Pennine Lines w/c 6 May 2024
|| Warmer, humid || Very much summer now ||
The Boss || Climber: Shauna Coxsey
|| Focus On... ||
Medalists
Well, summer really made a hard landing this week. Fasten your seatbelts and assume the brace position. I’m sat typing this on a deckchair in the garden, desperately jockeying for position in the ever-moving shade cast by some rapidly drying washing. It’s less than seven days since it was cool enough for an era-defining gritstone ascent. And since then we’ve had limestone crags condensing, midges, and various other spoils of a limestone summer. The Peak’s many free van campsites (formerly known as lay-bys) runneth over.
I’m sure much will be written about Shauna Coxsey’s ascent of The Boss in due course, but for the minute I’ll just point out that I know Shauna had already climbed Font 8b+ as long ago as ten years since, so it’s easy to forget that the ascent pushes the rarefied heights of female gritstone standards forward several grades. Even if by some clerical error The Boss went into a guide at Font 8a+ instead of 8b+ it’d still be the hardest female ascent on gritstone (if anyone knows of any harder-than-8a female ascents on grit let me know). Such leaps are very uncommon, if not unheard of, as climbing and training for climbing matures and the talent pool expands. It may be that the sit-start to Voyager might well turn out to be 8c after holds have broken - who knows - but since there’s nothing currently harder on grit (at least on paper) it puts the top end of female ascents right up there at the top of male grit standards, and I’m not sure that’s ever been the case before, certainly not in living memory.
Twisted Trees || Yarncliffe
The lack of female ascents of even fairly run-of the-mill-for-lads harder testpieces like The Joker or The Ace, despite the strength of the current talent pool, tells you something about how much size makes a huge difference on these problems, and hence why Shauna’s ascent of The Boss isn’t really at the top of the female ascent grade pyramid but more like a capping stone levitating 20ft above the top of the said pyramid. And we could talk about how that ascent came after basically one-and-a-bit sessions, almost in a single visit - making it potentially the quickest ascent to date? Hadn’t really fully moved through the gears. Maybe we’ll leave that one there.
Having watched this one unfold, I’m once again struck by the brilliantly understated nature of remarkable moments like this and how they play out here in the UK. You might observe the version of current climbing presented on social media with a sense of despair at times, but it’s reassuring so see things like this go down in a typically British fashion. It reminded me of, say, Tyler doing Smiling Buttress - you could have been walking on Curbar that day and not known what was unfolding. Granted there’s someone videoing and someone taking photos, but there’s nobody spraying bottles of Bollinger around, no trophies handed out, no shaking fists at a grandstand of cheering spectators. Because climbing isn’t a sport. Cars still rumble their way down the strip of tarmac below, dog walkers pass by, birds sit in the treetops chirpily looking on, thousands of ants busily doing whatever it is they do, and a hundred meters away the usual school group topping goes on as normal, any one of them a potential Shauna of the future, oblivious to history being made. It’s a moment in time that soon passes. It means a lot to someone, and at the same time it means nothing, stripped of context. Same as any climbing really; it’s kinda nothing, a daft pursuit, but it means a lot to us, and that’s the way it should be.
Enjoying just being out || Thorn Crag
The fact that the media of climbing is a self-inflicted numbers game shouldn’t mean we can’t recognise these moments when they happen to us. This is the great thing about climbing; the parity of experience across the grades, at every standard. The experience a global wad has trying hard on Font XXX grade isn’t fundamentally different to you or I trying hard on something. And in fact your mate battling up a 7b+ (or indeed a 6b+) after injury can be more impressive than an over-strong youth doing an 8a easily, regardless of whether or not a brand account lazily reposts it or not. Or someone of well below average male height managing a problem where the grade reward isn’t commensurate with the effort expended. There’s little hidden victories happening all the time - the surpassing of expectations, the challenging of fears, the comeback after injury, enjoying it again, or just getting anything done in the face of ‘life’ stuff. We can all be winners now and again, even if there’s no medals up for grabs.
|| Supported By ||
|| Recently Through the lens ||
The week as it played out; cool Boss scenes, warm grit evenings, and Will Bosi at "the best crag in the country" (his words not mine); Raven Tor.
|| Fresh Prints ||
This week it seems appropriate to showcase a bit of Yarncliffe in the Print Shop, a lovely bit of woods just yards from The Boss which is actually a fairly quiet corner of the Peak to enjoy a bit of tree appreciation.
