Pennine Lines w/c 2 December 2024
|| Warmer, damp || Up and down ||
The Ace || Climber: Jim Pope
|| Focus On... ||
Your best Hand
During the bouldering golden boom years of the 2000s you could rely on a few things; very baggy S7 (later Moon) trousers, Anasazi Velcros, and the fact that Font 8b was hard. Those were the three landmarks by which you would navigate the bouldering landscape. Anyone doing an 8b, any ascent of an 8b, was newsworthy. Every keen boulder could likely reel off a list of who’d bouldered 8b in the UK to date off the top of their head, and they had probably seen all available video footage of all those ascents, if that footage existed. Good times.
Fast forward twenty years and you can’t even get arrested for bouldering Font 8b any more. Standards have rocketed in recent years, not just in the level of cutting edge stuff, but also just the sheer weight in numbers of the peloton. There has probably been more footage of UK 8b ascents uploaded to the internet in the time it’s taking you to read this than there existed in the 2000s. You can’t turn a street corner in any northern city any more without tripping over Font 8b climbers; tick lists of Rocklands and Ticino ascents bulging, enough to have secured sponsorship deals, free foreign trips and magazine covers 20 years ago, but today languishing in blink-and-you’ll-miss-'em obscurity, fighting a losing battle against 7a influencers picking up 80kg off the floor on a 10mm edge on Instagram.
So having witnessed this bewildering rise in standards over the last twenty years or so (much of it actually occurring in the last decade) it’s therefore reassuring to find that some things are still the same; The Ace is still quite hard. The holds might have improved, the top jug might have snapped off and been glued back on, the landing might have been extended, the rock in front of it might have been toppled and then put back, pads might be twice as thick now and sequences might have changed, everyone might have been training specifically for it on replica holds now, and it might even have been flashed a few times, the baggy S7 strides might be gone (sadly), and Anasazis no longer rule the roost (again, sadly), but one remaining sliver of former certainties still remains; The Ace is still quite hard. It can still give the best a rough ride. No wonder Jim was so pleased.
Jim Pope || Stanage
Although Jim managed to make good use of the fleetly cold and crisp conditions on The Ace this last week it’s been a rather more unfortunate run of weather for those restricted to the weekends, with both of the last two being characterised by very damp, rainy and warm conditions. Plenty of crags in the Peak were even condensing due to the huge temperature rises (in some cases 10-15 degrees in the space of a day). With this we’ve seen, rather predictably, a return to “silly season” for folks climbing damp gritstone.
I’ve written plenty about this before; you can read the longer piece I wrote for The Depot here, and the video below, so I won’t repeat myself now……. Actually sod it, I will; don’t climb on wet gritstone. For the avoidance of doubt here the word “wet” encompasses “damp”, “soggy”, “dank”, “claggy” or any other euphemism you might choose to deploy when logging your ascent on UKC to make it look like a good effort, a battle against the odds, rather than a completely shameful error of judgement. Don’t do it. It knackers the rock, irreversibly so, and the rock doesn’t care how far you’ve driven either. Extra leeway isn’t given because you’ve travelled from [insert city name here] or that you’ve been sat at work all week missing the good weather only to find Saturday in the Peak to be a damp mess. We’ve got to be grown-up about this, otherwise a lot of boulder problems are going to be ruined. There’s long been a saying in climbing that you can always come back another day, or that your project “isn’t going anywhere”; this is, as it turns out, self-fulfilling. Sometimes we’ve got to come back another day if we want our projects to still be there in their current form (and grade!) next time.
Trashed rock || Stanage
As it happens, I understand many cities in the north now have facilities whereby in exchange for a small fee you can obtain entry to former industrial units, which are equipped with flat plywood panels covered in wooden or resin facsimiles of rock climbing holds, with padded floors or ropes to ensure safety in the event of a fall, and that these establishments offer an alternative to proper climbing when the weather is poor. I can’t see them catching on, personally, but if you’ve driven up “from the smoke” only to find Zippy’s Traverse is damp then it’s worth a try, right? Let me know if it’s any good.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
A little injection of colour into the winter gloom; Mike Adams on Unfamiliar at Stanage, and a dawn rainbow over Burbage.
|| Fresh Prints ||
This week we've got another couple of film shots from the dozen new images on 5x4” film to the Print Shop, in time for Christmas ordering. This time we've got Wyming Brook in the grip of autumn colour, and a spring evening at High Neb.
As mentioned last time, and as I will mention again next week, you have until 11th December for Christmas delivery for prints via the Print Shop.
