Back in Sheffield now! Travelled up through France to Font, where I had a couple of wonderful days - a bit warm for the slopers but so what? Audrey called in for a few days on her way to a bouldering world cup on Reunion Island, and the weather held out for enough time to get properly tired, then a bad forecast encouraged me to hit the road back to the UK. It had been four months since I’d had to deal with the horrendous traffic, and omnipresent fear of speed cameras, and it wasn’t much fun.

Back in Sheffield, I have a new place to live and a long list of things to do. I did my first Peak coaching session of the year on Saturday, and remember why I enjoy it so much - we had a real fairytale ending to the day. On Sunday (yesterday) I went up to the best bouldering area in the Peak District, and as usual, there was nobody there! I was joined by Audrey Seguy, then later Jamie Veitch. It was great to be cleaning off problems and running around the place looking for more gems - climbing there feels like finding an area of Fontainebleau that’s never been climbed on, even though I’m sure most of the problems have been done, it often doesn’t feel like that!

< Left Audrey Seguy on an unnamed, ungraded problem on Peak Gritstone, looks good, doesn’t it. When you’ve held the jump to the sloper - you’ve got to mantle it!

So, the plan is to spend my time coaching, and working on the two books that are currently in production - in particular Winter Climbing+ which I’m producing for Rockfax with Neil Gresham and Ian Parnell - I picked up a huge batch of photos from Ian last week, so lots of work going on with that one. Winter+ will be out for this winter.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are closed.