MgO2

Almscliff was my first experience of the fabled grit. I may have been from down South, and therefore dead soft, but its reputation had not escaped me, nor had that of the now familiar ‘cliff. Steep, hard and fierce was what I’d been told, and I believed it. It was, I assumed, one of those crags which gives a little tingle in the base of your spine: half excitement, half paralysing terror. The reality was somewhat underwhelming - even the dreaded Almscliff VS felt, well, VS. The quality, on the other hand, spoke for itself: behind the polish were superb climbs. I was converted.

My first trip to Almscliff was also pretty much the first time I saw real, proper boulderers in the wild. I used to boulder a lot in Somerset, and obviously saw others doing the same, but it was only when I moved to Yorkshire that I encountered the bona-fide, self confessed full time boulderers, with their buckets and beanies and one armed pull-ups. 

The chalk caked holds of Demon Wall stood out a mile off; the white-washed splodges looking like the resulting clash of a boulderer with a paintball gun and the problem which spat him off just one too many times…

I watched as a public spirited boulderer cleaned the chalk off: scrubbing hard with a washing up brush, he removed a significant portion of the crap from the holds. Impressed, and hoping for a demonstration of this iconic problem, I continued to watch as he dipped the same brush into a bag of chalk and preceded to smother holds with it, brushing hard and working chalk well into the rock. Strange. 

Another time, same crag. Wandering about climbing problems in sporadic bursts, I walk past the roof. “D’ya wanna go?”  “Alright”. I climbed across the easy start section, out to the lip and the painfully small crimps, almost hanging them, I could move no further. But my inability to hang small holds is by the by. What I’m getting at is the slippery chalky covering on grit, which normally has pretty amazing friction. Even the starting hold, which is enormous, gets brushed and recoated on a regular basis. Quite why people do this is beyond me: chalk is not a miraculous grip powder. It does not increase the friction coefficient between rock and hands in itself. It dries moisture from the hands, which increases friction. Excess chalk, or chalk on the rock does nothing of benefit, indeed quite the opposite. Tick marks do have their uses: blind and slappy holds, not uber jugs right in front of your face at the sitting start.

Chalk may wash off rock in our frequent rain, but not when it’s under a roof, and so in a combination of easter time essay-writing boredom and public spirited self affirmation I caught the train to give those holds the cleaning of their life. It turns out that two litres of water is not sufficient to clean all the holds properly, but I managed to get the worst off the really chalky holds under the roof. I’ll be back for the rest of the crag...

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.