Pennine Lines w/c 8 July 2024
|| Cool, damp || Old-fashioned summer ||
Wall Buttress, "VS" || Stanage
|| Focus On... ||
The Stanage VS Challenge
Given the sustained cool weather we’ve had it’s tempting to wax lyrical about the remarkably good once-in-a-generation Peak limestone bouldering conditions we’ve been enjoying. Especially if you contrast this summer to the last few heatwave summers. But I was reminded a couple of weeks ago of one of the best lower-grade grit days you can ever have as film-maker, trad aficionado and ground-fall-avoider Mike Cheque did the Stanage VS Challenge aka “All 36 Starred VSs From The 1989 Guide”.
I’m not big on these challenge sort of things in climbing or the outdoors in general, but the great thing about doing the Stanage VSs is it occupies a niche where it’s too hard for casual outdoors folk, no big-mountain appeal, but not fashionable enough to garner any social media traction. Very Severe is not, and never has been, a sexy grade. It’s a grade from back when people climbed in nailed boots with their mum’s washing line tied around their waist. You’ll not find it perennially cropping up in lazily-thrown-together climbing mag “Top 5 British Scrambles / Mountain Ridges / Multipitch Adventures [delete as applicable]” filler articles. The benefit of this is you’re not likely to get stuck behind a group of Royal Marines dragging a grand piano up the routes for charity, neither are you going to find yourself inadvertently stumbling into some fancy-dress clickbait climbing YouTube video by mistake either.
Basically it’s a good old fashioned wholesome day on the crags. Proper climbing. And the amount of climbing you're doing - a shade over 500metres - is just about manageable for most of us, and the quality is pretty high throughout. Whereas some subsequent Stanage guides devalued stars somewhat by giving dozens more of them out to pretty much any route that wasn’t actively on fire, in the manner of a Tory PM (remember those?) dishing out unearned peerages.
Gargoyle Buttress || Climber: Mike Cheque
I’m writing this assuming anyone going for the Stanage VSs is neither an entry-level VS leader nor an hard trad wad either. If you only climb VS on a good day then you’ve got no chance, and likewise if you’re Mr E6/7+ and go soloing a lot then you’re hardly likely to break into a sweat just soloing the lot. But the sweet spot for this day out is climbers who are operating in the low E-grades, as it’s hard enough to be worthwhile and yet still an engaging and long day out.
And it often is a very long day out, as a quick scan of various forum posts or blog entries will tell you. And one which it’s fairly common to bail out on, or otherwise fail to finish. Tales of starting and finishing in the dark are not unusual either. My first in-person encounter with this ‘challenge’ was walking out to meet my mates Rich and Kim on their attempt on a hot sunny summer’s day. We found them on Wall Buttress - a classic wide crack shocker (so much so it’s currently HVS) - tired, hot and dehydrated. And since they had started at the north end they had twenty routes still to climb. Needless to say Wall Buttress was their final route that day.
Anyway, other than the obvious things like making sure you know where the routes are, doing a few of the harder ones beforehand, wearing comfy shoes and taking enough food & water, there’s a few key things you can do to stack the odds in your favour, and hopefully make the day more enjoyable and less of a long and drawn-out ordeal. In my experience of doing it the first and most critical is the direction of travel. A lot of people seem to do it north-to-south. Perhaps because we read from left to right, or they appear in the guide in that order, or because it feels like it makes sense to save the routes you’re most familiar with till the end of the day. However, north-to-south is The Wrong Direction.
As alluded to above, finding yourself several hours in, tired and hungry and only having done, say, ten routes is a bit of a soul destroyer. Whereas going south-to-north you can knock off a LOT of routes you know very well at the Popular End pretty quickly whilst fresh, when the crag is quiet and not in the sun yet. This is a HUGE psychological boost, and leaves the more spread-out sections with long walks between routes for later in the day when your arms can recover while you walk, and eat whilst walking. And there’s very little chance of being held up queuing for a busy route and having to backtrack either.
Via Media, VS || Stanage Popular End
Another critical choice is just minimising general faff and the time on each route. Using a rope is a given here, as anyone happy to solo every route probably doesn’t need my advice. But if you’re taking a rope then treat the day like doing an alpine route, leading quickly with minimal faff and just enough gear placed to allow you to climb quickly is often faster than having to do a very cautious solo when tired. Especially in a pair where you only need to be at the sharp-end for half the routes. So yeah, take a rope, a handful of nuts and cams and a few quickdraws and keep it light and simple, and don't feel compelled to place too much gear on easy ground.
Also, that nice new 70m rope you bought? Forget about it. None of the routes are longer than 22m, so get your old beat-up 50m or 60m wall rope you were about the throw out, cut it in half, and use that. More important than saving weight, it’s going to spare you from a ton of coiling and uncoiling time. Plus it’s easy for the leader and second to quickly take a few hand or body coils each on a 30m rope, stay tied on and quickly descend to the next route than it is to fully come off the rope and stand there coiling it at the top of each route. If you insist of a pair of half ropes just instead take one and tie on in the middle. Also think a bit more laterally about belays at the top…..these routes were put up in the 1930s or 40s, so pre-war belay techniques are adequate a lot of the time. Don’t waste valuable minutes setting up a beautifully equalised three-point redundant belay for a second who isn’t going to fall off, when just wrapping the rope around a boulder and taking a quick waist belay will do.
Narrow Buttress || Stanage
Like on an alpine route, it’s not so much the climbing time that’s a killer it’s all the other faff and rope admin that eat up time. If you approach each route in exactly the same way you would lead a single stand-alone route under normal circumstances then you’re in for a VERY long day. Whereas if by leading quickly, minimising gear and belaying faff, rope coiling, uncoiling and pulling through 45m of unused rope is going to save you 5-10 minutes on each of 36 routes then that’s gonna save you 3-6 hours overall, which makes the difference between a long day and an exhausting epic. It also means you don’t have to time your big attempt to coincide with the longest daylight hours and hence also likely one of the warmest days. If you can get it down to the 7-10 hour range in total instead of the 13-16 hours that gives you a lot of flexibility to do it in more comfortable temps, when the climbing will feel easier, avoid bird bans, and keep dehydration at bay.
True fans of Peak VS trad routes, for whom the Stanage challenge is too straightforward, will also note that the blue 1991 Froggatt guide (from the same series as the 1989 Stanage guide) contains 34 starred VSs at the various Burbage Valley crags between Ringinglow Road and Hathersage Road. So that’s Burbage North and South, Higgar Tor and Millstone Edge. And one of those routes is a two-pitch route at Millstone so it’s actually 35 pitches and hence a pretty comparable challenge to the Stanage one. The climbing and rock types on display are massively more varied though, as is the quality - some of the routes I’d honestly never noticed were starred. Real masochists might also want to add on the handful of routes at Lawrencefield too, which takes it almost up to 40 routes. Doing this back-to-back Saturday-Sunday with the Stanage day could be an epic weekend for you and your regular trad partner? Don’t all volunteer at once.....
Black Slab / Hargreaves Original at the end of the day || Stanage
|| Fresh Prints ||
Maintaining the current theme, here's a few Stanage favourites from the Print Shop.
