone, mother rocktype of the much celebrated gritstone gets a pretty hard time in Britain, unjustifiably so. Frequently dismissed as soft, crumbly rubbish, many climbers forget that there is more to sandstone to the soft, crumbly rubbish down South (I jest...). If you visit the excellent sandstone of Northumberland you'll find something not too dissimilar to grit, to mention nothing of the brilliant sandstone around the world. So next time you're bearing down on some boulder problem at Stanage, or climbing splitters at Millstone, just remember it's all just sandstone. More love for the sand.

Torridonian sandstone is maroon, in case you were wondering.

Deliberately Dangerous?

Bouldering mats are a piece of gear, just as slider nuts and micro cams are. Using any gear changes the nature of the route, and leaving out gear to make it more dangerous and justify a higher grade seems pretty dumb. If I deliberately don't take a crucial number three cam on a route it doesn't increase by a grade, I've just made it more dangerous, and I think the same principle applies in a slightly different way to James Pearson's no mats ethic. 

The problem with ethical stances is that they often conflict with one another. There are many hard climbers doing routes in the mountains who are ardently 'free only'. Aiding is cheating and that's bad. And yet here they are, taking multiple falls onto bolts while redpointing a pitch. As far as I'm concerned if you're putting bolts into mountain crags then you're on pretty thin ground ethically. By all means go for it, (I've had some good times clipping bolts on big mountain routes) but try not to preach to others. 

James Pearson's approach is to use no pads, to draw the line between trad and 'pad trad' right there between the hard ground and one mat. And fair enough, that's an admirable ethic, but if you then go onto spend 10 days on it on a top rope you slightly lose the ethical high-ground.  

The idea that danger=ethical is a strange one which seems (from my experience of climbing around the world) to be a very British thing. Clipping that rusty as fuck peg on quarried grit is fine, but clipping a stainless bolt is somehow sacrosanct? Because you might die if you fell off? That's pretty stupid logic if you think about it. Both are damaging the rock, both make the climbing experience less natural, and yet one is tolerated because it might just kill you. How jolly British. 

In my opinion, a one day ground up ascent of a little padded out route is purer than a multi-day headpoint siege on the same objective. It just makes more sense, it's doing what climbers have always done - starting at the bottom and ending at the top, making it as safe as you feel comfortable with in the mean time. Deliberately taking a more dangerous approach, but then practicing enough to make it safer again seems illogical to me. 

I've kept out of all this grading furore until now, when my dissertaion deadline is 48 hours away and I'm embracing procrastination like never before. James Pearson seems like a genuine and really nice person, and it's a shame that there's been so much debate about such brilliant looking climbs. It should be admitted though, as good a climber as he is, the bottom line is he just can't grade routes very well; there's nothing wrong with that. 

If only he'd padded the hell out the Promise and given it Font 8a, I doubt any fuss would have been kicked up!