Pennine Lines w/c 7 August 2023
|| Drier and warmer || Summer’s tentative return ||
Fallen Slab Lip || Climber: John Coefield
|| Focus On... ||
Extinction
Between the rain showers and longer periods of rain there’s actually been some decent gritstone evening conditions to be had over the last week or so, and I’ve been making use of that in preparation for our family holiday in Fontainebleau. There’s two things I always try and do before a Font trip regardless of the time of year; get some time on grit, and have a Wave session at the Foundry. Whether or not this actually helps or not remains to be seen, but it’s been part of my pre-trip ritual for years and I’m not changing it now. This week in passing we returned to Fallen Slab Lip at Burbage, a problem which for me has turned into something of a conundrum of late, in that what everyone climbs and green-ticks on Instagram now isn’t the problem.
Basically Fallen Slab Lip is a traditional problem, done regularly before any of the modern-era guide or apps existed, before anyone had pads, and before it had a name. The meat of the problem, the original thing, starts by hanging the big hold/ledge on the nose then hand traverses the lip up rightwards through a tricky sequence, a few really good sloper moves, until reaching an obvious good hold where you sort of run out of rock and are forced to roll over and top out. On its own this is probably a tricky font 6c+. Later someone (possibly Mike Adams?) then added a hard sit start. This starts without the back arête, on a very poor left hand sloper and a poor thin right hand edge or undercut and does a big and hard move to gain the start of the original line. Given 7b in the guides, potentially undergraded and out of character with the rest of the line, this has understandably never been popular (although it’s still worth doing).
As a more balanced alternative one of the guidebooks years ago included a cop-out sit start version starting with left hand on the back arête, graded 7a and named Fallen Slab Lip. The same back arête used at the start is in essence the ‘top’ later on and hence isn’t used on the original line except to reluctantly top out. It’s an understandable compromise to create a half-decent sit start at the magic 7a grade but it does muddy the logic waters a little regarding the back arete/top, as we shall see. Over the years since then, Fallen Slab Lip 7a has metastasised into a problem where people handrail up the back arête for the entire way, or at the most leave it for one move in the middle then immediately pull back to the top. This isn’t necessarily that easy, although it’s markedly easier than what was originally written up as Fallen Slab Lip at 7a, and crucially nowhere near as good as it misses out the best moves. It’s ended up being just a bit of ungainly awkward sloper mauling to turn the lip. It is however extremely popular, as the chalk-bleached streak down the lower arete is testament to. If you search online and watch a few videos you’ll not be able to find one showing the actual original classic lip, the best part, being climbed at all - or at least I couldn’t.
It seems a little weird that in the current information-rich world, where the documentation cup runneth over, we’re seeing relatively well travelled problems slip into obscurity. At some of busiest crags in the country, the most well-trodden, it should not be possible. You could well argue that some little 6-move sloping lip at Burbage isn’t important, but I would argue it’s something of a test case, illustrative of some of the factors that increasingly influence documentation of climbing.
Eyeing up the crux move || Climber: John Coefield
Firstly, and I think this is probably the main factor, is the phenomena of the proliferation of video beta. This seems now to trump guidebook descriptions; videos trump even online topos or write-ups of problems, and in the case of Fallen Slab Lip it even trumps the information contained in name of the problem itself (‘Lip’ should be a clue as to what feature it climbs). In fact for this problem on UKC, a curated platform, there’s currently three videos and none of them show where the problem actually traditionally goes.
This isn’t limited to climbing either. Clearly the algorithm overlords have decided videos have better engagement for advertising so now all social media has pushed towards video clips. Even if you search for, say, an article or blog post about any given niche interest area you’re as likely to find a video as you are a written article. By human nature we look to cues from other people to know what’s acceptable, and I think for this reason video tends to trump other formats of info.
If there’s a problem with this democratisation of content generation it’s that outside of platforms with any manual curation at all you’ve no idea if what you’re seeing has any value. In fact is there’s so much information out there now that nobody can reasonably be expected to comb through it all for every problem or route you might want to try. So, we’re left to the mercy of Google, or rather we’re leaving curation of all aspects of climbing now to Google’s SEO algorithms. Google doesn’t know whether a particular video shows the wrong beta or the wrong problem, it’ll just serve up a few results deemed to already the most popular. So even if you have uploaded a video of a problem being done the correct way it’ll come to nothing if it’s not on the first page of the google results. Human nature dictates that we tend to home in on the easiest option too. So information that’s wrong is more likely to stick if it offers an easier option than a harder one. So we end up with situations where, say, one of the top three videos on the first page of Google results shows a well-known sponsored climber doing a sit-start problem from standing and “taking the tick” then despite all other information contradicting that - and just common sense/logic invalidating the ascent - it still carries a lot of weight.
Another issue Fallen Slab Lip illustrates is the sheer enormity of the task of documentation which climbing today demands. There’s just more stuff recorded and being recorded than ever before, by more people, at more crags, each one a record in a database, nominally of the same value, each one potentially competing for space on an app or in a printed guidebook. Having had a bit of recent experience assisting guide production I can’t emphasise enough just how bewildering the depth of info guide writers have to wade through in some instances. Value judgements are made all the time - what is a ‘classic’ local eliminate line and what is a piece of nonsense someone random has just added to the database?
The final factor to wrestle with is the stigma around eliminates. This is doubly weird in that it’s totally context specific too. So whereas someone might be adamant that you’ve got to do the end of Powerband using a specific eliminate sequence and that’s OK, but to suggest that climbing a rising traverse on grit without just immediately grabbing the top at the first opportunity is complete insanity. Climbers are a weird bunch at times.
All too often the eliminate card is played to diminish a problem, often to our own detriment. I think this is something we really need to get over, because sometimes making a problem an eliminate actually opens up a great feature, or some worthwhile climbing that you’d never experience if you only ever climb up anything anything-goes style. We don’t necessarily need to document every conceivable eliminate variation on every problem, but certain features actually benefit from it - like ones where you climb an arete on one side, avoiding some jug or other on the opposite side out of sight.
On Fallen Slab Lip as we’ve seen if you just employ line-of-least-resistance logic then the problem doesn’t climb the lip at all. If you’re sit starting using the back arete then where’s the logic in then leaving that back arete half way up? Or arguably the problem doesn’t even exist - why climb the steep side of that arete at all? Why climb from sitting? And I think we also need to get real and understand that the North of England isn’t like being in the Buttermilks or Yosemite, where huge boulders sit there with no easy way up, and everything is fair game. We live in an intensively populated and well developed area and quite often making a rule or eliminate is just a prudent way of making the best out of the rock we have.
So how do we make sure little local classics like this don’t get forgotten? Or does it matter at all? At the end of the day there’s nothing stopping me or anyone else climbing this thing the original way, as indeed some of us still do - and indeed that’s one of the great things about climbing. If you take away chasing ticks and grades you can climb whatever takes your fancy.
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Crag Cleanup ||
Outside's Crag Clean-Up day is next weekend, 12th August. You can pretty much guarantee the weather will be rubbish for climbing (pun intended) so what have you got to lose?
|| Recently Through the lens ||
Raven Tor nonsense
|| Fresh Prints ||
The nights are already drawing in and winter is just around the corner, like it or not! Here's a couple of winter shots from Stanage just added to the Print Shop.
