|| Mild and mixed || Fleeting dry rock prospects ||

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Caley

There’s a few places out there where you’d just be happy to have one good day there. One stellar day, feeling confident, strong, good skin, mint conditions, and just have a great day. Not being intimidated by things, no self doubt, not held back by expectations. I’m not talking about a fantasy sort of thing either, not like saying you’d want to rock up to a crag and solo all the 9a sport routes in wellies way above your normal level. More like a sort of unlikely but not impossible day. Things at the upper end of your level or comfort zone, both in difficulty and in height and stature, where on paper they’re doable - well given the right circumstances you could do them, on the right day they could feel fine. If you were in the right place at the right time, if a few things lined up, it could happen. On any given day it could happen. That sort of good day, and that would be enough. There’s a few places in my mind like this. Cuvier Rempart is my obvious one. The other is Caley. One genuinely good day at Caley would do me for life, but it’s never happened.

“Simply brilliant. A stellar venue that deserves all the superlatives you can throw at it, and then some. It is a crag of immaculate quality, offering a plethora of classic boulder problems and magnificent routes. Both newcomer and connoisseur will enjoy arguably the finest bouldering circuit in the UK.”

— YMC Yorkshire Gritstone Vol.1

But unfortunately, in its current state, it isn’t one of the finest bouldering circuits in the UK. That guide description of almost ten years ago reads as woefully out of date now. It’s probably not even the finest in Wharfedale any more, and I’ll explain why.

You know when you’re a kid and every now and again you meet a family friend or a relative you only see every few years and there’s that “oooh haven’t you grown” conversation? As a kid you just shrug, yes I assume I’ve grown. Well when I visit Caley now, regularly but not frequently, I adopt the role of that distant uncle, but it’s not “oooh haven’t you grown”, it’s more like “oooh haven’t you shrunk”.

The Rocking Groove || Climber: John Coefield

Basically there’s less and less good climbing to do at Caley every time I visit now. Not because it isn’t there, but because it’s increasingly green, lichened and overgrown. Carpets of moss are appearing on the tops of problems, and on slabby rock. Walls which were once clean or just needed a quick brush now fluoresce with bright orange lichen. Check the 2014 YMC guidebook photo - even ten years ago the famed Bob’s Bastard mantle looks pretty clean in that image. If you go tomorrow you could probably graze cattle on there, there’s so much vegetation. And this is mirrored all over the crag. The scope for that fabled “finest bouldering circuit” is remarkably limited now. Now I’m not one to argue with nature, but when you’re saddled with decades of baggage and expectations baked into grit climbing culture it’s hard to not be disappointed to see this once richly furnished crag of circuit classics reduced to half a dozen destination problems, islands of chalk in a ocean of green.

So here’s my theory; there was a period when lowland outcrop climbing and bouldering came into it’s own, the era that did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of establishing a lot of crags’ character and reputation within the climbing’s collective consciousness, and produced a lot of still-quite-hard-routes. That era was probably from the 1960s into 1990s, and at this time a lot of the crags were probably still reaping the benefits of poor air quality, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution. The “dark Satanic mills”, factories and steelworks of the north ploughed through millions of tons of coal from the 18th century onwards, eventually making respiratory illness the biggest threat to life well into living memory, so it’s probably not too much of a leap of the imagination to think that it wasn’t doing much good for plants, lichens and mosses either. This might explain why a lot of crags used to look fairly barren back in the day. Old photos of Caley show a largely clear hillside dotted with huge beautiful jet back boulders of impeccable gritstone. Good times, assuming bronchitis didn’t get you before you completed your project.

The Caley of today however presents a very different scene. With heavy industry a thing of the past, and air quality much higher, it’s much richer pickings for flora to reclaim the hillside. Young trees grow, lichen on the rock increases, mosses take hold. Also, with the climate now being warmer, you have to wonder if that make a big difference too. As I write this it’s mid November and we’ve not yet even had a frost yet.

Caley feels now like it’s at a tipping point, where there’s a lot of climbing that can now only be climbed following a level of cleaning effort that most visitors aren’t likely to want to (or be equipped to) put in on any random visit. And that level of effort might not be a wise investment of time, as whatever you’ve cleaned will revert back to its former state quite quickly given half a chance. The result is when you turn up to climb at Caley now you’re likely to find about a dozen very heavily chalked problems taking the brunt of the traffic with the scars to show for it, while the rest of the crag’s classics are put out to pasture. What you’re left with is a sort of Schrödinger’s Crag; one which is getting trashed due to popularity but is simultaneously becoming unusably overgrown.

If we pretend for a second that Caley is a closed system then as a demonstration of entropy it’s pretty illustrative of the need to put energy in to reduce disorder. That is to say unless you (we) do something to intervene here it’s only going to get more green and more overgrown, and less climbing will be available. How that is managed, and what the future of Caley looks like in real terms is anyone’s guess. Does the place just need a regular annual crag cleanup day every year, say at the end of winter, would that do the trick? If a lot of locals and keen visitors turned up with brushes and ab ropes and set about cleaning as much as possible, would doing that once a year be enough to keep things in good order? Maybe a bit of moss removal and tree pruning, sensitively done, could make a huge difference, and I dare say a lot of litter could be picked and removed too.

Or, do we just leave it to go fallow, conclude it’s not worth the effort of trying to strike an uneasy truce with nature here and just scratch the crag off the Best Yorkshire Grit Crags ledger entirely? Whatever happens at Caley it may foreshadow what’s to come at other venues. Caley is probably the most high profile example I’ve encountered but there’s no doubt other crags somewhere in the being-lost-to-greenery pipeline where we’re going to have to manage this conundrum going forward.