Pennine Lines w/c 3 June 2024
|| Breezy, cool || Can't complain ||
Names in the rock || Almscliff, Yorkshire
|| New Guide ||
Almscliff Bouldering
Crazy to think it’s June now and yet still within the last few days The Ace has been flashed. Kids today have no respect for the fact the conditions aren’t good enough for this sort of thing. Absolute scenes! Just goes to show that you can still climb hard on grit in the summer, as long as you’re one of the top climbers of your generation. Alexander Of Macedonia cried salt tears etc etc - you know the rest of this line well enough by now.
Anyway, speaking of year-round grit, one thing I’ve been working on over this spring is the Almscliff bouldering coverage for the Rockfax Digital app. If you’ve got the app then this should be available to download right now. It’s funny to be publishing this and looking back to the second bouldering guide I ever bought, the Alan Cameron-Duff Rockfax guide. This was a surprisingly comprehensive and detailed guide for its time, and some of that guide’s DNA will live on in the new Rockfax Yorkshire content, so it feels good to bring this one full circle.
I was reminded of my student days when we ended up driving to Almscliff and Brimham a lot from Durham, as it was widely held (but false) wisdom that they were the closest decent crags. It just required you to ignore the existence of Slipstones, Goldsborough, every crag in Northumberland etc etc. But I suppose that was when you were still supposed to be doing routes, you weren’t supposed to be bouldering because that wasn’t proper climbing. But still, drive to Almscliff we did - that’s a fairly wide event-horizon for a venue often considered the quintessential Yorkshire local's crag.
One thing which became apparent when working on this is that there’s a bewildering array of source material to parse when taking on a project like this, and not all of it is in agreement. The ACD guide, the late 2000s Total Climbing guide, the YMC guide of 2012, archived YorkshireGrit.com content, word-of-mouth beta from locals, plus hundreds of photos and video published online in recent years, and it all paints a slightly different picture of certain problems, and then that’s before you start raking through all the user-generated data on UKC (of which there is a lot, for this crag especially), some of which is not necessarily of the highest quality. And then consider that on the UKC/Rockfax app platform a route or problem can only exist in one place at a time, so a line has to be drawn somewhere between certain problems/routes as to whether they best fit in the bouldering coverage, or the routes coverage - usual “you can’t please everyone” caveats apply.
So with this in mind go easy on us if you spot any mistakes, or stuff you don’t agree with. The beauty of the app system is things can be tweaked and corrected and updated rather than being baked in for a 2000-copy print run like guides of old, so you can report mistakes by the usual means. And do me a favour; if you go to a crag and climb some minor variation, climbing a crack feet-first or doing an easy problem footless don’t then go and create a ‘new’ problem on the UKC database just so you can log it, or I will come and hunt you down with rabid dogs. That is all.
DMZ, Almscliff || Climber: John Coefield
Speaking of the ill-fated and ahead-of-its-time YorkshireGrit.com, one of my fondest Almscliff memories dates back to 2015. I was up in Leeds for a work course, based in Headingley. Undoubtedly this was some unmissable CPD opportunity at the time, petrol money paid for, but really I was just hoping to knock off early and get to a crag tout suite. However, it was February so time was against me. A stolen hour was the best I could hope for. I fidgeted uneasily on my conference-centre chair (you know the ones) every time the speaker asked the room if anyone had any questions, lest the session drag on and delay departure. I suspect the close of the event will have looked hilarious to my co-attendees when the customary line “well that’s everything folks; if anyone has any further questions or would like to do some networking we’ll be here for the next hour, til 5pm” was delivered to the ignominious sound of a firedoor slamming shut and my car screeching out of the carpark.
I pulled up at the ‘Cliff just as the orange light of the winter afternoon was washing over the crag. Fuelled only on the nutritionally questionable beige buffet of sausage rolls, samosas and custard creams of four hours previous I set about a hasty warmup on the classics at Low Man in the time-honoured fashion, then made for Demon Wall Roof as the amber sunlight faded into a withering pink hue. Fingertips were barely warm but conditions were off the scale. As I tried to pump more blood into my arms a lone figure approached from around the corner, with the unmistakable gait of a local who knew the terrain well. Perfunctory nods were exchanged, and in between my abortive attempts on whatever it was I was trying Local Guy pulled on and summarily despatched both the long and short versions of Exorcist with apparently remarkable ease, climbed absolutely perfectly with a precision and fluidity that left a lasting impression. If you’ve ever been in Font and experienced an anonymous Bleausard turning up and casually climbing something desperate-looking while you thrash around like a punter, well this was basically that, except he had a Pod mat and a bar towel instead of a pof rag and one of those weird French triple-fold pads, and these were 8as not some gnarly red problems. I didn’t even have chance to grab a photo, just a quick “good effort mate” had to do, and with that Local Guy was off from whence he came, leaving me to puzzle why I didn’t have the hip flexibility to rock over properly in the fading dusk light. I drove home not thinking about the content of the training course, but about just how well Local Guy had climbed those problems.
Of course Local Guy wasn’t just some anonymous apparition; I recognised him as Jon Pearson, forward-thinking founder of YorkshireGrit.com. That chance meeting would be the only time I would ever bump into Jon. I was sad to learn of his passing away a few years later, but just glad I saw him climb, and climb so brilliantly, that once. As something of a legendary figure in the burgeoning noughties online bouldering community (and is WAS a community) Jon’s work on YorkshireGrit.com contributed massively to the Yorkshire scene at the time and laid the foundations for all the various guides that followed, this new Rockfax App guide included. I hope we’ve done it justice - thanks for all the inspiration Jon.
|| Big Depot Fair ||
Don't forget the Big Depot event in a couple of weeks. Head down and check it out, it'll be raining anyway so why not? Workshop spaces, including my photography ones, are filling up fast I hear so don't sleep on this one.
|| Supported By ||
|| Recently Through the lens ||
Trying to avoid the greenery and stay out of the bracken at Burbage - the cottongrass is looking great at the minute,
|| Fresh Prints ||
Looking back to decidedly cooler weather this winter here are two prints brand new from the Print Shop. Still plenty of time to get prints ordered and have 'em arrive for Father's Day.
