|| Warm and damp || Nothing to write home about ||

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Slipstones

It was reported that North West Scotland ‘enjoyed’ temps up to 19-odd degrees on the weekend. In case you’ve forgotten, it is supposed to be the depths of winter right now. This is insane, and yet I know that in a few years someone will stumble across a copy of this text online and think it’s quaint that I considered room-temperature Januarys in the Highlands to be a cause for concern, given what’s no doubt still to come. Since we’re now circling the plughole of end-stage capitalism and a collapse of all ecosystems, I have resigned myself to not being able to personally solve these problems by a humble climbing-inspiration-to-your-inbox model, so instead I’ll do what I can do, which is offer a few minutes’ distraction from the slow-motion car crash of the final days of the Anthropocene. And if it’s an escape you’re looking for I know just the place….

Ironically, given all that I’ve just written, the first time I visited Slipstones we arrived in a clapped-out old Jaguar Sovereign, owned by one of many colourful characters the university mountaineering club determined to at least usher in the new millennium with a touch of class. On a downhill stretch it must have only scraped into double digits of miles-per-gallon but with two up front and four of us crammed onto the faded leather of the back seat I suppose it was probably less carbon-per-head emitted than everyone driving around in individual cars today. I digress….

Anyway: escape, and this was. An escape from the expectations of the university club, being that you were supposed to be doing big mountain trad or failing that, some multi pitch was acceptable, or failing that, some single pitch trad if the weather was poor. What you weren’t supposed to do on a nice day was go to some 20ft high grit crag and go ‘just’ bouldering.

The key piece of the escape kit was this new thing my mate Kim had acquired. It was two sheets of foam encased in Cordura, with a shoulder strap, and the letters “S7’ screen printed on it, along with a yellow target in the centre. It was called a ‘bouldering mat’ and was about the thickness of a phone book - for any readers under 25 a phone book was like a sort of regional data protection breach printed out hundreds of sheets of low quality paper, cumulatively about 5cm thick. We’d seen one of these bouldering mats in the background of some photos of Ben Moon in the climbing magazines, just under the pof rag, so we knew it must be good. For any readers under 25 a climbing magazine was a bit like a printout of Instagram on higher quality paper, but there was no indoor comp-style content to rapidly scroll through. Instead there were a few dozen pages in the middle about big mountain expeditions you flicked straight past instead. Kim actually won the mat in a magazine competition where all you had to do was write in and surrender some personal details to the proprietors, presumably for nefarious purposes, so in that sense it was also exactly like social media too and remarkably ahead of the game.

The S7 mat covered an area of ground about the size of the phone you’re reading this on, hence the yellow target on the mat was a fortuitous addition. When you stared down between your shaking legs you at least had something to aim for, no matter how statistically slim your odds of hitting it were. You were aiming for the bull but considered yourself a winner if the dart even stuck in that sort of cabinet thing with the doors that you hang a dartboard in. Bounce-outs were common. The set of on-the-fly calculations and seat-of-pants dead reckoning required to land was on a par with the successful return of Apollo 13. Nevertheless, it totally changed the world for us, as it was already starting to change climbing over the next decade.

One of the greatest pieces of psychological sleight-of-hand in climbing is the simple act of chucking a bouldering pad down under a short grit route. Regardless of how much use the pad is going to be, straight away the game is changed. You’re not soloing, you’re bouldering. If you told your mum you were off out soloing she’d have a fit. Bouldering though, that’s fine. If you explained bouldering to your mum she’d be fine with it. Particularly at grit crags like Slipstones mats are a great enabler. Like many Pennine crags Slipstones has a bit of what you’d call legitimate straight bouldering, and a LOT of stuff which hovers around that invisible dividing line between bouldering and routes. Arguably the best stuff in fact. And a lot of the time it’s not so much about the height, but in the difficulty and character of the climbing up high. Being a bit too high for comfort can be momentarily OK. You can trick yourself into going for it if there’s a positive hold, a jug to aim for, a slight easing.

To me those sorts of grit crags that dedicated trad climbers don’t want to bother coming to offer some of the most uniquely gritstone experiences. It’s not that there’s no gear to be placed, or that everything’s too low to need a rope, it’s just that it often doesn’t make sense to head there for a day with the rope and rack. Yet it’s not really bouldering - a lot of the routes at Slipstones aren’t really highballs. That first visit with the tiny S7 pad, well I don’t remember us jumping off from very high onto it. I remember at lot of climbing up, thinking about it, then downclimbing. Then going for it, or moving on. That sort of thing. Can you really call it bouldering if you’re not falling off? Either way, deviating from the well trodden uni club path and taking a chance on this fine grey craglet high in Colsterdale, back when we’d never so much as seen a photo of the crag, and finding this tall perfect rippled wall of Steve’s Wall and Paul’s Arete, it felt like the escape attempt had paid off.

When I returned to these problems on a disappointingly damp and grey day while on the Grit Blocs photo mission I was still in awe of the rock quality at Slipstones. I wasn’t, however, expecting those tall lines, with a bunch of modern thick pads under them and twenty years’ climbing experience to the better, to feel so high. Maybe it was the howling wind that day, maybe it’s age, but they still command a bit of respect. But I was reassured those problems/routes - call em what you like - were as good as I remembered. Shame about the lighting conditions, but the climbing quality…as if it was ever in doubt!

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