Pennine Lines w/c 24 February 2025
It doesn’t hurt that such a full-day immersion in complete bouldering all-you-can-eat gluttony is reminiscent of the fabled “first day in Font” vibes of yore. Arriving in the Forest already dehydrated by 8 hours of driving, fuelled only by coffee, beaucoup pains au chocolate and what scant sleep you managed to scrape whilst lying on the floor of the lounge in a budget ferry whilst being stepped over by various chain-smoking continental lorry drivers, the stage is set for an epic day of climbing. With no concession made to saving any energy or skin, and - with smartphone weather forecasts still a full decade in the future - no way of knowing what the next few days will bring other than a half-remembered forecast, all bridges are burned on the first day. With elbows duly wrecked by locking between the chipped slots on the Cuvier red circuit, the hope is that those bridges can be at least partially reconstructed later that night by judicious use of fingertape, ibuprofen and antihydral. Rinse and repeat for seven consecutive days. Bon chance.
Pennine Lines w/c 3 June 2024
Local Guy pulled on and summarily despatched both the long and short versions of Exorcist with apparently remarkable ease, climbed absolutely perfectly with a precision and fluidity that left a lasting impression. If you’ve ever been in Font and experienced an anonymous Bleausard turning up and casually climbing something desperate-looking while you thrash around like a punter, well this was basically that, except he had a Pod pat and a bar towel instead of a pof rag and one of those weird French triple-fold pads, and these were 8as not some gnarly red problems. I didn’t even have chance to grab a photo, just a quick “good effort mate” had to do, and with that Local Guy was off from whence he came, leaving me to puzzle why I didn’t have the hip flexibility to rock over properly in the fading dusk light. I drove home not thinking about the content of the training course, but about just how well Local Guy had climbed those problems.
Pennine Lines w/c 15 april 2024
There’s a saying in climbing, attributed to the late Alex Lowe, that the best climber in the world is the one having the most fun. Not to be misconstrued to mean that, at present, Adam Ondra has more fun than the rest of us (could actually be true to be fair…), it sort of distils into a soundbite the idea that the whole point of this bizarre past-time / sport / existential quest [delete as applicable] is to enjoy what you’re doing. Similarly, since the point of being a climber is to go climbing, to climb ideally as much and as often as you can manage, the best crag in the world is the one only ten minutes away.
Pennine Lines w/c 8 april 2024
Now of course pads are the norm and guidebooks/grades have caught up, so heel-hooks don’t really make headlines these days; even Will Bosi’s live-streamed dalliance with a heel on Burden Of Dreams barely made a ripple. Limited heel-hook skirmishes are still being fought by hardliners on certain problems of course, typically ones that straddled the eras. It’s given rise to phenomena of “crap classics”, like The Green Traverse at Stanage for example. Basically there’s a few old problems out there who’s status - and often grade - is derived from the way they were always climbed in the pre-heel pre-pads days, but aren’t actually that good or even make that much sense when done the easiest way with heels, and it makes little financial sense for any guidebook writer to deprive 1000s of Londoners of their only 7a tick. The Green Traverse, (ignoring the lowball Full Green start) is a lovely flowing set of moves where good clean footwork is essential to keep pressure on the marginal footholds all the way, but if you heel-hook it’s just a sort of awkward inelegant drape. Easiest isn’t necessarily better. Once you’ve done it the old school way you won’t go back. Hand on heart, it’s a nicer sequence without, trust me.