Pennine Lines w/c 7 October 2024
|| Drying off slowly || Still a way to go ||
Crafnant Arete RH || Climber: Rhys Crabtree
|| Focus On... ||
Tying Up Loose Ends
They say things come in threes, which is of course nonsense. However, I would probably have made sure I enjoyed having ‘only’ a split-tip to worry about in Wales this weekend had I known I had a dropknee injury lurking around the corner a few days later, AND a broken washing machine waiting for me at home. Serves me right for leaving the Peak I suppose. Never again. Anyway, this email is coming together while I ring round various white-goods repair places and juggle a basket full of half-washed sopping wet clothes, so it’s a brief one this week.
Anyone ever noticed that when you take a trip away you still end up homing in on the most grit-like problems wherever you go? Crafnant Arete is an obvious example which wouldn’t be out of place at any gritstone crag, and rewards the old staying-composed-up-high grit mindset. The entire Crafnant boulder jumble is one of those venues with quite a few of these really. Topographically the place is a sort of uber-treacherous huge talus field, but once on the rock the coarse texture and rounded shapes take you right back to the grit. It’s very much like a more inconveniently located Welsh cousin to Carrock Fell in that regard, but instead of being roadside Crafnant is right at the end of a very long and narrow single track road to the head of the valley. If anything there’s actually less climbing there than you might expect at first, but what there is is very good, and it has to be said there’s some VERY striking lines hanging above the boulders on the crag above.
Question Mark Direct || Climber: Rob Smith
Unfinished business is a concept we often bandy around in climbing, almost always meaning there’s something you’ve tried but not completed. But sometimes unfinished business is more general than that, like when circumstances conspire to rob you of a chance to really give a crag a fair crack of the whip. I had only visited Crafnant once before, in the immediate pre-covid days of late Feb 2020, when you could walk right into other people’s personal space and breathe in their exhaled air with gay abandon. Good times. Anyway, a landslide had closed the road to Crafnant, forcing a very long approach walk from Capel Curig, to be rewarded with maybe and hour and a half of good climbing before it snowed and we had to make the long wet trudge back to the car. And then the world changed overnight and a return visit suddenly seemed a very distant prospect. So it was good this weekend to have the full run of the place, to explore a bit, find a few problems you’d never heard of, put a face to a few names in the guide, and properly get to know the place, all in midge-free conditions, sun and shade, and everything dry. What I would call a proper day’s bouldering. More of these please.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
Two man-made icons of the landscape in their respective areas - Hope Valley and The Great Orme in Llandudno.
|| Fresh Prints ||
We're getting into autumn spirit now that the leaves are turning, in the Print Shop.
