Pennine Lines w/c 3 March 2025
|| Warmer and drier || Peak season ||
Deliverance, Stanage || Climber: Adam Long
|| Focus On... ||
Erosion Work
The tape slides in past the spring-loaded flap and decends into the machine, unseen, fingers crossed that it doesn’t chew it up like it did with your auntie’s wedding footage. The screen flickers into life, a couple of sponsor logos and some rudimentary opening credits punctuate the black field. Electronic chords reverberate menacingly. A couple of action shots briefly flash into view: limestone, plywood and gritstone, more credits, more text, and we’re into the main action.
With a long blonde ponytail blowing in the summer breeze, a shirtless figure leaves behind a hessian doormat and an old towel, and pulls onto a gently concave face of dark gritstone, it’s upper half rearing up just to the point where gravity will attempt to pull our hero off, rather than on to, the rock. A pale stripe of chalk-stained rock six feet above him at the apex of the face marks his eventual destination. A voice booms out over the footage:
“Bouldering is, in a sense, the essence of climbing...”
To look back on One Summer Bouldering In The Peak now is like opening a time capsule, at a crossroads in climbing, when bouldering was not yet a mainstream activity, but it was starting to gain traction with a few keen practitioners, and it was becoming known as the not-so-secret weapon of those at the top end. The main problem, other than the previous generation taking the piss about only climbing small rocks? Bouldering meant hitting the ground, a ground which was invariably quite hard and prone to being full of rocks. And hitting that ground a lot. Repeatedly.
Crescent Arete ground works || Stanage
Viewers today of the Stanage footage in One Summer might note that in 1994 a lot of the ground around and under the boulder problems is, for the most part, covered with a strange green filament-like photosynthesising substance known as ‘grass”; a rather fragile plant which doesn’t stand up to being landed on again and again very well, but who’s roots do a very good job of holding the crag’s sandy soil together and stop it being washed away by heavy rain, so stops drainage channels appearing which then become a runaway erosion problem. The landings get lower, rockier, muddier, and just generally become an eroding mess. There’s a top-down view of Jason Myres latching the Deliverance jug on One Summer, and it’s an eye opening comparison to make if you contrast the state of the landing in 1994 to the state of it now. Had the film showcased the lowball dabfest Zippy’s Traverse, beloved by the cake-it-in-chalk-cos-its-not-actually-dry community, then a similar contrast would be evident.
Or indeed compare now to 2005, which was the last time any ground repair or maintenance work was done at Stanage. Back then an army of willing volunteers ferried several tons of gravel and aggregate up the hill, dug out the landings under Deliverance and the Business Face, and infilled them to restore the ground level and hopefully allow grass to re-grow. From memory I’m not convinced the grass ever did really come back seriously, but in general the erosion of the landings was abated for a good fifteen years or so.
When bouldering mats became commonplace in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the oft-cited benefits offered up as an excuse for lugging a huge square of foam around (largely to placate the “you’re all going soft, we used to do these problems with just a bar towel stolen from the pub” crowd) was that by using bouldering pads we were protecting the ground from further wear, stopping the grass being battered by repeated falls etc etc. Win win - what selfless legends were were! However, far from being a ‘win’ for erosion, pads clearly just served to enable the whole activity, making it an enjoyable mainstream prospect for all climbers year-round, not just the preserve of fringe nutcases with cast-iron ankles, lowball traverse fans, and cutting edge players needing a training option in the summer - the only time the landings were dry enough to stand on. Hence the massive boom in bouldering participation over the last two decades, with a commensurate strain on the land. Bigger numbers now means at certain places we’re seeing massively accelerated erosion, and it won’t just sort itself out, it’s going to need some legwork from all of us.
Gen X and Gen Z getting stuck in || Stanage
With this in mind a few haggard-looking middle-aged blokes - with Jim Pope flying the flag for Gen Z - gathered at Stanage last week to do a bit of work as part of what will hopefully be the first phase of landing restoration work. Objectives for the day were fairly modest, targeting only The Green Traverse and Crescent Arete as a sort of proof-of-concept. The latter having had a deteriorating landing for some time and never had any restorative or preventative work done on it, as far as I know. These were supported by the National Park who kindly provided the materials, tools and a bit of crucial mechanised support to shift a lot of the aggregate, and coordinated by the BMC’s Access Officer for England (Jon Fulwood).
One thing I will say, as someone who’s never done a job of manual labour in his life, is that you would not believe how hard is it to push a wheelbarrow full of wet gravel up the Stanage Plantation path, and how much DOMS in your arms and back it’ll give you for the subsequent week. I now fully understand why builders live off a diet of Monster and full-English-in-a-breadcake (insert name of regional bread-roll equivalent here). With this in mind it would be great if some younger, stronger and fitter people get involved with future work, even if it’s just ferrying aggregate up the hill…It’s not all backbreaking graft though, there’s good banter to be had and you get to swan around smugly knowing that you enjoy indefinite moral superiority over everyone else at the crag by virtue of having lifted a finger to do something positive. The wheelbarrow work in particular must be good training for some sort of sustained undercutting, so maybe if you have projects at Forest Rock this is just your sort of caper.
The next jobs at Stanage are probably going to include the Deliverance landing, to try and make it less prone to being washed away longer term, and something similar under the Business boulder. But wider than this, similar erosion hotspots are likely to be playing out at other crags up and down the Pennines, at the busy spots in Yorkshire, and the Peak. Despite climbing shoe manufacturers’ best efforts to price everyone out of the market, bouldering doesn’t look to be getting any less popular soon, and increased footfall is going to make these sorts of ground works necessary more often. But the flip side of increased numbers is that there are more bodies available to help, a larger volunteer pool, more pairs of eyes.
With this in mind, keep your ears open for chances to help out, and when you’re out at your local crags, especially places you go to year on year, keep an eye out for places of high wear, where ground erosion is getting worse. These sorts of works need co-operation from landowners, the relevant authorities and all that sort of thing, so it’s not possible everywhere, but it’s always worth getting in touch with the BMC with ideas for places where restorative erosion work might be beneficial. You don’t have to wait for someone else to organise something, don’t let the official involvement of the BMC make you think this sort of thing happens top-down. It’s very much grass-roots work (pun very much intended), really driven by local activists in the community; people doing good stuff to keep the places they love in a decent state. What’s not to like? Get involved.
One more rep... || Stanage
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
Continuing the Stanage theme, here's the Popular End in golden evening light, and The Joker gets an ascent while Jerry Moffatt offers encouragement. Absolute scenes all round.
|| Fresh Prints ||
We had to go full Stanage this week, so here's a couple of classics from the Print Shop.
