Pennine Lines w/c 12 February 2024
Facing away from the afternoon sun, with boulders lurking among the twisted boughs of the trees, slow to dry but offering welcome shelter from strong westerlies in winter, with a few tall crag-based lines looming above the boulders, on the right day it’s a great spot to find a bit of peace. This part of the South Peak didn’t find its way onto the cover of Grit Blocs by accident.
Pennine Lines w/c 5 February 2024
The bouldering is probably due a renaissance that will never happen, as it too is sort of unfashionable by today’s trends. There’s a lot of traverses, and a lot of holds which whilst not being that small per se, or sharp, are somehow just too crimpy or over-positive for comfort. Doing your comp-style problems down the wall isn’t really going to prepare you for this. Neither is all the board sessions on smooth lovingly crafted pinches. You’ve got to get into the pure filth, with a lot holds comprising various fingertip-bruising lumps you have to muller your hands into violently. Kudos wall in particular is one of those places you need to burn two or three sessions here just to deaden your finger pulp before you’re going to get anywhere. I suppose most people aren’t keen to make that sort of investment of time into it. The same goes for the hard routes - Zeke, Caviar, Dangerous Brothers, Tribes, The Sissy, even Salar and To Old To Be Bold can feel like feel like finger ruiners.
Pennine Lines w/c 29 January 2024
The S7 mat covered an area of ground about the size of the phone you’re reading this on, hence the yellow target on the mat was a fortuitous addition. When you stared down between your shaking legs you at least had something to aim for, no matter how statistically slim your odds of hitting it were. You were aiming for the bull but considered yourself a winner if the dart even stuck in that sort of cabinet thing with the doors that you hang a dartboard in. Bounce-outs were common. The set of on-the-fly calculations and seat-of-pants dead reckoning required to land was on a par with the successful return of Apollo 13. Nevertheless, it totally changed the world for us, as it was already starting to change climbing over the next decade.
Pennine Lines w/c 25 September 2023
Hawkcliffe was a bit of a surprise really for more than one reason - I was not expecting such an impressive crag, for such a relatively obscure venue. The rock architecture is formidable; there’s some HUGE buttresses and big bold looking routes with the odd peg (pegs that I assume whoever placed them wouldn’t have gotten away with at a more popular grit crag). The ramparts of fine-grained rock emerge from a steep tangle of rhododendrons, moss covered bushes, slippy travelator-like mud and abandoned conference-venue chairs. It’s like Wharnecliffe meets Gladiators in a crack lounge.
Pennine Lines w/c 18 September 2023
Grades are one of the things about climbing that we can’t live with, but we can’t live without. They are inevitable to some extent, but we often use them badly, we ask too much of them, and we use them inappropriately. Granted, at best they are a noble attempt to form part of a theoretically democratic dialogue, to convey information usefully, and can give people some form of inspiration and maybe much need validation, provide a lot of talking points over post-climbing drinks in pubs and online.
Pennine Lines w/c 11 September 2023
When looking back at previous Septembers in my photo archive it’s clear that this month can be characterised by see-sawing between sub-par attempts at gritstone bouldering while it’s still too warm, and limestone barrel-scraping. Always feeling like it’s the arse-end of the lime season, enthusiasm wearing thin, evening daylight rapidly deserting us, and the anything-is-possible endless summer vibe of late spring a distant memory.
Pennine Lines w/c 4 September 2023
September always feels like the natural starting point of something to me. I’m sure a few people reading this who have kids or work (or worked) in education might agree. It feels like it fits with the natural cadence of life - not just the new school year but also the seasons changing. You’re already aware that the evenings are drawing in, the bracken at the crags is starting the brown up at the edges a little. Speaking personally it always feels like a new year more than the actual New Year does.
Pennine Lines w/c 28 August 2023
But moving beyond the nuts and bolts of relaying information to you, guidebooks at their best are passports not only to X, Y or Z problems on the ground; long before you even set foot at the crag they are fuel for the fires of the imagination to burn. Although the pages of any guide are crammed full of words and photos they act as a sort of blank canvas to sketch out any one of thousands of possibilities played out in your mind’s eye. We can all be heroes when reading a guidebook. Every day is perfect weather, every hold feels good, every move made with confidence. Anything is possible.
Pennine Lines w/c 21 august 2023
‘Stuff’ - each item in of itself relatively benign; each one to solve a problem, to make things easier. To enhance performance. But in another way each one contributes to creating a problem, to changing the experience, diluting it, getting in the way of what’s good about bouldering in the first place - the simplicity. And suddenly five boulderers plus all their gear and pads would no longer fit into a Nissan Micra.
Pennine Lines w/c 14 august 2023
As I mention once or twice in Grit Blocs, in the world of gritstone bouldering we tend to look up to Fontainebleau; we borrow Font grades, and we use ‘Font style’ as the highest accolade we give to a problem. But the weird thing about British climbing’s relationship with Font is our tendency to characterise the climbing there as being exclusively rounded topouts on rippled slopers, reducing it to a stereotype and ignoring the wealth of climbing styles on offer. Font is in fact pretty well equipped with savage crimpy walls, horrendous cracks, tendon-snapping pocket pulling, steep basic pulling, one-movers, long stamina problems, low physical roofs, highballs deserving of route status and just about everything in between.
Pennine Lines w/c 7 August 2023
Fallen Slab Lip is a traditional problem, done regularly before any of the modern-era guide or apps existed, before anyone had pads, and before it had a name. The meat of the problem, the original thing, starts by hanging the big hold/ledge on the nose then hand traverses the lip up rightwards through a tricky sequence, a few really good sloper moves, until reaching an obvious good hold where you sort of run out of rock and are forced to roll over and top out.
Pennine Lines w/c 31 July 2023
We talk a lot about friction when discussing gritstone climbing, and it’s never better than when dry grit takes a hit from a passing shower, then dries off in a keen breeze. Something happens there; the friction goes sky high, even in summer. Maybe it’s just the fact that it cleans off the surface chalk and debris and just refreshes the holds. Maybe the water evaporating off actually cools the surface a little. But whatever it is it’s real and you know it when you find it. And find it you certainly can at this time of year in this sort of weather.
Pennine Lines w/c 24 July 2023
One unexpected bonus of Britain’s political shambles of recent years combined with spiralling cost of living and rampant corporate profiteering here at home means that Switzerland now barely feels any more expensive than the UK. Certainly when you collapse into a remote mountain hut at then end of an exhaustingly nerve-wracking 10-hours dodging crevasses on a melting glacier and order a pint of helicopter-supplied Swiss lager for 7 francs (about £6.30) then that starts to look like astonishingly good value compared to the average UK town centre pub.
Pennine Lines w/c 17 July 2023
One of the things I think is great about climbing is it’s one of those pursuits where a relatively small set of skills and knowledge can go a long way. Ideally gained early on in your career and well embedded so you can dredge them up from the back of your mind when required, just a few nuggets of know-how can gain you access to some pretty special places and stunning scenery.
Pennine Lines w/c 10 July 2023
When all anyone was supposed to be interested in was route climbing, Baslow took a back seat to its near neighbours. It lacks the stature and the big routes of Curbar, it’s not equipped with classic after classic for the slab climber like Froggatt, and the rock quality for the most part is nowhere near as good as Gardoms. So Baslow is a really the underdog of the Eastern Edges, but viewed through a pair of bouldering eyes this underdog has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Pennine Lines w/c 3 July 2023
In climbing circles we talk a lot about the rock, understandably, but at this time of year it’s really two types of vegetation which are dominating the scenery of the moorland grit crags. Firstly, my least favourite aspect of the Pennines: bracken.
Pennine Lines w/c 26 June 2023
This was one I actually had lined up to feature in Grit Blocs once I’d got some shots of Ned attempting this at the end of a long day mopping up some other photos for the book. It would have at the very least got a mention in the Swivel Finger section, or there was a chance it could have bumped that problem out entirely, as it looked superb, and as a long-standing project carried a bit of gravitas. In the end I visited once more with Ned but again we left empty handed, and in fact it took Ned until this April to seal the deal.
Pennine Lines w/c 19 June 2023
When you've lived in the same place for a long time it's easy to fall into complacency and routine. Now, I'm not saying routine in climbing is necessarily wrong, and in fact I'm a strong believer that building a relationship with a place, with a crag or venue, can be a very a positive thing. Generally speaking it's got a lot going for it instead of the fashionable but consumerist approach of just flitting around picking off low hanging fruit. However, I am as guilty as anyone of falling to the trap of frequenting the same places each year almost by default.
Pennine Lines w/c 12 June 2023
We're only a couple of days in to the genuinely hot weather so at this point I'm reticent to go all-in on the woe-is-me patter about it being too warm in the Peak. Especially because if previous summers are any indicator of what's to come you can guarantee in a few weeks time we'll be looking back on today's weather with a sense of nostalgia for those days when it was comparatively cool.
Pennine Lines w/c 5 June 2023
As I return from a family holiday in Northumberland this weekend to the scene of most of the moor atop Burbage North as far as Lady Canning’s Plantation still being out of bounds due to fires still smouldering, it serves as something of a wakeup call to the world we live in now. Namely; it’s barely June, it’s not even been that hot yet, and we had a very damp winter and spring, and nevertheless we’re already seeing pretty substantial fire risk. This doesn’t bode well if we have another heatwave summer.