Andrew Smith: 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...