|| Cooler, breezy, westerlies || Feeling fresher ||

N Of The Affair || Climber: Ned Feehally

|| Nth Cloud ||

N Of The Affair

Hopefully we’re in for a cooler and fresher feeling week, but as I write this I’m struggling to maintain enthusiasm for the current sticky-feeling warm spell. On paper it’s still not all that warm, but I’m definitely feeling it a lot more than previous weeks - is it just me? Anyway, instead of writing anything relevant to the current weather I’m instead going to block it out entirely and concentrate on the winter just gone. A period when admittedly I spent most of the time moaning that I was too cold, but there we go.

Last week UKClimbing published a Peak bouldering roundup which I’d written for them, and so here with the luxury of more space I’m going to dig into one the lines I mention in that article - the Nth cloud project.

This was one I actually had lined up to feature in Grit Blocs once I’d got some shots of Ned attempting this at the end of a long day mopping up some other photos for the book. It would have at the very least got a mention in the Swivel Finger section, or there was a chance it could have bumped that problem out entirely, as it looked superb, and as a long-standing project carried a bit of gravitas. In the end I visited once more with Ned but again we left empty handed, and in fact it took Ned until this April to seal the deal. So I had to leave it out of the book in case I put the kibosh on the whole project - it wouldn’t be the first time someone has fallen foul of book photo curse on their project!

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Resting between attempts || Climber: Ned Feehally

At this point you’d be thinking this is going to be a top-level addition. Three-year-long project for someone who’s flashed 8b+ after all. Well, top level in terms of quality, definitely, but in terms of difficulty the picture was less clear. “I’d have said 8a+ until I did it and it now feels like a 7c” came the reply (in fact having done it once, Ned was able to immediately repeat it for a different angle of phone-propped-up-in-shoe video) I suppose that’s a sentiment that should chime with anyone who’s had a project on the grit. Necessarily they often feel ‘easy’ when you do them, probably because you’ve got to climb something well to do it at all, and have good conditions. Those prerequisites often mean it’s going to feel ‘easy’ - relatively speaking - otherwise you’d not get up it. Often people cite this as a reason to dislike grit, as if they are disappointed to find their prized send isn’t just a battle, to be beaten into submission. But for me that’s part of the attraction - something feeling ‘easy’ is validation of something falling into place, being in the right place at the right time, and climbing well.

That got me thinking what’s interesting to witness and recognise, during the process of unlocking a line like this, is that the principle is basically the same no matter what the eventual grade or difficulty is. Regardless of whether Ned had decided this felt 7c or 8b wouldn’t have changed his experience in reaching that point. It was something he’d tried but not done, and then eventually he did it. As the saying goes, there’s only two grades; things you can do, and things you can’t do.

Crux toe-hook move to poor slopers || Climber: Ned Feehally

This is something we all experience too, on our journey from being a novice or beginner climber to becoming more experienced. It might not look like it all the time, especially if we take everyone’s success-biased social media output at face value, but everyone is juggling the same issues; conditions, fitness, expectations, self-doubt, confidence, and the general ebb and flow of all these factors bouncing around whatever else is going on in life. Ignoring for a minute climbing as an organised competitive sport (arguably an awkward and contrived fit for climbing anyway) then what you’re left with is the competition between you and your expectations, or between your ability to dream vs your ability to climb. The tactics and nuances might change, the margins might narrow, the room for error might decrease as you approach your theoretical limit, but I’ve always believed the experience of having to try hard to climb something, something that you couldn’t do at first, is pretty much universal across the difficulty spectrum.

I think this is really one of the great parts of climbing, in that it doesn’t matter if you’re climbing font 6c, 7c, or 8c, the process is the same. There’s a parity of experience, or more appropriately the quality of experience, in that the 6c climber who’s found a 6c project and has to really apply themselves and climb well to succeed doesn’t really have a fundamentally different experience from someone operating at the top end. You’re not going to enjoy climbing less if you’re a 7a climber compared to a 8a climber, or an 8a climber compared to a 9a climber. You’re not less significant, or less valuable, or less valid. If you can feel like you’re climbing well and enjoying it that’s all that matters - that’s where you ‘win’ in the competitive sense. And yet we probably don’t celebrate this enough.

In climbing media today as much as ever we tend to focus on the top end and deify climbers who achieve the hardest grades, the highest metrics, but we forget it’s all relative. There’s admittedly something a little different for a first ascent, but when something’s been worked or checked out on a rope the question of “can it actually be climbed?” has already been answered, replaced with “will I climb this?”. And at the end of the day that’s the same question we’re all asking.

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|| Fresh Prints ||

In the collective consciousness warm weather equals seaside, and the problem with the Pennines is there's no coastline. The one fly in the otherwise perfect ointment. Anyway, as I was in Northumberland recently I was contemplating the Pennine's lack of coast, and concluding a sort of honorary Pennine-adjacent status must be awarded to the coast of the North East, from North Yorkshire to Northumberland. Similar proximity to the hills and moors, similarly welded to the industrial towns and social fabric, a familiar feel. Plus I love it up there, and so I've added a new gallery to the Print Shop with a few choice images from the coast, as with my other landscape work these are all shot on large format film. Hopefully the thought of a cooling sea breeze will make the hot weather a little more manageable.

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