Pennine Lines w/c 15 September 2024
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Pennine Lines w/c 15 September 2024

I have to say actually receiving a physical copy came as something of a surprise, as part of my personal magazine expectations baked into my psyche stem from the late 2000s. In many ways this era ushered in the decline of the UK climbing magazines, where along with not being paid very much for image use in magazines in the first place (that is if you got paid at all, or paid without having to chase them up a few times first) I distinctly remember actually having to go out and cough up a few quids worth of that hard-won cash and buy a physical copy of the magazine to even see your my work in print - hardly surprising then that a lot of us just stopped bothering submitting images to the mags. So it was great to see a couple of my images in print again in Klettern, although it does expose the fact that my grade C in GCSE German doesn’t go very far these days in terms of actually reading the magazine. Still looking for an article containing directions to the Bahnhof, taking the first straße on the left, then ordering two beers and a coffee mit sahne.

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Pennine Lines w/c 6 May 2024
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Pennine Lines w/c 6 May 2024

I’m sure much will be written about Shauna Coxsey’s ascent of The Boss in due course, but for the minute I’ll just point out that I know Shauna had already climbed Font 8b+ as long ago as ten years since, so it’s easy to forget that the ascent pushes the rarefied heights of female gritstone standards forward several grades. Even if by some clerical error The Boss went into a guide at Font 8a+ instead of 8b+ it’d still be the hardest female ascent on gritstone (if anyone knows of any harder-than-8a female ascents on grit let me know). Such leaps are very uncommon, if not unheard of, as climbing and training for climbing matures and the talent pool expands. It may be that the sit-start to Voyager might well turn out to be 8c after holds have broken - who knows - but since there’s nothing currently harder on grit (at least on paper) it puts the top end of female ascents right up there at the top of male grit standards, and I’m not sure that’s ever been the case before, certainly not in living memory.

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