Bursting into Life

Mike Lee on Spitfire, The Anvil

Spring is here and strings of vegetation are wriggling from the earth, a bit like the veins in my forearms...

If you've survived a winter of indoor training and have no injuries, this is the time to be getting out on the early season sports routes, transferring bouldering strength to those fuzzy crux moves of that old project. Building up stamina is a painful necessity and hours of burning up the forearms pays dividends for the trad routes over the summer - after all that's what sport climbing and bouldering was invented for, was it not? How times change!

Bouldering news has been a bit thin, but Dumby has seen new eliminates, especially Dave Mac's quick ascent of the Totality eliminate. He also knocked off the last line on the Heather Hat in Glen Nevis - the obvious slopers through the right hand side of the roof, at a MacLeod '8a+'... as a local, this will no doubt be a 'local's' sandbag!

Also at Dumby Will Atkinson has been eating up the hard classics with friends, producing a nice smorgasbord of video here entitled 'Dumby Dosage'. Smooth climbing on the Rock all round lads, rather than round lads climbing smooth rock.



Stewart Brown and said Will Atkinson proved that the old sports testpieces hold no challenge any more for the Facebook generation (I guess the pre-wall era you could call the Coalface Generation) - anyway, both youths flashed Hamish Teds and Nic Duboust despatched Marlena second visit after failing narrowly on the previous onsight.

Steepness at the Anvil...

Pierre Fuentes visited the NW and discovered the best problems in Scotland as well as the 'Scottish side-effect' of rubber fetishism (turning up to the boulder in wellies with big tarpaulins and large mattresses) ... Richie Betts is the ubermeister of tarpaulin fetishism, I'm sure there's a website for this but I'm too scared to Google it.


For any boulderers interested in remote and new stones to climb on, I'll be producing an ebook end of the year called 'The Book of Lost Stones' which is exactly what it says it is: a compendium of giant stones lost in places awaiting a little attention. Some of these stones I've found on journeys, some were tip-offs and of course many still remain to be found, but the book will hopefully encourage folk to get out with their mats and climb to their potential... some of these stones have truly futuristic lines and are geological works of art, while some are moss-clad loners with the odd incredible line. I'll provide accurate grid refs and approach notes as well, so all that remains is for you to go climb them. Anyone wanting to add a stone to this list (if they're not keeping them for projects) just email me a jpeg and details, I'll patch it into the book.


Lost Stones...

Speaking of lost stones, the old Galloway project stone, discovered by Tim Rankin a number of years ago has been found by Roddy McKenzie.: it's an attractive granite bloc with some mighty hard lines to go, we await Roddy's attentions with keen anticipation...


Popular posts from this blog

Vertical Landscapes: Exploring Glasgow's Hidden Bouldering

Image
With the new guide to Glasgow Bouldering forthcoming, and with the last two years spent scouring our local landscapes for vertical diversion, many of us discovered a closer, more nuanced appreciation of climbing and how it helps maintain mental wellbeing as much as physical. The big mountains and wilderness landscapes were for the first time excluded from access and our pandemic taught us all to appreciate the landscapes on our doorstep. Even the urban world has its own small wildernesses and landscapes to immerse ourselves in for a while. For me, the daily walk in lockdown occasionally became a hunt for an esoteric piece of rock spied on the OS map or Google Earth. Rumours of boulders and mythologies of obscure rock were hunted down to help feed a hunger for the vertical. Even Dumbarton Rock was out of range, lying outside of the Glasgow City boundary. It's a venue which famously makes the blood run cold, with fiercely exposed overhanging routes, highball boulder problems and cl
Read more

The Lost Township of Grulin on Eigg

Image
‘The Stony Place’ as it translates, the archaeological notes on the RCAHMS database for Eigg, state baldly the lost humanity of Grulin as early as an 1880 OS survey map: ‘…eighteen unroofed buildings, six enclosures and a field-system’. Now a scheduled monument and memorialised as a ‘depopulated settlement’, though it is not obvious if the verb is passive or aggressive, Grulin Uachdrach (Grulin Upper) is, like Hallaig on Raasay, a place of violent silence and resonance. Who lived here and why was the site abandoned? If it were not in Scotland, suspicions might fall to the climate, remoteness and apparent unsustainability of the stony place, a rabble of large rocks under the steep slopes of An Sgurr, but the carefully constructed walls tell us it was once a thriving township – the kilns, folds and blackhouse walls integrated with the giant boulders such as Clach Hosdail. In 1853 the whole of the village of Grulin, both upper and lower, housed fourteen families who were forced to l
Read more

Great Mountain Crags of Scotland

Image
Ages ago, oh, well only 7 years I'd say, I recall discussing the idea of a grand book on Scottish mountain crags with Guy Robertson and Adrian Crofton, a kind of regional upgrade and remix of Extreme Rock / Cold Climbs . They wanted to create something grand and poetical, giving the landscape as much presence as the climbing, and mixing the best writing with the best photography. It was a 'Big Stone Country' project and one too big for a small independent publisher. It gradually grew into a concept requiring significant resource and commitment, possibly even beyond Trustee based publishing such as the SMC. The history of publishing Scotland's climbing has now over a century of documentation. The first SMC journal was in 1890 (the journal including a chapter on Arran bouldering in 1897!) and it has kept a diligent and accurate record ever since, as well as including fine articles and writing over the decades. W.P. Haskett Smith produced volumes of guides in the
Read more