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Showing posts from March, 2012

Glen Lednock

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Spring in Glen Lednock... red kites, buzzards, curlews, lapwings, munro-baggers and boulderers. Everything out at it, we attacked the blocs and shredded tips on this particularly vicious geology - a compact quartz schist, every pocket like a Piranha's kiss. Just grazing the rock takes the skin off your knuckles, so working a sequence out mentally, and visualizing your moves, is good advice for this venue. Or just watch someone else and absorb the beta... anything to save skin and allow more than the obligatory two hours before the tips start throbbing. Whilst there are some good 7th grade testpieces such as Tsunami, Manic Stupor, Monochrome and Reiver's Logic, the most fun is to be had circuiting the best problems around Font 5 to 6b (a Font red circuit, or Lednock 'blood' circuit). The outlook over the Sput Rolla waterfall and down Glen Lednock is idyllic. Updated list of problems at: https://sites.google.com/site/boulderscotland/glen-lednock

Stone Play 2 - The Art of Bouldering revisited

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One of the unfortunate consequences of doing a full-colour photo-book with essays is neglecting to give enough space for the written word. We published Stone Play - the Art of Bouldering in 2007 and it was  well received as a book which gave bouldering a voice outside of the traditional climbing sphere, allowing it a little philosophy of its own. However, many articles had to be cut to allow a fuller complement of photography, one of the most expensive and unnecessary mistakes I've made in publishing! Since then, much more has been written on the aesthetics of bouldering and there is a vibrant and growing literature to match its online presence in video and image. So, we've decided to revisit the book, but this time reducing the fascination with the image (heavily saturated in our online age) and allowing the written word to coax out the subtle and elusive experience of bouldering. On re-reading, the words are generally so much more adept at capturing the fluid inner-