Aye got bored & did a thrash loop link-up. Aye it strains. I managed to squeeze an involuntary one out on the crux in - A balloon neck screamer style. Mental hard arete sitter into arete direct reversed into & cut right along the knife-blade lip of the renamed V15. Nasty but every snatch at a sloper or move explodes with satisfaction. That pic is one of the complete sequence with a head-splitter deckout onto the knife-edge rightward & along that. V14'ish all in. MacLeod sneered that the V15 direct was impossible so he won't like this one either. Tough banana, rusty piton, unfortunate Y-fronts, like it or not, it's been climbed, but fear not, I have 'a visitor' coming over soon who could probably repeat it without being a total arse about the whole thing as well. It's a new line in effect. The Hole -Am Uaimh- is classic & home to three of Lewis's hardest boulder problems all withing feet of eachother. Well...Scotland needs it's own cloned version version of Godskins to my mind. Theres nobody I know of actively climbing here at the moment with the sort of calibur needed to repeat these things & Malcs off working on oil-rigs with his da...

On the trad front I managed to bang in the top peg on the roof project nearby, ready for the clips & managed to prep my monster Mangurs†adh line. I can do the crux comfortably now on a shunt. It will be freakish climbing on the hard end of a lead. The only fragile gear at two-thirds height unzipped immediately on a weighted flight test! When the boulder hit the bottom it exploded. Looked like a nade had gone off in a rucksack. It makes you pace excitedly feeling ready to go at it...Im twitchy...but Peglers fucked up the new harness order & I dont want to take another whipper in my 'creaker' again. Soloed my own death-leaping 180 Herbacious Backson - E7, out of frustration of not being able to get on my project roof next door. I know this much, not reading Scottish Climbs does wonders for your motivation. Havn't seen it in absolute ages. The place had become an embarrassing shambles of sniping & negativity so I got rid of the link even.

Project: Imagine a steep almost horizontal free roof solo on papercut edges into an areted two finger edge shared with a knife-blade & HB Micromate zero, halfway across the void with one wheel biting, then uk 7a moves all the way to the top & below of the uk7b crux & nasty deckouts possible from pretty much anywhere on the route but at the peg & cam...that's the roof project. I've already tested the deckout once this month, narrowly avoiding a snapped leg & a monster log-split down the back of my head...Unbelievably, I was saved by a puddle. There's no way to avoid a groundfall, even making a controlled exit... How do you grade a line with a fixed peg but with trad placements as well...errr.

Sprad? is Sprad ethical? When my new line goes, will it be Sprad9 & technically Trutch8c+? I believe a line in Twll Mawr has the same issue..

Wheres the God of Strathyre when you need him....creating hairstyles in San Diego I guess...G'luck in The Tree there Davie, don't fall out.

I believe Keen Yoof is away to Southern Sandstone right now on the trail of hard things. He was asking for beta on my own 'Northern Raiders'

E4-6b-v5 sounds like a good line, some of the huge Coire boulder problems have trad tags aound that mark although removing the crevassed talus would take more than a trolley & some lads with elbows. Now then...if they take the fridge away can you reach the good holds? Dilemma non? Without fridge - plentiful soft landings, thoughts of skipping maidens while on the crux. With fridge - like standing on a Peugeot 206 to clip the first runner but nasty deckout. No skipping maidens, just overwieght dinner ladies in chainmail...yep...dilemma.

If you had thought about it, you could have bought a long extension lead & had a cold drinks bar at the crag....no...scrap that...

Am back from the sandstone, a week of wetness. Deary deary me.
How are the midgies doing Simon? I have to say I am a bit of a pansy when it comes to the little blood sucking blighters.

Awesome photos - who takes them if you're climbing? (Or is this one of those stupid questions where I've totally missed the point?)

Nice work on repeating Special Cases & 4X though Yoofus. The back of the Bowderstone has always been a bit of an unsung classic aye. I once did a full traverse from left of 4x through & rightward up to the 'hand-shakey' hole & so on...which can make you quite tired. 4X hadn't been named back then but had definately been surmounted. This was around the time I bottled out of repeating 'Hellish' ground-up, having been fed horror stories at Thrang the day before.. Around that time, Dave was going everywhere on his Africa-Twin at 90mph, Sam Toms was fighting everyone he could get his hands on, Andy Dawes was in hiding & this girl with huge norks started stalking everyone at the Langdale Boulders...salad days.

Midgies have only just started to crawl out here. None on the sea cliffs. I have stacks of 'Shoo' for the Coire so no worries there. Time to rest a while, left elbow, shoulders & fingers are pretty wrecked from cranking right now. Still can't nail the short Sprad project...