Another flash-in-the-pan blog?

No! :-) Just in case you were thinking that this is one of those blogs that someone has set-up, briefly maintained and then abandoned, that isn't the case at all. We just haven't had chance to get out climbing in ages. Hopefully soon...

Self portrait

I haven't been able to get out climbing for a while now so I don't have anything new to write about here. So how about a self portrait?


The beautiful old car was found on an industrial estate. Remind you of Christine at all? I also wanted to do a picture with me sitting in the driver's seat but the thought of Christine was entirely too spooky so I chickened out. I shall return with backup and do the interior pic! :-)

View of Kingussie Crag

This is a view over Kingussie to the crag where Katie and I go climbing. The image was produced using the High Dynamic Range process, compiled from 7 exposures at 1-stop intervals.


That picture was taken from up on the hill at Ruthven Barracks. I did this photo of the Barracks while I was there, also an HDR.

Jamie Andrew @ Equal Adventure

I photographed the Equal Adventure Festival at the weekend for the Press & Journal newspaper. This event gave teams of disabled and able-bodied people an opportunity to participate in a wide range of sporting activities. One of the people taking part was climber Jamie Andrew who lost both hands and both feet while climbing in the Alps in 1999. This is the picture that was published in the paper, showing Jamie walking a slackline.

Psycho Vertical

I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I got back from work last night. Andy Kirkpatrick had been in to Katie's shop, Cairngorm Mountain Sports in Aviemore, so she got him to sign a copy of his book Psycho Vertical for me:

Up another grade: Hard Severe (seconded)

Katie and I were back at Kingussie Crag tonight with Martin. We'd been away from climbing for a week as both of us were ill for a few days with a nasty little stomach bug. We only did one route tonight, graded as hard severe, The Groove:


Martin lead the route, placing gear while I belayed him:


I love looking up at the climb ahead of me and seeing the rope trailing through quickdraws instead of just a dangling top-rope. It feels like proper climbing!


You can learn things from photos and videos of yourself climbing. One thing that jumps out at me from tonight's photos is that I'm starting to trust my shoes, and getting used to how grippy they are. Look at the tiny toe holds I'm using in the next few shots...






Nothing much to say about this next pic, we just both like it :-)


Hey look how far I climbed!


This route was fun, fun, fun. There was a lot of it, it had just the right balance of difficulty, and there were a few "nowhere to go" bits that I managed to get past by just going for it and clinging on for dear life. Very satisfying. Before I even finished it I was looking forward to doing it again some day.

Once I'd got to the top, Martin showed me how to set-up a belay point and how to belay from above, which I haven't done before. No photos of that part of the evening as both cameras were back down at the bottom of the crag. And sadly no photos of Katie climbing, but I do want to mention that she did it a lot faster than I did.

Then it was time to abseil down! I had a chance to try abseiling at Dunrobin Castle a couple of months ago, but I turned it down. I had sort of wanted to do it, but I realised that my motivation was to be able to tell people that I'd done it, not because I wanted to do it for myself. That would have been the wrong reason. But tonight, learning to abseil was part of my mission to learn how to climb, so I did it. I was controlling my own descent but Martin still had me on a safety line, although he slackened it off about 2/3 of the way down.


I think you can see from the body language in this next shot that I wasn't entirely confident about abseiling! :-)


This next photo shows one of the climbs that I'd like to do at some point in future. The route is called Left-Hand Crack and it goes straight up the middle of this big vertical slab. It's graded E1. I know there's no way I could do it at this time because there are no good rests and my arms aren't even close to strong enough yet, but it's good to have a goal...


Last pic for tonight, Katie and the moon:


Katie has started her own blog! Have a look: What Katie Did?

New crag, new grade: Severe (seconded)

Katie, Martin and I hit a new crag last night, Pinnacle Crag near Duntelchaig. I added three new routes to my ever-expanding logbook: Pinnacle Face, Right Angle and Tapered Groove.

Pinnacle Face, graded severe, is now my best outdoor grade, and it was also my first time seconding a climb. I was top-toped on Right Angle and Tapered Groove, both graded as very difficult. Katie also threw on a harness and squirrelled up Tapered Groove, with a much more confident and fluid climb than mine.

I met my match with the severe-graded Stepped Corner. The first 8-10 feet were so slippery that my shoes had no friction, and apart from two tiny foot holds it was all about arm strength, which I don't have enough of, so I failed. I did try, and tried, and tried, but basically just spent 10 minutes humping the leg of it before pathetically falling off, exhausted. My unconquerable determination will reign supreme next time! :-)

Top-roped an E1 :-)

Lots of successes (and a couple of failures) to report from the last few days, including my first climb of an E1 equivalent indoor route.

Katie and I had an epic 3-hour session at the wall in Inverness on Monday night, with me doing all of the climbing because Katie wasn't feeling well. There were a couple of routes that I wanted to tackle, both graded as HS (hard severe). There was one that looked very challenging due to the sparsity of holds and several sharp overhangs, so I started on the other route that looked easier:

Well good lord was it difficult!! I worked at it for hours and always ran out of steam at around the same point, my arms completely zapped of energy. I also had my first fall when I went for a hold that my by-then-feeble left hand couldn't grip.

So eventually I took a break from that route and tackled the one that I thought would be even more difficult:

Went straight up it, no problem! There were a couple of times when I thought the next move was beyond me, but there were good rest positions so I was able to take time and think about the moves. They all turned out to be fairly easy.

On Tuesday night we had another session with our instructor Martin. We went back to Kingussie Crag and spent a good couple of hours learning about fundamental safety techniques, such as how to correctly set-up an anchor point for a belay at the top of a climb:

An introduction to using a shunt to secure yourself to an anchor point while preparing the belay point at the top of the climb:

Martin demonstrating that the shunt does actually work!

I then had to take the shunt off the rope, put it on again myself under Martin's supervision, and (cautiously) go to the edge to prove to myself that it would hold:

With the belay point rigged at the top of the climb, we walked round to the bottom and did some work on knots. Homework from the previous session had been to find out how to tie-off the rope when belaying, and although the technique I had found was good, Martin soon demonstrated its weakness by asking me to tie it with a weighted rope, which I couldn't. He showed how it can be done even with a climber hanging on the other end of the rope, simply by crimping the rope hard against the belay plate:

I'd also been told to learn how to tie a clove hitch. I had learned the beginner's 2-handed way of tying it so Martin taught me a more useful 1-handed way, then had me tie myself on using that knot and lean back to prove that I could trust it:

Katie belaying Martin as he made his way up the Classic Crack route:

Martin was going to place gear all the way up the route, some of it bombproof and some of it weak, then I had to climb up (top-roped) and tell him how solid each piece was. Then I had to remove it, so Martin sent the nut tool down the rope:

One of the demo gear placements:

On my way up! This route is graded as difficult but I found it more challenging than my previous two outdoor climbs which had the same rating. Even though the route is at an angle, so there's less strain on your arms, there are far fewer good holds so you either have to "smear" (which I'm not comfortable doing yet) or keep the side of your foot firmly pressed against whatever shallow ledges you can find, so there's always the risk of sliding.

At the top and glad to be getting back to flat ground!

Nice views you get with this rock climbing lark...

Katie and I were back at the Inverness wall on Wednesday afternoon. Katie was fighting fit again and she stormed up an HVS (hard very severe) route. Naturally that meant I had to try something harder, so I had a go at this one -- graded F6A -- which is at the top end of HVS and the bottom end of the "extreme" E1:

This route was a real battle. Small and medium-sized finger holds, nothing really decent to get a grip on. Many times I had to precariously balance to shake my arms out, coaxing out every last bit of strength that I could find, and I was constantly having to cover my hands in chalk because I was sweating so much.

When I got to the crux move about 2/3 of the way up it took me several minutes to decide what I needed to do. I had to balance on a small hold on my left foot with my left hand on a 2-finger hold, then reach out with my right foot and get on to a shallow hold at full stretch. Then I had to shift my weight on to my right foot and, with my left foot, push off and upwards to reach for a tiny right hand hold, also at full stretch. I called to Katie to "watch me" on belay, took a few deep breaths, psyched myself up and went for it. Somehow, shouting for strength, I managed to grip the right hand hold for long enough to find another hold with my left hand, and that was the job done. Scooted up the last bit and came back down, dripping with sweat and pumped with pride. Awesome experience!

It's not truely an E1, not in my opinion at least. For a start it was inside. I was top-roped so I didn't need to worry about gear placement, and there was no serious risk of injury if I fell.

But the actual climbing was right at the edge of my current personal limit, and I had to work and make moves that I felt were almost sure to fail. I'd say this was a good achievement, only one month after I first set foot on a climbing wall.

Notes on beginner's gear

I'm guessing that most people's first experience of climbing nowadays will be at an indoor wall, either for (perceived) safety reasons or because such walls are more accessible than real rock.

Also by going to indoor walls you can avoid the cost of buying equipment, by renting it instead -- usually a harness, carabiner, belay plate and a pair of sticky shoes. All respectable walls should provide a helmet free of charge.

But my advice would be to buy your own gear as soon as you're sure that you will be climbing regularly. You're probably looking at £10+ hire charges per wall visit, and pretty soon that's going to add up to more than the cost of buying your own gear, which isn't as expensive as you might think.

Plus of course, once you've got it, you've got it. You'll get familiar with it. You'll be comfortable with it. You'll know that it has been stored and cared for correctly, so you'll trust it. And you can use it to climb at any wall or real rock route worldwide.

One lucky break I had in choosing my gear was that my girlfriend and climbing partner Katie is the manager of a mountain sports shop. So I was able to spend a relaxed, un-hurried afternoon at the shop, trying out various pieces of kit, listening to the pros and cons of each item, and finding what I was most comfortable with.

Here's the kit we put together:

Helmet
Black Diamond Half Dome

Harness
Wild Country Vision Ziplock Adjustable

Shoes
Five Ten Anasazi VCS (Onyx)

Carabina
DMM Belay Master

Belay plate
Wild Country VC Pro II

The whole package added up to less than £200.

Climbing gear is fairly competitively priced so there isn't much you could shave off that, maybe a few £££ here are there by going for lesser shoes and a more basic belay / carabiner, but really for the sake of a tenner you'd might as well get what's right for you.

If you're only going to climb at indoor walls then you could feasibly leave out the helmet to start with and "rent" one each time, which as I mentioned should be free. So that would bring you down to around the £150 mark to have all the gear you need to get started and avoid rental costs that would otherwise start to quickly build up.

The other major expense in starting to climb is the admission price for indoor walls, probably around £8 for private establishments or £6 for council-owned walls.

So see if you can find a wall that is part of a council membership scheme. For instance, Katie and I jointly pay £22 per month for membership of the Highland Council's High Life scheme, allowing us unlimited access to the large indoor wall at Inverness Leisure Centre, although it costs us around £10 in fuel to get there and back.

It is hoped that the Extreme Dream wall in Aviemore will soon join the High Life scheme, at which point we'll effectively have unlimited climbing training for just the cost of the High Life membership.

Bottom line: Climbing is an addictive hobby / pursuit / passion and you're going to want to do it as often as possible. Cut out the repeat costs as much as possible and it can be reasonably affordable.

First "real rock" climbs

Katie and I have completed our first climbs on real rock. We went to Kingussie Crag with our friend and instructor Martin Middleton, who guided us through two routes: Little Crack and The Slab. Both are rated as difficult but provide a fairly easy introduction to real rock climbing, much less strenuous than the easy indoor routes we've been doing so far.

Arriving at the crag:


Martin preparing gear at the base of Little Crack:


Looking up at Little Crack, quite excited by this point that I was about to have my first experience of climbing in the wild:


Katie and Martin:


Mmm, lots of lovely gear!


Katie belaying Martin on Little Crack so he could top-rope us:


Me on the first few steps of Little Crack, which are perhaps the most challenging of the whole route:


About half way up:


At the top with Martin:


Katie making a start on Little Crack:


Making progress:



At the top with Martin:


Martin giving us an introduction to gear placement:


Katie belaying Martin as he leads on The Slab and tells us a bit more about gear placement:


Katie making a start on The Slab:


What a poser! She did this move especially for the camera. I didn't even ask her to!


Nearly there...


Sadly no pictures of me on The Slab because the camera battery died, but I did do it, honest! :-) And jolly good fun it was too. Here's the view over Kingussie from the base: