.. 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.

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

(more…)

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.

I’ve had some strange experiences at slightly obscure crags over the years but I can’t recall anything quite like our day at Callerhues. We knew that there was something a bit odd going on at this crag; even the locals had admitted that the grades were, “a bit on the stiff side”, and anyone who has climbed in Northumberland will probably realise the full significance of that comment.

It all started reasonably with a quick ascent of the classic Callerhues Crack - nowt wrong with that lad, a good HVS, possibly with a slight Curbar feel to it, but nothing that a seasoned grtistoner couldn’t cope with.

That was about it though as the next four hours really began to take its toll. Callerhues Crack is the soft-touch of the crag and everything else weighs in at one, two or even three grades harder than you are expecting. We got battered initially by E2s masquerading as E1s, then by E2s masquerading as HVSs, then finally by an E3 masquerading as a MVS. Mild VS! My ego found the ‘mild’ particularly difficult to take. Subsequent investigation revealed that the MVS called Paving probably followed a line about 1m left of where we were trying it, however I had already climbed that line and thought it was about E1!

Being a guidebook writer I know that grades are tricky; you are never going to get them right yet most of your readers expect that you have got them right. Not only that but they tend to be a bit upset when they think the book is wrong, especially if it went and ruined their day. All we can do is try and get them as accurate as we can, and if there are mistakes then we can try to correct them in the next edition, inevitably introducing a new set of grades that people can dispute.

That is what is so strange about Callerhues. Those grades have not really changed in the last 30 years despite being in a few guidebooks. Actually that’s not strictly true, the initial grades for some routes were even harder than they are now, but they were first climbed when E-grades weren’t widely used and any route less than 10m was regarded as a virtual boulder problem. So after one revision to take account of E-grades, Callerhues has sat there, lurking, ready to take on all-comers, especially southern softies.

The only reason I can think of for this is ‘historical significance’. The routes were put up by the revered Smith brothers and maybe no-one wants to annoy them by re-grading the routes. Whatever the reason, it is not a practice we intend to continue in the Northern England Rockfax. All the routes have been given new grades which we think are more in line with what you would find elsewhere in the country, particularly on the similar-style gritstone crags. We will have got some of these grades wrong, but at least it is a start.

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.

The UKC team were at Froggatt the other night. Mick wanted to continue his quest to tick off all the Peak classics he had missed during his earlier ‘UK climbing’ career in the 1980s. We had an hour and a half before the BMC Peak Area meeting started at the Grouse and the plan was to get a quick tick of Valkyrie in, then drop in at the meeting. As ever with routes like this, they tend to bite back if you underestimate them and the quick tick turned into quite a drawn out expedition. The sun had well and truely set by the time we eventually scrambled off the top of the pinnacle and stumbled down the the steep crag path to the lower parking area.

Still, the plan was on track even if the meeting had started about 45 minutes ago. As we walked past the BMC meeting room and entered the pub, Michael Owen scored - one nil! Okay, let’s have a quick pint and see how the football goes. Then Owen did the business again and we decided to celebrate the second goal with a second pint. The problem was that Andy, the driver, had really enjoyed the beer - better than that rubbish you get in the Lakes, and wanted to sample some more without the driving committment! So it became a difficult decision but in the end the BMC didn’t stand a chance against the Cobden View Pub, a pint of Moonshine and Owen and the lads. Sorry BMC.

No trip to Cornwall would be complete without ticking a route and what a route we managed - Astral Stroll, one of the classics of the South West. 21 years since I’d last been on it so I couldn’t remember much (or anything at all as it turned out). Mark hadn’t even done it, he said he’d always been keeping it for a perfect day.

As it turns out a perfect day was exactly what we got - calm seas, beautiful sunshine, a high tide during the afternoon and not too greasy on the rock. The route turned out to be bigger, badder and better than I remembered it. It also turned out that my memory of the route was completely wrong but there you go.

The end result was that we both thought it might be almost worth E2 and quite serious if you got stuck on it. I wouldn’t want to be struggling on pitch 3 with a huge swell and a partner who was pushing their grade a bit!

Photo: Mark seconding pitch 2 of Astral Stroll after the drop-down move.

I knocked up a full topo in PDF format which gives you that useful view of the route before you commit yourself.

Download the Astral Stroll MicroGUIDE