Pennine Lines w/c 8 July 2024
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.
Pennine Lines w/c 8 January 2024
In fact, Rivelin is a classic winter venue, THE January crag. I swear some years have passed where it’s the only place I’ve found dry rock. Low lying and sheltered, yet open enough for that fine grained rock to dry fast; it’s a sun trap too and rarely feels as grim and bleak as other Sheffield local moorland crags. On a dull day it can seem like a brown crag for those brown January days, so it just fits. But it's even better when the low winter sun rakes through the bare trees, the light modelling the crag, shadows are cast and everything pops into relief. BOOM.
Pennine Lines w/c 24 July 2023
One unexpected bonus of Britain’s political shambles of recent years combined with spiralling cost of living and rampant corporate profiteering here at home means that Switzerland now barely feels any more expensive than the UK. Certainly when you collapse into a remote mountain hut at then end of an exhaustingly nerve-wracking 10-hours dodging crevasses on a melting glacier and order a pint of helicopter-supplied Swiss lager for 7 francs (about £6.30) then that starts to look like astonishingly good value compared to the average UK town centre pub.
Pennine Lines w/c 17 July 2023
One of the things I think is great about climbing is it’s one of those pursuits where a relatively small set of skills and knowledge can go a long way. Ideally gained early on in your career and well embedded so you can dredge them up from the back of your mind when required, just a few nuggets of know-how can gain you access to some pretty special places and stunning scenery.