Pennine Lines w/c 28 August 2023
|| Cooler, hopefully drier || Autumn on the horizon? ||
Levi Roofs, as pictured in the new guide || Climber: Shauna Coxsey
|| Focus On... ||
Books
It’s good to be back home again. Holidays are great but there’s a limit to just how much of a good time I’m willing to have before the lure of cold overcast drizzle becomes too much. And I don’t even want to look at another pastry or small bottle of generic lager again - well, not for a few days at least.
While I’ve been away the new Rockfax Peak bouldering guide has been on pre-order and is now officially released. If you pick up a copy of this book - and you should - you’ll see a few of my photos in there - some you might recognise, some you won’t - along with a ton of other quality images from some great local photographers. We’re blessed in the Peak that no guide ever needs to come out with mediocre imagery! But aside from the photos this is a book that I’ve had a bit of involvement with checking and putting the final touches to earlier this year.
It’s funny how this turned out really, as the first bouldering guide I ever owned was a Rockfax. The 1998 Peak Bouldering book, written by Al Williams and Alan James. This was released about 18 months into my climbing career, fortuitously falling into my lap just as I was getting keen and, crucially, having just graduated from jibbering up VSs with minimal finesse I was just about good enough to do some problems.
Until the first Vertebrate guide in 2005 this Rockfax was THE guide, written by knowledgeable locals and built upon the two OTE-published small guides from earlier in the 1990s, which had long since disappeared from the climbing shop shelves by the time I started climbing. The shops sold a few bouldering mats by then, and they were of little use if you didn’t know where you were going. Existing trad guides didn’t really cover bouldering bar the most long-standing obvious lines as footnotes. As a result of that information void I and pretty much everyone I climbed with absolutely devoured the Rockfax guide and it was hugely influential to anyone starting out and taking bouldering seriously at that time.
It was far from perfect, and plenty of people moaned about the use of B grades (which to be fair worked OK and were at least internally consistent, as much as grades ever are) but we do well to be reminded that complete beats perfect every time. The Peak finally had a good usable and fairly comprehensive modern guide, full of personality and little weird nuggets of info, dripping with psyche. And you have to remember that at this time the internet did exist but virtually nobody used it. I know of one single website containing Peak bouldering info at the time, run by local enthusiast Keith Turton, and that was it. One website, one guy. So yeah, that Rockfax guide was influential in a way that you can scarcely imagine today.
Stretch & Mantle, from the Staffs section of the new guide || Climber: unknown
Fast forward a quarter of a century and in a bizarre sort of bringing-it-full-circle way it feels good to be able to contribute to the new Rockfax guide. Guides these days don’t operate in the rarefied vacuum of the late ‘90s any more, and can’t expect to influence upcoming generations in the same way. However, inspire they still can. If apps and websites are the present and future of in-hand info at the crag (and lets be clear; some of the current generation of apps like Rockfax and the Fontainebleau Boolder app are very good) then printed books still have an important place combining information with inspiration. I tried to fuse a little of that ethos into writing Grit Blocs - which I will stress is very much not a guidebook, Amazon reviewers should note.
But moving beyond the nuts and bolts of relaying information to you, guidebooks at their best are passports not only to X, Y or Z problems on the ground; long before you even set foot at the crag they are fuel for the fires of the imagination to burn. Although the pages of any guide are crammed full of words and photos they act as a sort of blank canvas to sketch out any one of thousands of possibilities played out in your mind’s eye. We can all be heroes when reading a guidebook. Every day is perfect weather, every hold feels good, every move made with confidence. Anything is possible.
Boyager sample page || Climber: Frances Bensley
So what I will say in conclusion is it would be great if people can get out there and support this new guide. Printed bouldering guides in particular require an extraordinary amount of effort to produce; you can’t fully appreciate it until you’ve been involved. What with one thing and another it’s harder and harder for publishers to justify these sorts of guides in the current climate. The last Vertebrate Peak Bouldering guide was published twelve years ago, and the excellent BMC Peak volumes of recent years are set to be the last ones the produced as I understand the BMC are not planning any more definitive guides (a great shame as those guides are the high-water mark for volunteer guide production). Also, bouldering is a details game; attention to the finer points, getting everything bang on and dotting the ‘i’s and the lower-case ‘j’s is critical otherwise everyone kicks off if their hardest problem gets half a grade knocked off, so it’s an unforgiving audience to win over.
But if the absence of any other players on the scene has meant one thing it’s that the new Rockfax guide has enjoyed a level of grassroots support from local developers and activists that surpasses previous editions. Depth of local knowledge and buy-in is where the magic is - that’s why the 1998 book was great, and it should stand this 2023 edition in good stead too.
Wym Crime, from the North-Sheffield section of the guide || Climber: Jon Fullwood
|| Grit Blocs ||
I was flicking through old photos on my phone and realised it’s about a year ago that the first copies of Grit Blocs appeared in the flesh. I had to go in to the Vertebrate offices to sign a couple of hundred pre-order copies, a stressful experience because I was absolutely convinced I was going to smudge the ink on them all or sign the wrong page. Daft as it sounds after doing a couple of hundred it’s perfectly possible to mess up your own signature too. It’s a bit like if you pick a word and say it out loud repeatedly dozens of times it starts to sound weird, stripped of context. Well signing lots of your own signature is a bit like that. Anyway, I got through it, and to anyone who got a book from the bottom of the pile I can only apologise for the scribble in the front.
All joking aside, this time last summer when the book materialised into a real physical thing was both exciting and nerve-wracking in equal measures, not least as I was convinced once in print we’d notice loads of mistakes. In the end I’ve only spotted one typo in the book to date, which seems to have gone unnoticed by everyone else - or at least everybody is too polite to point it out to me. So a huge thanks not only to everyone who’s refrained for pointing out that mistake, and any others they’ve found. And generally a huge thanks to you if you’ve bought the book, told your friends about it, posted about it on social media. Writing a book like this is not a huge money spinner for anyone involved - you will note I’m not suddenly swanning around in a Maserati toting a gold-plated camera - margins on publishing are paper thin (pun intended) so every copy sold counts and means something to me. Hopefully if sales continue to be healthy long term I’ll more or less cover the cost of the fuel used to drive to the crags to take the photos in the first place.
Again, joking aside, part of why you take on projects like writing Grit Blocs is not for the coin but for the love of the game. Because you are convinced gritstone bouldering is worth writing about, and for a belief in the value of proper published books and the important contribution they make to climbing culture. So an especially large thanks goes out to those of you who’ve not only bought and read the book but have reached out with a kind word or two that they in some way enjoyed it or that it got them psyched, or got them to visit a new place, or rediscoved somewhere they’d not been for years. That’s why you take these things on, and it’s a huge honour to be able to contribute to climbing culture in some way, which is only possible with the support of each and every one of you.
Finally, if you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about you can buy a copy here. It is quite good, if I do say so myself.
|| SUPPORTED BY ||
|| Depot Youth Cup 2023 ||
I will be at the Depot Youth Cup next weekend covering the event all day. I am expecting less carnage than at Crack Fest (pictured below) but if you or your beloved offspring are in attendance say 'hi' and grab me a chocolate bar and a coffee 'cos I'll be needing it.
|| Fresh Prints ||
Autumn's just around the corner I promise, and you know what that means - get ahead of the Christmas rush in the Print Shop.
