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 23 September 2024
The culture of considering bouldering as only being worthy as training for routes persisted well into this century, and it carried over into indoor climbing too. In fact it wasn’t until the mid to late 2000s that you could turn up at an indoor wall as a beginner and do any beginner-level or easy bouldering at all. It just wasn’t catered for. The easier climbing was on ropes, and that was that. In retrospect this was odd, but it just reflected the prevailing trends at the time. Bouldering was supposed to be hard, to be training, you were supposed to serve an apprenticeship of “proper” climbing on ropes. You weren’t really supposed to do bouldering to the exclusion of all else.
Pennine Lines w/c 2 September 2024
Let’s not linger on the fading daylight hours, that’s a given, but at this time of year there’s space to imagine if it’s going to be one of those vintage autumns. Cool and dry, the gritstone feeling crisp under the skin after the sweaty grind of summer, shoe rubber feeling sticky, and the limestone crags staying dry well into November. Confidence running high, momentum building, and maybe a few long-term projects will fall? We must be due a good ‘un after the last couple of warm and damp autumns. Last year in particular was terrible but I’m determined to not look back in anger.
Pennine Lines w/c 21 august 2023
‘Stuff’ - each item in of itself relatively benign; each one to solve a problem, to make things easier. To enhance performance. But in another way each one contributes to creating a problem, to changing the experience, diluting it, getting in the way of what’s good about bouldering in the first place - the simplicity. And suddenly five boulderers plus all their gear and pads would no longer fit into a Nissan Micra.
Pennine Lines w/c 14 august 2023
As I mention once or twice in Grit Blocs, in the world of gritstone bouldering we tend to look up to Fontainebleau; we borrow Font grades, and we use ‘Font style’ as the highest accolade we give to a problem. But the weird thing about British climbing’s relationship with Font is our tendency to characterise the climbing there as being exclusively rounded topouts on rippled slopers, reducing it to a stereotype and ignoring the wealth of climbing styles on offer. Font is in fact pretty well equipped with savage crimpy walls, horrendous cracks, tendon-snapping pocket pulling, steep basic pulling, one-movers, long stamina problems, low physical roofs, highballs deserving of route status and just about everything in between.