Pennine Lines w/c 21 august 2023
|| Mild and mixed || Still nice in Font ||
Orange circuit || La Ségognole
|| Focus On... ||
Stuff
I’m heading back to the UK in a couple of days so this is the last email coming at you from in-situ in the Forest. Always mixed feelings when you reach the last few days of any trip, as invariably you’d rather stay another week….but as always it will be nice to return to proper Sheffield tap water (niche content here!). But before we return to kettles devoid of limescale it’s also been great while we’ve been in Font to strip some of the unwanted junk out of climbing a little too.
Some context on this; my route into climbing was via walking and scrambling, and I still love trad climbing and always will. The rewards are great but MY GOD there’s a lot of faffing about involved. And especially a lot of faffing around when you’re new to the game. All the gear, the carrying it all in, the racking up, the waiting for your mate to set up a belay. The being marooned on a ledge before a run-out psyching out, internally debating whether or not to call for a toprope. The waiting while your mate gets stuck on a ledge psyching out. The standing around, the getting cold. The belaying. The utter horror of being tied on to your mate, responsible for his or her safety, while being eaten alive by midges from which your ten-foot diameter degree of freedom that belaying permits is not sufficient to escape. The getting cold at the top while your mate hangs on the rope trying to get that brand new nut out. The waiting for the previous party to finish faffing around on the classic route before you can even begin your own episode of faffing around.
With this in mind it was something of a breath of fresh air to discover bouldering, and getting good enough at climbing to do it properly. Maybe I’ve got too short an attention span but the fact you could go out for a couple of hours and get dozens of pieces of climbing done was a revelation. And you could chat with your mates while you did it. You could all be climbing at once. Nobody was stood getting cold or bored or midge bitten. The problem-solving of placing gear was replaced with the problem solving of working out harder moves - and continuous climbing with no stopping, no getting pumped. And you didn’t need a huge sack of metalware and a pair of ropes and helmets. Just your shoes, chalk bag, and old toothbrush and one of those new bouldering pads, a metre square of two-inch thick foam with “Pod” or “S7” screen printed on it. For this reason bouldering was brilliant.
Blue 37 || Roche aux Sabots
Then, at some point ‘stuff’ started to appear in our bags and in the boots of our cars. Useful stuff. You know the things; it’s happened to you too. A nicer brush. A second pair of tighter shoes. A chalk bucket. A brush-on-a-stick. A roll of fingertape. A roll of tape of a different width. A third pair of shoes that are really painful but are better at heelhooking. A bigger bouldering pad. A smaller bouldering pad that fits inside the bigger one. A sandpaper block. A sling and an old quickdraw to attach your original pad to the new big one with the smaller one inside it. A bottle of liquid chalk. A couple more brushes. A kneepad. A lamp and a headtorch. Some superglue and a skincare kit. A second chalk bag with some more expensive chalk in it. A different brand of liquid chalk. A bigger crag bag to carry this stuff in. A mini tripod for your phone. A powerbank. A crack glove. Another kneepad of a different type. A selection of therabands. A skin moisturising spray. A longer brush-stick. A USB handwarmer. A fingerboard. A big 18v fan. A drill battery to power the fan. A tarpaulin. A short static line and a few slings. A harness and a grigri. An extendable ladder. The list goes on (and I’m convinced if revisited in ten years time this list will look naively short).
‘Stuff’ - each item in of itself relatively benign; each one to solve a problem, to make things easier. To enhance performance. But in another way each one contributes to creating a problem, to changing the experience, diluting it, getting in the way of what’s good about bouldering in the first place - the simplicity. And suddenly five boulderers plus all their gear and pads would no longer fit into a Nissan Micra, and I’m carrying five times the amount of clobber out with me than I ever did when going trad climbing. All the ‘stuff’ opened a lot of doors, but it closed a few that we didn’t notice at the time.
Yellow circuit || Climber: Sam Parry
Sometimes less is more, so maybe that’s why circuiting around in Font in warm weather is such a welcome break from business-as-usual bouldering at home. For a start I’ve found that at the rate you move around an easy circuit a full size bouldering pad is too big; all the lugging it around kills the fun. So a little starter pad or half-pad is ideal. It’s warm so there’s no point pushing the boat out on anything you’re that likely to fall off heavily anyway. If the landings are good and the problems aren’t too high it’s all you need. Or to be honest in Font half the time maybe just an old towel to wipe the sand off your shoes with is enough. I’ve been using a mucky off-white towel I found at Rocher du Potala. 100% Cotton, Norwegian label, hot iron, do not bleach.
So with this upcycled towel and some comfy rock shoes bouldering is once again about the simplicity. Getting rid of the other ‘stuff’ for a while, a deep cleanse, much needed. Just the movement over rock, reconnecting with bouldering the way it should be; magic.
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Fresh Prints ||
A couple of the most Fontainebleau-esque gritstone problems, both from Doll Tor, in the Print Shop.
