We have been putting the finishing touches to the Northern England guidebook over the last few weeks, well, Chris has been at it for ages, but he passed the stuff over to me in July. Going through the various pages showed a few holes in photography, and information, so we planned a quick-hit visit to fill the gaps.

Day 1 involved a whole selection of great crags on the North York Moors: Scugdale, Park Nab and finishing off at the Wainstones. As luck would have it the CMC (Cleveland Mountaineering Club) had planned a meet for the Wainstones on that same evening - now that’s pretty damn keen: an isolated and exposed crag with a 30 minute walk-in, for an evening meet when the weather might be a bit dodgy! Anyway we were just packing up when most of the members arrived since it was too cold for us southern softies (more of that later). Having just bottled out of West Sphinx Direct - my excuse is that I didn’t have the required micro-wires to protect the bold move over the initial bulge but it was probably lack of motivation and cold fingers - we were leaving the crag since it was way too cold to actually climb. So when I later found out that keen CMC member Ian Jackson had not only climbed at the Wainstones in that freezing wind, he had also managed West Sphinx Direct, I was pretty damn impressed. He is not that tall either which I understand from shorty Jon Read’s comments makes the top move even harder.

The photo shows the easy (and possibly the best) way to get to the top of the Sphinx via the Nose Traverse.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Rockfax, Climbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.