I forget how pleasant and relaxing holidays where you don’t do much can be. When I was in my 20s the thought of going on a holiday away from rock used to fill me with horror - any time when traveling had to be dedicated exclusively to finding something to climb. I doubt if I left home on a trip anywhere without at least my boots and chalk bag in my luggage, even if it was a packed social weekend miles away from any climbing. They were a kind of security blanket.

Of course the pace of life was different - I didn’t work half as hard as I do now, and had no where near as many demands on my time. Nowadays a nice relaxing holiday away from climbing and, more importantly, the Internet, is essential.

Over Easter for the past few years we have spent a week in a series of Dutch holiday farmhouses - no danger of encountering anything to climb there, or any Internet for that matter. This year it seemed even more welcome after a hectic early year which has involved one book published and another taken to the brink of publishing. A short school term and the day-to-day complexities of UKClimbing have added to the workload.

So it was nice to pull up at a (rather large - see photo, and there were two other buildings) farm in rural Achterhoek in the Netherlands near a place called Borculo. In England this farmhouse would have been developed into 5 separate holiday cottages all charging a fortune. This particular organisation don’t seem too bothered about maximizing income from their asset and very grateful we were too.

On previous years these houses have been comparable pricewise to shabby UK holiday cottages with tiny rooms, carpets in the toilets and fridges that haven’t been properly cleaned for the last 5 years. This year the strength of the Euro has made it a little more expensive - Staatsbosbheer if you want the link, but you will need to be able to read Dutch. Not all Dutch holiday cottages are huge farmhouses - many are in purpose built holiday parks - but they are all relatively cheaper than the UK (Euro permitting) and you won’t ever find carpet in the toilet or a mucky fridge - or climbing!

The week passed without too much incident. One trip to the Dolphinarium at Hardewijk and several great bike rides. It was great to do very little actually.

On Monday it was back to the Internet and 453 emails and after a week I already feel like I need another holiday.

.. and everyone was there! Climbers on boulders and routes, walkers by the hundred and loads of paragliders - I even saw two teams busy on Count’s Buttress! It makes you realise why some issue on Stanage crops up at most BMC Peak Area meetings and why the place needs its own Access Forum.

We were just out for a family walk - a loop starting near the High Neb parking, dropping down in the general direction of North Lees farm but cutting back up towards the Plantation and onto the top of the Edge. From there the loop is easily closed down the Causeway and across by the Buckstone back to the car. Earlier in the day we had seen loads of people walking around in shorts and t-shirts but this means very little for Brits who will go out wearing next to nothing in any weather, especially on Friday nights! So we ignored the signs and the kid’s (Dutch) mother pre-prepared them in all sorts of coats, hats, gloves and scarves which of course all ended up hanging from my backpack by the time we got to the Plantation boulders. I felt like a right packhorse (as usual).

But it was worth it since the views were stunning.

Typos - don’t ya’ just hate ‘em!

The little tinkers lurk menacingly around a text as you construct it trying to jump in when you are not looking. Lazy or slow ones may get spotted, but most sneak through, especially if you drop your guard, which tends to happen in long projects as you are overcome by fatigue, boredom or complacency. Even easier sport is the text with multiple editors which offers many opportunities for the creative and ambitious typo to bury itself while author and editor transfer the half-cooked text between them.

Once in the text the shrewd typo will slip on its invisibility cloak and be gone. Only a really good wizard can find them then and only by painstaking application of effort which is also subject to the triple whammy of fatigue, boredom and complacency - there are no easy spells for this. For some reason invisibility cloaks work even better on the wizard who wrote the text in the first place. The really clever typo casts a reverse spell over the author so that it actually implants the correct text in their mind so that every time the author reads the grammatical nonsense they have created, it actually makes sense to them.

And that is how the game goes, through all stages of proofing. There’s the initial text - loads of typos in that; next there is the first pass by the editor - some sloppy typos out but many slip through and a few new ones added for good measure. Then there is the proofer stage where the success depends entirely on the ability of the wizard doing the proofing. A good wizard will find loads, including some that aren’t even typos; a bad wizard will find a maximum of five typos in any text and these will all be in the first three pages. Assuming that you have gone with the good wizard then all you will be left with are the really stubborn little critters.

This is all in the proofing stage of course. As soon as the press starts rolling you can almost see those invisibility cloaks being cast aside. No need for any wizardry skills to spot typos now, any half-wit can see them, dancing around screaming at each and every person who opens the book. It’s job done for the typo and as they attain immortality on the printed page!

Typos cropped up with regard to the new Yorkshire Grit Bouldering book. I haven’t seen it yet but, based on experience, I strongly suspect that the finished book isn’t nearly as bad as some have declared. I have heard the same leveled at our books in the past - “the text is riddled with mistakes” - only to find after inquiry that ‘riddled’ actually means a handful of mistakes spread thinly over a few chapters.

There are also plenty of commentators who suggest “how easy it is to get a couple of mates to proof text”. We produced a book to one area where we identified five influential and knowledgeable locals. They were all friendly and co-operative towards the project and were keen to help proof the guide. I packaged up five print-outs of the full guide text (no small job), sent them off with plenty of time, with an SAE and all five arrived back within a week or so. The grand total for a 250+ page guide was 25 corrections out of the five print-outs, and 50% of these were date corrections of the proofers’ own first ascents. Now at least this was 25 corrections but a good wizard will find 25 corrections on one double page spread, so these 25 hard-earned corrections just become more effort than they are worth.

Over the years I have learnt that good proofing needs reliable and competent proofers, mostly likely ones who are being financially rewarded. Graham ‘hyphen’ Hoey and others like Carl ‘comma’ Dawson, Mike James and Dave Gregory have done a great job for Rockfax, especially in recent years now that we give them more time, however typos still slip through. I suspect that they always will since guidebooks in the UK just don’t have a big enough budget to fund 100% reliable proofing. Keep in mind the fact that proofing is independent of print run - a 350 page book, 2000 copy print run ‘technical’ book (tiny by publishing industry standards) requires significantly more proofing than a 600 page Harry Potter and I think Bloomsbury can probably afford perfect proofing without harming their book budget!

If you do find a typo in a guidebook which annoys you then have a bit of patience, accept the fact that you have a great-looking book which by most reasonable business standards is far closer to a ‘labour of love’ rather than an ‘agent of profitability’. You will certainly make the publisher and author happier by noting it down and pointing it out to them rather then making sweeping generalisations about errors you claim to have found on public forums.

Last year I started a thread on UKClimbing challenging people to go through the whole of 2007 without accepting a single plastic bag from a retailer - the thread is here.

“The idea is that you manage to last the whole of 2007 without accepting any plastic bag from any retailer. To do this you need to either carry what you bought, or use bags you already own. If you do get caught out then any bag you accept must be re-used at least five times for it not to count towards your total.”

If we are going to be perfectly honest about this then I have to admit that the James-Louwerse household failed in the strict definition of this challenge. I accepted a couple of bags when stuck at a checkout at a DIY store with lots of little fiddly items and a long way to the car, and Henriette was never really fully with the challenge. The fact that we moved house during the year didn’t help much and then getting two kittens meant that we suddenly needed loads of plastic bags to deal with the cat litter during the first few months while they had to be kept inside. However, the real result of changing our behaviour has been thoroughly successful and we now have a big stock of solid permanent bags (and a wheelbarrow) and we remember and use them, as well as re-using to destruction any old plastic bags.

I think one of the most encouraging things is that I have also noticed a slow change in other people’s behaviour. Shop keepers no longer assume that you want a bag and tend to ask now, many more people appear to be shopping with their own bags and there is also a lot more in the media about zero plastic bags, including the zero plastic bag village - Modbury in Devon. Decathlon now charge for plastic bags and I think it won’t be long before more shops start doing this. It seems to be one of these curious situations where the public opinion is way ahead of the retailers who are all terrified of charging for plastic bags as seen in this article.

So what is the challenge for 2008?

Well obviously to continue the plastic bag challenge, but this year’s main target for us is the stand-by devices and making sure they are turned off when not in use. This is so far proving much harder than I anticipated. So many devices appear to use a bit of leccy just to keep then ticking over like the DAB radios we have which all lose all their stations when turned off at the socket. I have an intelliplug which means you can power-down a whole series of sockets when your computer goes to sleep, however this also takes down the wireless network which I have now had to put onto a different socket. It also means every time I wake up the machine, the printers chug into action making a huge racket and probably using about 10 hours worth of stand-by power. Once again, they have gone onto another socket which only leaves some speakers and a couple of hard drives connected to the intelliplug.

The other issue which should probably be much higher on most people’s agendas is low-energy light bulbs. I am still amazed that the stock of old-style light bulbs is so big in most supermarkets and I had a real struggle finding a shop that supplied low-energy spot bulbs. However we have been using low-energy bulbs for about ten years now so this isn’t one that we as a household can improve on much. Getting the kids to turn them off though is a different matter!

As co-owner of UKClimbing.com, one of my other jobs is to moderate the UKC Forums. One accusation that sometimes gets leveled at the moderators is that we ‘censor’ people’s free speech; that by removing certain threads and replies, we are infringing on people’s freedom to say what they think. On the surface this argument obviously has some merit however when you dig a bit deeper it can be seen that allowing everything actually ends up inhibiting much more.

For example, we could could operate an ‘anything goes’ policy and allow everything to be posted - commercial plugs, links to porn sites, racist propaganda and libellous slander about fellow users. If we did that then it is fairly obvious that it wouldn’t take long for the Forums to become a place where no-one wanted to be, where there would be no threads since the users would leave in droves, and the Forums would implode to nothing.

At the other extreme we have the situation where anything negative is removed, where any criticism of commercial entities is deleted be they advertisers or not, where people who criticise in any way are banned and where the UKC Forums become a puppet to the advertisers. Once again, it is fairly obvious that this would implode as people left the sterile forum to find somewhere more interesting to discuss their thoughts and ideas.

The difficulty for us as moderators is getting the balance right between these two extremes. Sometimes this means removing posts that many users are okay with, and other times it means allowing things that may cause offense to some. We don’t always get it right, but we are also open to feedback and will respond every time to emails questioning removed posts.

It is even more difficult to get it right where companies are concerned. UKC has many advertisers who are the life-blood of the site, yet if we allow criticism of these companies on UKC then we could be putting our own funding in danger. It is a problem encountered by all media funded by advertising and, on many occasions, it is a problem which is not satisfactorily solved. Responsible and sensible behaviour by advertisers is often key to getting this right though and the majority of companies recognise this and are very co-operative. However, in the past we have had threads started in praise of certain companies. When we take a look a little deeper we have found on occasion that the thread was started by the very company concerned via a ‘plant profile’. Spotting the difference between genuine and planted posts is quite a problem for us made more difficult by this attempted freeloading.

There are also occasions where a thread is started which questions or criticises a certain company. These present an even more difficult problem for us and occasionally they aren’t treated well by the companies concerned. We will only allow such threads to start where they come from a registered user who has no conflict of interests. The usual pattern of events is that a debate ensues where the company concerned actually fairs very well with much positive and constructive feedback. This is even better when a representative of the company concerned gets involved and we encourage this as much as possible. It is certainly the approach I take when Rockfax comes under fire on the forum and, despite some misconceptions, Rockfax regularly does get its fair share of rough treatment on UKC. Despite this, some companies still shy away from allowing themselves to be questioned in public and apply intense pressure to get critical starter posts removed often ignoring the positive content of the rest of the thread.

If you are ever concerned about the moderating on UKC then get in touch via the contact us forms. A popular misconceptions about UKClimbing.com is that it is a huge company with an office and the resources to employ full-time Forum Moderators - well, we aren’t. We frequently get incredulous emails from people starting with the line “I can’t believe why you allow this sort of offensive rubbish to be posted !” If I then check the offensive thread I find that it has only been there for 15 minutes, a quick click or two later and it is gone. Although perhaps the tone of the email was slightly misplaced, we are grateful for people bringing anything like this to our attention. UKC users are key to helping keep the Forums a more pleasant place to post since, as a group, you are there 24 hours a day!

One of the best known routes in the Blanca is the magnificent ridge of Espolón Central on the Puig. The fact that you can see it from the motorway as you drive up and down the coast means that virtually every climber who comes here has contemplated climbing this feature at some stage or another.

I first included it in a guidebook in 1996 in the original Costa Blanca, Mallorca, El Chorro guide. Chris Craggs had already written it up in his Blanca guide from 1990. Since then I have put it in two further editions of the three-area guide, Chris included it in his second Costa Blanca guide from 1997 and finally we both included it in the joint 2005 dedicated Costa Blanca Rockfax. That’s 6 books in all.

So it was a bit of a shock when in December last year I realised that neither Chris nor I had actually climbed this major route. Chris’s original description had been written up by Dave Gregory, my information had come from Rowland Edwards, and the 2005 description was written by Mark Glaister. The information in the 6 books was always good, although the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Rockfax guides tended to confuse the route by describing too many alternatives and extensions.

February this year I was in the Blanca with Mick Ryan. We were staying at the Orange House and had a good weather forecast for the next day - the only decent day of our week trip as it turned out. Well the ascent went without real incident, we got up and down in plenty of time and were soon supping beers in a warm satisfied glow of the early evening sun - a magnificent route ticked in magnificent conditions - the stuff that great memories are made of!

I decided to write up my own description for what is almost certainly the best version of the route. There are variations that try and tackle the full ridge from low on the left, and the full ridge in the centre of the face, but the direct start leads to a good and logical direct route up the pillar and adding harder variation pitches, or trying to mess with the line, seem to miss the point really.

Download the Espolon Central MicroGUIDE. It contains virtually the same information as the 2005 Rockfax guidebook but with a slightly different description and a different photo-topo. It is also extremely light and easy to carry!

I was thinking back to 2001 the other day after hearing news of Mike Robertson’s Deep Water Rockfax winning of the Mountain Exposition Award at the Banff Book Festival.

2001 was the year that Chris Craggs and I teamed up to publish Peak Gritstone East - just another guidebook for most people now, but for Rockfax and many other UK guidebook producers, PGE has become a significant watershed. For those who may not know, or remember, Peak Gritstone East was published amid a furore of debate and discussion and even threats of legal action (summarised below or in the ‘rest of entry’ link). Now so many guidebooks are in full-colour, using many of the layout and publishing ideas we had in PGE, it seems so strange to think that there were people at the time who tried very hard to prevent it from being published. The resulting stress gave me more sleepless nights than I care to remember; that combined with the birth of our third child Lydia (a happy event but not one that tends to lighten the stress load) plus 9/11 four days after her birth, make me think of late 2001 with mixed emotions.

The photo shows the guidebook launch in Rock+ Run Sheffield, in December 2001.

I have subsequently discovered that all the debate that had gone on across various BMC committees in the latter few months of 2001 had been very close to agreeing to the BMC taking legal action against Rockfax and only the sensible behaviour of some at the BMC prevented it.

So what if they had taken legal action? Well, the point of law in question was so big and untested that it was never a case that tiny entities like the BMC and Rockfax were going to achieve anything with. The result of the legal action would have just been to cost the BMC a lot of money and me more money than I had. Hence, PGE would probably not have been published and Rockfax would probably not exist any more. There would have been no useful precedent established apart from scaring off competition from all new private guidebook producers for many years, probably on a nationwide basis - every time a new guidebook was proposed that was unwanted by the BMC and Club establishment, they would have been able to trot out this saga to prevent publication. At that time the BMC had already taken on Niall Grimes as full-time guidebook co-ordinator, so this positive development had nothing to do with the debate.

The more I have thought about it the more I think what a pointless and expensive waste of time this whole episode was, something which is even more apparent now that both the BMC and Rockfax are winning World awards for their guidebooks. This is in contrast to the guidebook debate Rockfax caused in 1995, where Ken Wilson led the discussion against the Pembroke Rockfax. Whilst this 1995 debate also left unresolved issues, it was a good debate to have, and one that had a positive effect on both parties in the long run, and tended to steer clear of legal issues. I certainly was given food for thought and modified my behavior because of it. The same is not true of the 2001 saga which still leaves a very bitter taste.

As it is, common sense prevailed, PGE was published and Rockfax guidebooks have gone from strength to strength. The BMC guidebooks are now superb publications which, although influenced by the style of PGE, are very much in their own mould. Other producers like Ground-Up are publishing great books, the traditional club producers like the FRCC in particular have updated their formats to make best use of the production techniques possible with modern dtp technology. The influence of British guidebooks is becoming apparent in almost every publication that appears around the World and we are even winning awards!

As a footnote I would like to add that the BMC of 2007 is a very different organisation to the BMC of 2001 and none of the issues from the 2001 guidebook saga are applicable today.

UKClimbing.com discussion thread

Read the rest of this entry »

Well I’m not, but maybe you are?

There was some discussion on the forums today about Mallorca and it seems people are heading out there once again for the winter sun climbing fix. One of the problems in the past with Mallorca has always been finding sufficient lower grade routes. The locals have never really bothered too much with bolting easier stuff and it is certainly true that the best of the climbing is in the higher grades. However for most climbers operating at around VS and above there will still be a week or two’s worth of climbing if you seek out the good destinations. Places like Puig de Garrafa, S’estret, Creveta and Cala Magraner have plenty of routes to choose from.

Rockfax Mallorca Route Database

One route not to miss is the magnificent Albahida. A full day’s outing for most including a summit tick and a long descent. Unusually it is a trad route but only a small rack is required so no need to blow your ever-diminishing luggage allowance.

One thing you may not want to carry up the route with you is the guidebook. So now you can save a bit of weight by downloading the Albahida MicroGUIDE which has all the info included in the book.

After a great day climbing on Tryfan on Saturday, and a fairly disappointing evening watching the Rugby, we looked for somewhere off the beaten track on Sunday since the Pass looked a little crowded and cloudy and our chosen crag - Craig Ddu - was under its usual covering of wetness.

I remembered Carreg Alltrem, a little crag to the east of the mountains which had a superb trio of routes that are almost guaranteed to satisfy. I done them all years ago but beyond knowing they were good routes, I could remember little else. These days it seems few people know about Carreg Alltrem so we anticipated having the place to ourselves. Of course class is difficult to hide and when we arrived we found ourselves vying for Lavaredo with Tom and Martin who had come here following their mate’s recommendation from the day before. There were enough routes to go round though so we all proceeded to have a great social day’s climbing on the three classics of the crag: Lavaredo (VS), Lightning Visit (VS) and Fratricide Wall (HVS at the beginning of the day). The photo shows Martin on the superb pitch 2 of Lavaredo on Carreg Alltrem

Grades are funny things. The more you think about them, the more complicated they get. Those three routes seemed to encompass many of the problems found when trying to decide on grades for routes. Lightning Wall is fine at VS 4a, 4c. Perhaps pitch 2 is a bit soft at 4c but few can really complain. Lavaredo on the other hand is give VS 4b, 4b in one guide and a more realistic VS 4b, 5a in North Wales Rock. The thing is that VS 4b, 5a doesn’t really cover it very well. It gives you the impression that pitch 2 is well-protected route with one hard move, but in fact the move is more of a section including placing gear, a big pull, placing more gear, then another pull, making it feel more like HVS for some, yet it probably isn’t that hard really. Whatever it gets, be prepared for a much harder second pitch than first, and be prepared to keep moving on the second although don’t forget to enjoy it; there are few better-positioned HVS’s around.

The final route of the day for us was Fratricide Wall which takes a complicated line up the big wall left of the central grooves of the crag. I made the mistake of trying to do this one in a single run-out. It got quite lonely near the top and the number of hard moves made me think this was closer to E1 than HVS for most. A great route though and well worth doing to complete the trio.

UKClimbing thread discussing the grades at Carreg Alltrem.

There are a few other gems there - like Civetta - which my guidebook says I climbed with Andy Fanshawe in 1990. I can’t remember anything about it now but at the time I added an extra star and changed the grade to E2 5c. If I were you I’d take the star but ignore the downgrade.

Download the free Carreg Alltrem MicroGUIDE

AJ high on Lightning Visit. Photo: Mick Ryan

There was an interesting thread on UKClimbing Forums last week about the Climbers’ Clubs guides. One of the main points to come out of the discussion was that the Climbers’ Club continue to produce guidebooks without route numbers. On the thread John Wilson states:

“These (numbers) make sense in guides where all or nearly all routes are shown on topos and where the topos are on same spread. We are thus using numbers in Portland and (as previously) in Southern Sandstone. Where this (as here - Wye Valley Guide) is not the case, keys have to be superimposed on the diagrams and text numbers are then totally pointless; they are also visually unattractive, they disrupt the left alignment of route names, and they add yet another numeral statistic to the lengths, grades and dates of the route-title lines.”

The discussion revolved around a sample download of the Wye Valley guide, available here from the Climbers’ Club site.

I actually think that route numbers become even more important when routes and diagrams are not on the same spread and here is why: (some of this was posted on the thread but I have expanded on it here a bit).

- Routes may appear on a map, may appear on a photo-topo, may appear on both, or neither.
- When you are looking at the route text (the first port of call for most) you have no idea where, or if, there is a diagram or map.
- So you start turning pages to look for one, and eventually come across a diagram.
- That diagram has some route names (all of which need reading of course) but not yours. So now what do you do?
- One thing you could do is turn more pages to look for another diagram, or you could turn back to you route to see if you recognise a route name near your route.
- You will need to read all the route names in order to locate which block of routes is covered on the diagram, but this block may be further to the right so you won’t find them without extensive further searching.
- If you do locate this block of routes you may know which way you should turn the pages to see if there is a diagram.
- Eventually you may find a diagram, or a plan map, but you will almost certainly have flicked back and forth through the guide several times trying to identify the block of routes covered by the topo/map and spending ages reading route names and trying to remember if they were the ones on the diagram you had found.

Now here’s how the same procedure works with consistent route numbers:

- the route you are interested in is route number 12 so you try and find a diagram.
- you turn pages and find one but it starts at route 20 so you know your route isn’t there straight away with one quick look, and you also know that, if there is a diagram, it is the other way in the book.
- You find another diagram either with your route, or with routes numbered up to something less than 12 in which case you know that your route doesn’t have a diagram and you have only flicked through a few pages.

As a practical example of a Climbers’ Club guide where the addition of numbers would have been a great help, consider the 2000 Tremadog guide. Tremadog is a notoriously difficult crag to locate the starts of routes owing to the trees, however you can usually spot the top sections from below on the road by Craig Bwlch y Moch. On page 94 95 of the Tremadog guide is the following photo-diagram:

This diagram has 4 routes listed on it but it actually covers 21 routes between The Grasper and The Plum, and a few more to the right as well. The route the Plum is actually 6 pages away from the diagram. What this diagram in its current state tells us is the rough location of 4 routes. If you want to do a route in this area that isn’t marked on the diagram then you need to read and memorise the route names of the four routes that are featured and try and related them using the text to your route - that is 6 pages of text!

With the simple addition of numbers - Grasper as route 1, and The Plum as route 21, you can easily tell what the spread of the diagram is without memorising any route names. The addition of a few annotations to say which routes started in which area would make the diagram even more useful and with route numbers you could do this very concisely. For example: the clean wall to the left of The Plum could be indicated as being the starting point for routes 17 to 20. At a crag like Tremadog this is useful information, particularly for the hundreds of people each year who want to do the route Christmas Curry.

However you end up actually using them, I can see no way that the addition of numbers in any guide can be regarded as “totally pointless”. Numbers help to relate routes to each other and they help to relate routes to diagrams and topos. They do not add unnecessary clutter if you design the page correctly and to omit them on the grounds of page design is about as daft as omitting the technical grade of a route because you couldn’t find anywhere to write it in your current page layout.