Pennine Lines w/c 11 December 2023
|| Damp and uninspiring || More of the same ||
McNab, Lord's Seat || Climber: Henry Jeffreys
|| Grit Blocs Backstory ||
Barden Fell
The forecast was true to form this week; normal December service is resumed. The designated One Good Day fell midweek so most of us were out of luck there. That could be it now until 2024 - I’m not joking!
December is one of those months where when it’s bad it’s really bad, and when it’s good is really good. There’s not really much middle ground going on. But oddly enough, although I know it’s often absolutely garbage weather-wise, when I look back through my photo library to see what I was doing and where I was going at this time in previous years it always looks like a great month. I’m not much of a record keeper, I don’t write stuff down and have never kept a diary, so for better or worse the hard drive full of images serves as the lazy man’s journal, albeit a very biased one. The photo library has a selective memory, because if it’s not a great day then in all likelihood the camera won’t have made it out of the bag, or even out of the house.
Anyway I noted this week that it’s exactly two years ago since I found myself driving up the M1 at the crack of dawn on one of those icy cold midweek December days on a mission. The deadline for completing Grit Blocs was approaching. I had most of it written and photographed having chipped away at it problem by problem over the preceding few months, but I still had a few gaping holes in the manuscript and gaps in the photo list. One of those in particular was burning a hole in my pocket - Barden Fell.
And She Was || Climber: Ross Cooper
I had been regaled with tales of amazing tors of premium grit dotting the fell, and the brilliant days climbing on them as enjoyed by various friends over the years. I had avoided going up there in summer as I wanted to experience the place in cooler temps and to see it at its best, and I wanted to go with a small team for the ‘crack’ as much as pad/spotter prudence. But being a bit of a longer drive from Sheffield, and a long walk-in, and limited winter daylight, things had never quite lined up before. At some point that December I realised though that it was now or never, there was a book to be written, so I was going to have to just head up there myself.
I’d been warned about the steep and long approach, so I tried to beat the system by fastidiously auditing my climbing bag like an obsessive alpine mountaineer trying to shave off any excess weight I could. For once I made do with just one pair of rockshoes. Kneepad - that can stay at home. Liquid chalk - don’t need that. House keys can stay in the car. Photo of the guidebook pages on my phone instead of carrying the full book. Ditch the big camera and multiple lenses in favour of the lightest one I own with a fixed lens. Smallest carbon fibre tripod. I wasn’t a million miles away from sawing the handles off my brush.
This might seem excessive but the other factor to calculate into the mix here is the thorny issue of carrying a pad up there. The elephant in the room as far as bouldering is concerned; to make it a simple climbing experience we’re saddled with carting huge blocks of foam all over the place. I was particularly saddled that day as I’d just picked up a new and MASSIVE prototype pad from Core. Like a kid at xmas I was adamant I was going to carry this sexy new pad up there rather than slumming it with my old soft knackered one. Nevertheless, I hadn’t really calibrated my expectations for just how heavy it was going to feel when trudging up the zigzagg tracks through the woods to get up to the moor. Even with a pair of trekking poles to spread the load a bit it was an exhausting carry for my untrained legs.
Features in the grit - walk 50m and it changes again || Barden Fell
It was with some disbelief that having finally made my way across the flagstones of the frozen moor to Simon’s Seat, and collapsed onto the aforementioned enormous pad to catch my breath, I soon heard voices coming from the other side of the crag. The voices turned into a friendly bunch out for a day’s bouldering from Leeds, all with pads, and all set on doing basically the same tour of the moor as I was, so in retrospect I’d have been fine turning up with any old pad. Facepalm emoji.
If there’s a fly in the Barden Fell ointment then it’s the presence of gratuitously chipped holds at Simon’s Seat, specifically on the problem Galaxy, which do the venue and rock quality a total disservice. I know historic chipped holds at relatively urban or roadside crags like Wimberry, Ilkley, Almscliff and Caley are fairly common, sadly, but still it’s pretty jarring to come up here and find blatant hold creation like this. These will be decades old now, but they still look just as terrible and saddening as if it was done yesterday.
Luckily, once away from Galaxy the spectre of chipping was soon forgotten about, and a good few hours of climbing was had. It was one of those days etched into my memory not just for the exhausted state I was in arriving back at the car by head torch, or even for the quality of climbing, or the variety of micro-genres of gritstone on display in such small area. More generally because of the viscerally intense experience of being high up on the moors on a cold and windy day, with a solid cobalt blue sky, numb fingers and toes, and the sun gradually turning from the golden to orange to vivid pink and then giving way to the smokey soft light of dusk as the temperature dropped further. You definitely feel alive up there. On these sorts of days it actually seems discourteous to the Barden Fell crags to single out a few problems for inclusion in the book, as I had to. The problems are all solid choices but really they are just signposts to say “this is an incredible place” to be experienced and cherished. And if you can drop on that One Good Day in December, all the better.
Subtle textures of the finest grained grit imaginable || Hen Stones
|| Do Me A Favour ||
As part of my plans for the coming year I have a few ideas jostling for position in the to-do list - I've set up a very short three-question survey just to gauge people's interest in these. So I need you to click here and just take 30-seconds to complete it for me - thanks!
|| Vertebrate Discount ||
A reminder that our friends at Vertebrate have kindly shared with us a 30% discount code in the run up to Christmas. The code is valid until the 21st December, and should work on everything on their site including Grit Blocs, and all the other good books they produce, which is a lot!
The code is:
VPSUBS30
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Recently Through the lens ||
A sneak peak of some of the new large format landscape images which will be making their way onto the site in the new year. All shot on 5x4" Fuji Velvia transparency film, developed and scanned by me here in Sheffield.
|| Fresh Prints ||
I was reminded this week, when developing some film from last May (yes it can take that long) just how special a place the Northumberland coast is, so here's a couple of my favourites from the Print Shop.
