Pennine Lines w/c 11 November 2024
|| Cooler, and clearer || That's more like it ||
Mugstizo || Dumbarton
|| Focus On... ||
Eliminates
I feel like I’ve hardly been in the Peak or touched gritstone at all these last two weeks, although given the almost-blanket grey clag and mild temps we’ve been enduring I’ve arguably not missed very much. Other than one visit to Rubicon I’ve instead had to scrape by with sessions at Bradley (honorary limestone), Carrock Fell (honorary gritstone), The Bowderstone (honorary board) and Dumbarton (honorary Bowderstone). This level of travel is not my usual forte, so now I’m looking forward to not having to drive for more than half an hour until 2025.
One thing I’ve been pondering whilst eating up the motorway miles is the sometimes rather uncomfortable status which eliminate problems occupy in British climbing. This has been brought into focus during visits to some of these iconic old-school venues like The Bowderstone and Dumbarton, not to mention Peak Limestone. Talking to people at various crags it’s clear everyone has a different take on eliminates, ranging from leaning very heavily into them, to completely denouncing them. Climbing is supposed to be about taking the line of least resistance to the top, anything else is just stupid, right? While I recognise this is a topic which warrants a more detailed dive than I will offer up here today, I’ll offer up a few points for consideration.
Firstly, what even counts as an eliminate?
Well I come here bearing the bad news that virtually everything we climb on boulders or crags or outcrops is in some way eliminate, in the sense that it is almost never the easiest way to the top of the boulder/crag; there is almost always a path around the back. This is just the nature of the game - we look for a combination of aesthetics and difficulty. The existence of this truth doesn’t devalue what we do, but it does mean eliminate is a spectrum, a sliding scale. If you want to visualise this, then let's imagine a scale with the theoretical boulder/pinnacle with only one way up or down at the 0 end, and the named-holds-in-specified-order-no-heels type of Stoney Middleton eliminate at the other end at 10 on the scale. So the reality is that most nominally non-eliminate stuff we climb is probably actually 2-5 on that scale - higher than you'd like to admit - and stuff at 6-10 is still all well and good if we know what what we’re signing up for.
Minus Ten Wall || Stoney Middleton
In fact the extreme end of the eliminate scale is usually the least controversial - you can either take it or leave it. Problems, if correctly described, should be clearly eliminate in nature. Minus Ten, Pinches Wall, the Egg Face at Almscliff, etc etc. We are seeing some rather weird knock-on effects of the prevailing logbook culture in this area though. Firstly the recording of such eliminates has, at certain venues, exploded to the point where no sane guidebook writer can hope to tackle it any more, all hopes of quality curation out of the window. So stuff like that just gets ignored entirely with a “many eliminates are possible” footnote. Similarly since some people today won’t climb anything if it’s not tickable or loggable somewhere and hence are forever creating a public-facing online record of any random variation or different sequence on even established problems, we end up with some problems looking like they’re eliminate, when really they’re not. You might think this isn’t really an issue - online space is free so let folk claim whatever they want, the more the merrier? Fine, but at some point a guidebook writer is going to have to wade through piles of dross, and the more dross there is, the more the good stuff will get missed, overlooked or mistaken for something else. Less is sometimes more.
Another weird one we see a lot, usually around the half-way point on the eliminate scale, is the eliminate sequence. Climb the thing, but only climb it in this particular way…for whatever reason. Again, if this is made clear from the outset then it’s easy enough to ignore if you’re not into it (as most of us aren’t) or the problem or sequence isn’t of sufficient historical value for this to have self-perpetuated (for example where holds have changed, rending a classic less viable). But the issues often arise when, perhaps, an eliminate problem wasn’t initially described as such, or where the eliminate nature seems so obvious and implicit to the first ascensionist that it never occurred to them to even describe it in those terms….until someone finds a ‘better’ (i.e. easier) sequence. In fairness though, the easiest sequence isn’t always the one with the best moves. The Green Traverse at Stanage is a shining example of this. Draping across with heel hooks whilst almost lying on top of the boulder is the easiest (and popular) way, but dropping down onto the rail, no heels, offers objectively superior moves. But, you know, tickers gotta tick.
A relatively common variation on this theme is seen on problems that were never conceived by the first ascentionist as eliminates, but have over the years metastasised into eliminates in order to preserve the grade, often by the application of retcon rules, often from other people. Oddly much more prevalent if we’re talking about the magic 7c+/8a boundary than any other - funny that? A great example of this is Tsunami at Rubicon, but there are others out there. Usually the longevity of the rules ends up being dictated by the quality of the moves, the classic status of the problem, or simply the status of the first ascentionist at the time, and in the long term sanity usually prevails eventually.
The lower values on the eliminate scale are often represented by the ‘avoid an adjacent feature’ genre - wall next to an arête being the most commonly found example. But there are others - wall next to a crack, or prow next to a groove, jutting roof next to a gully. Or sometimes even where an arête exists but it is easier to climb the wall next to it, but more aesthetic to stay on the arête - these ones do exist and show that following aesthetics only doesn’t always lead to the most logical solution.
Eliminates of this type aught to be self-policing, in that avoiding said adjacent feature should just be obvious if the problem is to exist at all, leaving the climber only to make the judgement on whether or not they think the climbing is any good or if it’s too close to the feature to climb well. However, the waters are often muddied by the relatively recent appearance of the contrived toehooking-a-distant-arête genre, so prevalent in indoor setting, meaning you do see some rather odd stuff going on outside….. if modern climbing has taught us anything it’s that nothing goes without saying anymore (see the depressing spectacle of folk climbing damp grit/sandstone, for example).
Tsunami || Rubicon
We’ll all be familiar with the idea that the biggest diss you can serve up on someone’s problem they’ve proudly reported is to write it off a merely an eliminate - a crime even worse than being ‘soft’. However, as with a lot of situations in climbing (and, indeed, life) expectation management is key. If someone has reported a new problem and made it clear that it’s an eliminate, then at least we’re all on the same page. You can make a value judgement on it, or you can go and try it; the choice is yours, fine. But for all the negativity surrounding eliminates, whether they are declared or not, and whether they are over-recorded or not, it’s easy to overlook the positive aspects to them. An obvious benefit is of making best use of the rock, or in lending logic to climbing a certain feature or collection of moves which might not otherwise be deemed worthy of attention.
But beyond that still there remains one of the greatest overlooked parts of bouldering (and bouldering specifically, as opposed to route climbing); that of the creative element. Playing around, making stuff up, the spontaneity and fun that aught to be at the heart of why we go bouldering. Remember, bouldering is (or rather was) supposed to be the ‘simple’ type of climbing; unencumbered by ropes and gear and bolts and fixed lines of passage. Sometimes it feels that the need to log and tick has somehow dulled our creativity because we get wrapped up in the consumerism of acquiring the tick or the Instagram post or the social media “so strong dude” validation. At one point you’d still find this skill practised indoors because most bouldering walls were cramped and densely packed with holds, so once you’d done the set problems you could sit there and make your own problems up. But this is scarcely required now since luxuriously spacious walls offering colour-coded problems up sparsely populated plywood panels are now the norm, where the hold density is barely enough to make up your own lines. Maybe the resurgence of the old-school-style densely packed Spray walls will reignite that skillset, if we can stay off the accompanying apps long enough to flex the imagination a little.
|| 2025 Calendar ||
OK you've seen the Instagram posts, you've read these emails enough times to know about the 2025 Peak Landscapes Calendar, shot entirely on 5x4" large format film, right? You don't need me to tell you that the ordering window closes on midnight this Friday the 16th, and that after this point you've missed your chance to grab one? You know this already, so I don't need to remind you. As you were, nothing to see here.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
A bit of everything from recent travels....
|| Fresh Prints ||
Here's a couple of very different images from the Yarncliffe / Padley neck of the woods (pun intended) in the Print Shop.
