Posts

Showing posts from 2005

Scottish Gobstoppers from 2005

Image
This year has seen a continued exploration of Scotland's vast bouldering potential, with many new venues and ascents from a growing critical mass of boulderers. The sheer remoteness of some venues has meant repeats will be slow in coming, but these are some of the most impressive confirmed bouldering ascents of the year. February at Dumby and Dave MacLeod has been busy on the rocks, with the first major ascent of the year: 'Smokescreen' V12. He describes it thus: “The second big project to go in the Firestarter cave. Start just left of the flat lip jug with both hands in a good slot. Levitate up and slightly left on atrocious glassy slopers until it is possible to make a technical slap right to a tiny ripple on a smooth ramp. Go again for the High Flyer jug and finish up this. devious and technical with a backbreaking landing. Hardest bloc at Dumby in Feb 2005.� Dave MacLeod on The Perfect Crime V13 March 2005, Dumbarton. An invigorated Dave Macleod climbs the link-up

Muchalls Shore

Image
Thanks to Stuart Stronach for pics of an exciting new venue: Muchalls Shore, south of Portlethen. Stuart reports: Thankyou Mister Limpet V1 "It’s a few miles south of Portlethen – a broad pebbly beach with assorted boulders, craglets and pinnacles that now offers nearly 100 problems, mostly very easy but with a few up to V5. As such, it will hopefully attract those who find the Portlethen circuit a little too intense, and/or those new to bouldering. The mostly friendly landings also make a pleasant change from the boulders and rocks on other coastal spots. That said, there are a few problems which require a ‘shallow water soloing’ mentality, including Chris Fryer’s Smile Around the Face. Smile Around the Face V2 Downsides? Well, it’s more tidal than Portlethen, so barnacles can be a problem when the tide is out, and the problems are spread out over a larger area. Potential for more problems? The area immediately north of the current developm

Solstice Rock

Image
Port Nis - pic by Helen Suzanne The winter solstice, 6 hours of daylight, the sun skimming low over a watery horizon, driven by a Hebridean wind. The rain lashes the window like sand and the wind hokes in the chimneys looking for something lost... it was only to be expected on a winter bouldering trip to Lewis. The land here is romantically bleak and skirted with a coastal fringe of hardbitten gneiss: veins of ancient colour run through it and everything has shape in it, like frozen creatures in the midst of some weird metamorphosis. The old myths of being turned to stone if you look back are evident everywhere on this howling coastline. A museum of rock where the pinnacles, the waves of rock, the faces in stone, the tortured headlands, exhibit the faces of a previous life beyond all memory. This is where the old Gaelic stories are born out of the exposed stones and given the cloth of meaning. Good people live here

Clashfarquhar - Yukon Afternoon

Image
Some winter afternoons in Scotland repay persistence. Driving around lost in a warren of roads and dead-end villages. A rumour of fine new rock , good landings, perfect sea-swirl schist, veins of gold movement... Tim Rankin has been extending the Aberdeen bouldering scene south along the sea cliffs of Portlethen, adding about 40 problems and his hardest to date at about V11. Gold Rush V5 Unsure of the precise location, I kept bashing along the coves and platforms until it became obvious where the bouldering was to be had - sun-drenched walls of gold-quartzed schist, solitude and a breathing ocean. With the sun sinking like a slow flare, I pitched the mats and got cranking on a big boulder. The rest was a blur of movement and failure and occasionally success. Yukon Afternoon V3

Industria

Image
The first snows on the southern highlands now have a wider vista behind the the slow dismantling of the old distillery, like time being reversed. All the bricks being removed, taken away, turned back into dust and clay, buried back in the earth... and still we return to Dumbarton, dismantling the old, forging the new. Winter has come early this November... it's bouldering weather - time to get on the slopers you couldn't hang in summer, time to enjoy the brief thrill of rubber biting into smooth basalt, sticking and allowing the torque to be applied... letting the power surge smoothly without the clutch slipping. Dave MacLeod is very close to the roof link-up under Gorilla , saying he feels way stronger than last year (!) - the body tension in him is locked taut as an Erskine bridge cable, which is the least required to maintain the rigid architecture between fingers and heels. Dave MacLeod working 'Pressure' Someone took a chainsaw to the old 2HB sycamore, a rather ra

'The Inchbae Intrusion'

Image
Sounds like a bad thriller, jets screaming overhead, somewhere in Scotland, someone on the run across the heather, pursued by guns and dogs, hiding behind boulders... Ian Taylor had seen them as well, glacial drift and erratics all over the place, in dumpy moraine hillocks and drumlins. Once or twice I almost ended up in Black Bridge craning my neck out the side-window. Then one day I stopped, put the wellies on and went to satisfy the rock-thirst again. Situated between Garve and Ullapool, these boulders are mostly hidden from view, but a litter of small ones by 'Lubfearn' (the alder loop), under the choked throat of Altguish, were recently attended to by myself and Ian Taylor. Here's what Ian found as description for the area: 'originally a porphyritic granite with abundant orthoclase phenocrysts, but is now a coarse biotite-granite gneiss in which the phenocrysts are largely deformed to augen wrapped round by a steaked out matrix of quartz, biotite, potash felspar

Border Raid

Image
Shape and movement moulded into one! Okay, it's not Scotland, but while storms rattled chimneys in the far North West, a late autumn sun skidded low over the post-harvest Cheviots and if the Tweed had deigned to meander further south, we'd have a mini-Fontainebleau in Scotland. But the Dovehole boulders rightly remain part of 'the coonty'. Just past Coldstream, the road bends sharply through Milfield and a forest break on the east flanks of these gentle hills reveals a nest of sandstone sculptures... a perfect haven for an autumn afternoon, my only company a few pheasants ratcheting off over the stubble like clockwork-sprung toys. Some spots are perfect microcosms of movement. The wind-imagined shapes of these sandstone stumps rise like remembered dunes from an ancient land, their original domes and rope-twists smoothed out into half-seen shapes and mythical softness. The movement is quick like half-remembered dreams, you flow through the easy meditations on generous po

Glen Etive Bouldering

Image
Storm Boulder Cubby has reported his problems on the Etive boulders at www.cubbyimages.com and I paid a visit on a squally day in the mid-autumn westerlies. I stuck the wellies on and stomped along the boggy path in driving rain until it became obvious the shoreline was the better approach. The rain passed and the sun came out, the first two boulders nestling like gleaming dinosaur eggs on the brink of the loch. The problems require sit starts, with the traverses being the classic lines. Micron 2000 Boulder - Jo George, courtesy of www.cubbyimages.com Between Heaven and Hel l is a desperate traverse clockwise from the west slab lip round the boulder, I was glad it was soaked in a way, but a fresh wind and sun dried it off instantly, so I decided to come back to it... Cubby rates it as an absolute cracker, and a hard Font 7b, that's about V8 in modern currency. Silver Surfer is an excellent rockover problem on this boulder. For more info, see Cubby's site. A further 10 min

Portlethen

Image
Guy Robertson on 'The Aberdonian' V8 ss Portlethen. On the main area, Tim Rankin added a hard sit start called The Aberdonian , which he says is an unmissable problem if you’re climbing to that level and in the area. The stand-up is easier, but also classic status amongst the problems here. John Watson added a link-up on the Bad Buoy - start up the Bad Buoy sit start to the break, traverse right to a crux cut-loose and desperate little nubbin sloper to rock up the flake problem above the mezzanine. Glasgow Bhoy V6 pic... Tim Rankin has further devloped the harbour area, mainly round the big stone of the Bad Buoy Boulder and Dave’s Roof across the wee bay. Hopefully we’ll see a complete topo for Portlethen in the near future, as it now has hundreds of excellent gems. The best problems are Pete’S Lip - the full lip traverse of the boulder skipping over to the smaller boulder to finish along that; the seaward arete of Moon Lightning and the steep central wall from a sit s

Acapulco Zawn - Dawros Head, Donegal

Image
Acapulco E3 5c Acapulco Zawn - a wild traipse over a storm-smoothed wall, moving boldly between thin breaks until forced out over the sea... this photo was taken in 1999, I believe. A perfect sea-cliff route.

Temperance V5 Dawros Head Donegal

Image
Bouldering out of a blow-hole on a wave-cut platform, up stepped overhangs, the crux of this was maintaining body tension and hanging the slopers long enough to reach a three-finger crimp and wind-eroded jugs in the seams of schist above... I spent a good hour trying to find the balance and still my body enough to keep the hand on that left sloper... too much momentum meant falling over, too little power meant a slip back into your own gravity: a bit like the balance in surfing a wave - rock is a static wave that has to be surfed upwards with the same attention to balance and control.

The Famine Road

Image

Meta Bouldering

Metadolerite. what the hell was that? I flicked through the South Donegal appendix to discover it is an igneous intrusion, but very, very old. An original intrusion into very old schist, this itself had been metamorphosed several times into a dense smooth gabbro of sorts, with rough faces and unbreakable holds, even the wee edges were like diamond. There was sea-washed schist as well, smooth and faceted, or rippled into finger jugs where baby periwinkles lodged under the fingernails... sea-bouldering in Donegal is elemental. Traipsing out over zawns, heel-hooking out along wave-cut platforms, hanging to a nugget-hard residue of the earth's previous thoughts. Seals raised curious buoy-like heads, sniffed the air for human sweat, curious at the odd struggles. A russet mink sniffed along the ledges, oblivious and upwind, then vanished into the rocks somewhere. The machair is bitten down by late summer winds, the heather dessicated, mushrooms shrivelled in dry cow pats, asphodel like

Engramma

Image
larrybane Originally uploaded by jsw2004 .

Engram 1

I have touched a lot of rock in the last couple of decades and wanted to try and retrieve the emotions of it a little bit better, rather than just saying, oh yes, I've done that... and that...that too. If you took this attitude to climbing, there'd be no point moving at all, you'd have just gone through physical motions like going to work and it would all have no context at all. A climbing friend once said he felt strange that he might just be remembered for 'being able to hang on small bits of rock for ages" and this is the fear we have, that it is all meaningless. I don't believe it is - most of us understand our climbing intuitively and it is a spiritual thing that just happens as you climb and is contiguous... no need to talk about it. I would feel the same, but also think it is worthwhile bringing something to the mountain or the stone other than just more desire... an echoing ear at least, or an engram eye. It is good when moving on new rock and old memor

Phosphorous Fur

Deep in the cave something... like a light when you crack your head on an overhang, but in a green tinge, the stuff you can't focus on... The problem above me lay still, the magnetised relationship of holds divorcing into just being rock, and I remembered where I'd seen this before... on Arran, twenty years ago as a youth, during a midnight swim opposite the Holy Island. The water bloomed around me in billions of phosphorescent living things. Either the sea was hallucinating, or I'd got over-excited and pee'd in the great swimming pool of life... it races through twenty years to paste in the celluloid...amazing how memory covers ground so fast. Boulderers find themselves in odd places, like an Indiana Jones extra lost in the wrong canyon, eyed by the beasts, suddenly nowhere near the cameras and action. I sit on the mat for a while and absorb the green gold glowing away happily beside me. Perfect time to be swallowed whole by the only sabre-toothed tiger in Scotland. T

Mohammed-Ali-Boulder

Image
Mohammed-Ali-Boulder-1-web Originally uploaded by jsw2004 . Rope-A-Dope V4

How Bouldering Turned Me Blind

A weekend of untouched boulders and hero stones, fine rewards in lost places, I pay thanks to the golden ratio: for every good day we must suffer so many bad... the necessary trade-off of awry days, bad weather, midgies and plain stupidity... ‘I could see them from Glen Etive, one eye on the road, the other chameleon eye scouring the hillside above. The car kept lurching into roadside ruts on the single track so I stopped and pulled out a pair of binoculars. Shakily, I held them against my spectacles and briefly granite came into gleaming focus - sun beamed off clean white prows and my heart leapt with bouldery anticipation. But I could be wrong: I had been fooled before – stone giants had become lichenous dwarfs when I arrived. I tried to judge their size by the shrubs and trees around – they seemed to belittle the shrubs and respectably diminish the proportions of a stand of Scots Pine high on the hill. I resolved to climb them. The only problem was a Great Barrier Reef of Rhod
Image
Stronachlachlar dynamics
Image
'The Menin Road' www.stonecountry.co.uk

Give Me the Strength to Let Go!

We wind up the A82 looking for fully-formed icefalls. This winter has had a late cold snap lasting weeks, but little snow-cover in the west, so the icefalls tend to form brittle chandeliers and crash off in the blazing sun like wind-chimes from rotten string. We stop at Orchy and binocular into the Coire... Fahrenheit 451 hasn't quite touched down and looks like the afternoon sun will strip it, but 'Salamander Gully' has a thin rake of snow leading to a fat icefall, so we bash in before the strengthening March sun creeps round Dorainn and gets its superman eyes on the ice. Climbing in Scotland is so often to do with opportunism... I'm reminded of five years ago, on a day up here with Murray Dale... "Oh My God, give me the strength to let go!" I never really understood this statement. It was uttered by a friend on the crux of a new and rather unexpected HVS on a Donegal sea-cliff. Then, it was a plea in extremis, later it was the humorous route-name with the st

Soul Traffic

The traffic conspires with the balance of mind and inertia chokes the city, but the sky is blue high above. By the time I'm at the Erskine Bridge, I'm opening the window and pitying the Tollbooth guy. The rest is freedom up the A82 to Arrochar, bar the odd Citylink bus... but we're all headed north, that's fine. I check the Brack, too lean, the Cobbler is stripped. I bank on Miseach and head up to the Tharsuinn corrie, looking for big stones on the way. The north groove that is Philosopher's Gully is lean but icy. I wind up some Grade 3 icy drapes to cut across to the gully as a snow-storm beats in behind. The sun is just behind the crags now and there is that curious Godlight and all these millions of snowflakes driven up towards the light like millions of little manic souls all jostling to get there first... soul traffic... I disappear like a sinner into the black-walled gully. It goes fine and has good icy diversions, especially at the top slab, where I commit t
Image
'Gift Egg' V3 Kilta - Skye Photo courtesy of http://socbloc.blogspot.com/

Gift Eggs

Like gift eggs, boulders can be given, presented to each other, it is almost our duty to reserve stones for others, like putting the first fish back, to witness second hand the freedom gained, movement by proxy, slipping away in someone else's timestream... Si had left these stones, silent and untouched, overlooking the Raasay currents, his back rooked, maybe enjoying the gifting, the curiosity of others' movements, the establishment of different rhythms and limits... The gulls wheeling over like screaming heads, the Sound whipped up into quiffs and the chill blue of winter sun in the water... one of those days when the wind blows through the very minute construction of the body, through the chemistry of flesh, you're transparent and part of the landscape, as malleable as vapour and just as fluid, moving over the rocks like wind, sifting, drifting, merging... The currents of other climbers move in and out of each other, their company like speeded winds clash and merge in st
Image
Why do I climb? www.stonecountry.co.uk
Image
'An Garradh', or 'the Copse' - the Stronachlachlar boulders
‘An Garradh’ ‘She is a curious ghost following me through the boulders in the copse. I don’t see her until I gain the height and see the shadowed grass of her family’s run-rigs, the melted rubble of her shieling. It is the late spring sun which brings her out to play, to join me on the boulders. Everyone gains vision on top of a boulder, it makes you stall the moment, swathe into the current of time, opening vistas from their channel, voices echo like birds startled in the woods. You can see for miles here. She clutches her skinny raw legs and bites her knees, soaking up the glory of her Highland home, tranquil in the sun, a lookout at the junction of these perpendicular lochs, watching the smoke of her house rise into the still air of a clear Scottish day. She is curious why I climb, what are you doing? She clutches and frowns, am I here to harm? No, of course not, I reassure. Why do you touch the rocks? I clutch my own knees and gaze into the past, the shieling rebuilds its