Sunday Frame III
Sunday, July 30, 2006
The Hole in the Rain
The Hole in the Rain, where village island children have played endless, down through all the ages. Dangling the holds in the cave roof, leaping the falls, dust from lichen & holding your breath in the falls. If you jumped from the damp moss edge above, you were king over the hole, master of dare. Aeons swum amongst the nights we jumped Barna jetty & The Pins, & aeons scatter borders. The threads of our old swing ropes long overgrown, but by eldila lightning memory flash, I see Archie is as bald today, as he was back then. Someone is grown drunk & fighting lost, another sleeps in Spain, one rides storms on brawling trawlers, out through the driving rain. I took the mountains as my alter & cut my soul into stone. The girl who climbed into the back of the cave & touched the green stone was bravest. She summoned demons into our legends & we sent ourselves squirming down the paths onto the bóithrín, boney fingers down our backs, breath on our necks, reaching through storm wood, stingers & drains where we sacrificed angry wasps, as examples to others. And the sun would set, & you'd go home all dragged & clattering, holding up miles of pants & coarse towels slung with mud & leaves. Black Jock now works the Uig dock on Calmac...he's no really black, just more hell-of-a durty - as he always was, even after floating off hours of blue dragonflies dancing above his nose. Ears below water, eyes just above...it was the way, the rule, a rule I took into the wadis - Tarmac on the toes, wet footprints..I can still see them...decades gone & no sign they will dry...a new wave has control of the Hole in the Rain these days - We are children sending children in aye...
This week? I completed a new monster soaring Torridon V12 & a some new V8s & a new V9, for a bit of surrounding decoration aye -[nb: Despite putting my mobile number up as The Climb Line in addition to my email, on this trip I heard zero from zero other climbers.]. Photos will be up soon, in conjunction with Θ Nick Smiths Θ wee online photographic article.
 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 12:47 PM | 6 comments
10,000 acres of erse...
Monday, July 17, 2006
As a bit of trivia, '10,000 Acres of Skye' was filmed on Raasay, which is across from Skye, & has nothing to do with Raasay in that it is geographically seperated by water...deep water. Skye in turn, is also larger than 10,000 acres. It wobbled our thoughts deep into the night. What could they mean? So after much debate, we concluded that by '10,000 acres of Skye' they must have cryptically meant Raasay. But it was a flawed conclusion since everyone here knows that Raasay is about 15,360 acres all in. Enter Donald.
This would imply that whole island bar 5,360 acres was now under the control of white settlers in the form of a strumpet & a goofy musician. Donald was unyielding in his stance, that it didnt logically follow as a possible scenario, since, the Raasay Hotel gardens & prisoner-of-war camp aside, after a few drams, 5,360 acres is about the size of his subsistence farming outlet. Ergo, given that the other 10,000 acres were spoken for, it would leave nowhere for him to park his tractor - which simply wasn't going to happen.
A crisis was averted. He was right of course & to prove there was plenty of remaining acreage for the locals, Donald drove his tractor everwhere around the island, at speed & on Sundays, without reprisal; often helping film crews into the loch by taking corners to fast. Directors & television stars merrily gestured to Donald everywhere he went, & indeed, Donald gestured back.
So in short, they should have called it 'A Couple of Feet of Raasay' or 'Kicking about in Inverarish' or 'The Nutter of Osgaig'

I lay preference in relaying the harmless late night rambling stories of inebriated & retired old islanders over writing 'A tv series filmed near an ugly ferry terminal'. If you drop onto Raasay it's stuff of legends, as is the night they chased a monster whale off the shores Rona, the MV Stardust in hot pursuit, Cowie of Acarseid Mhor at the helm. It raises a broader smile, than saying a naval sub scared them shitless...which, they'd never admit anyway.
 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 10:31 PM | 0 comments
Sunday - frame II
Sunday, July 16, 2006

Di-dómhnaich, is coimhead bhuam air cuan na Hearadh - chun imeacht i dtreo na bóithre gan cosán le mo thaobh atá mé...An tèid thu leam air bhàrr nan tonn? Tha mo bheul cho tioram agus coma leam leabaidh no cadal no biadh...

Mondays child - has a half pound bag of Metolius super-chalk, wide tape for strapping, & fresh finger skin. He will be a busy little bee on his 12mtr woody for pulling, wherein a replica of the project crux sequences await. True, this harder indoor mimicry, carries exact replication of the task at hand, save that it demands of any ascensionist proclaiming resource of the required calibur, that they should fight with dramatically smaller holds, at a steeper angle & through sickeningly extended copies of reaches, so that when the time comes, & the temperature is cooled, & the rain is pushed through; all breathing realities of the ensuing event will be tipped towards negligible negative consequence. For now, let the rain rain. Let it tap out crazy rhythm & meter on the cattle-shed roof while I soak myself inside engraming, mind reference, & burn - staining each muscle, sinew & soul element into focused solitary mantra & kinaesthetic drone. These day in-day out ways, for me as a standard, are the simple traditions of trade. To bring results beyond contention.

The winter lecture & movement workshop frameworks are layed out almost ready, & the venues & walls are apparently, totally excited about it. Matt Heason recently even went so far as to say: Well, if youre ever down this way, John Dunne did a lecture in the Peak & got out alive.... I did grin, after I shuddered. Add also, that people are actually asking if they can purchase & if I'm willing to sell, my black & white climbing photography. Before you know it, the big black & white crux photograph of Eat Yerself Whole-V15, they framed & hung in the bar, will be on ebay...rare as dragons eggs they say. Somehow, it got me looking through old slides of climbing in the Wadis, Font, Eaux Claires, the Alps & beyond into the k5 Shining Wall, places like that...the list is quite big. The dusty old box of stills & slides Robo, Mac, Zed & myself & others who have come & gone, or disappeared into suburbia to grow beer bellies & children, both with equal veracity to their gnome collections & minimum wages, those slides we took before so many fell, & collected through the years. It smells the same...the marks on the corners from the box living in gites & vans are familiar, the scribbles on the slide casings, ask the corners of your mouth to curl lopsided into a fond grin. Things are looking good & positive all round. I'm climbing like a thing possessed as well, people are getting drop-jawed, projects are getting thrashed & we are finding totally new & exciting crags to develop. One crag has an huge old seaniar heid with a beard, profiled into the soaring arete. Then come winter, I'll be advising on the layout of a new climbing wall, route setting & all that on top, & at some point getting archeologists safely on & off of sea-stacks & doing the photography. It all goes into the climbing fund aye...I may be able to afford some of those fancy wire-gate clips by November for the sport project, imagine that!!

A man you can talk with - Hatrick Edgeclinger

I had texted James earlier, to see if he was up to seconding a full girdle traverse of Kilt at half height. There has been no reply as yet & since he may be looking for spare porta-ledges in the glen, I'm gonna have a nip over Torridon way mid-week with Cowie, for some intense boulder action if anyones up for it. Oh, before I nip off like, I just noticed that the blog has merrily motored past 30,000 hits!... I'd originally started the counter at 134 so as to appear visited, at the start of it all the other year. Since then it's obviously proved immensely popular with climbers, boulderers, the mountain fraternity & beyond, giving direct insight into sometimes personal moments, hopefully clarifying the ups & downs of an ordinary climbing life, the humour, the hate, the methodology of the mind & more...rather than relying on & as a way to escape, the forum hearsay piled with random uninformed conjecture, fantasy or plain vindictiveness, about who & what I am about. My polite way of saying sea-stac of bullshit aye. Even my most favourite great & lunatic climber Ben Paulo Cossey drops in from down-under Ozi way, when he's not singingwithamongooseicecreamdancingonhisheadfullofbarbedwire &gravybowls, aye matey... along with many other names. Benjo just loves life, & in turn, life loves him back, with colour, movement & stillness. This blog was the first of it's kind, & the first of note, so they tell me. Other climbers have now followed suit & hopefully the blog network won't suffer the embarrassing snide abuse the climbing community has bestowed upon itself, through many a self-perpetuating forum...Whatever happened to just phoning & asking somebody about things, or calling round with your handlebars set at a ridiculous angle? Anyways, 30,000 hits & still chugging along aye. I feel like putting a candle in a doughnut & dancing, which would be exhuberent for a Connemara redneck stained into the Hebrides for life....The blood in the pool bleeds red wherever you cut the belly, whoever you are, wherever you are. When did the boundary colours fade into one thing? Back to the Torridon bouldering at hand & the usual climb-line of: 07981215915 applies...Free trawler lift over to Torridon & back of course. If you can't stand the smell of dead fish, desal & diesel - swim or drive the pussy long way round. See you there.

Benjo pissing about on Groovy at Taipan Wall... pansy 8b or something...

[nb: Despite putting my mobile number up as The Climb Line in addition to my email, on this trip I heard zero from zero other climbers.]

 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 1:37 PM | 1 comments
Sunday - frame I
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Ive decided, when I'm back on Skye repairing skin & shoulders from climbing hard stuff, to grab my 25a red filters, f-stops & all that dross & blether, & head out to take a Sunday photograph fae the blog, of somewhere around the island...It's also a good calm way to whistle out a day, sitting waiting for light, & writing down key points for the climbing lecture & workshop I'm doing later this year. The dog gets to jump in & out of the shore weed as well... Here's the first anyways, totally untouched.
Domhnaill, a fhir a bháta is na horó eile...ag lorg áit lena mbuaileann an fharraige leis an spéaratá mé - Portrigh
 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 6:10 PM | 0 comments
Of soul jewels & clay jugs...of Iconoclasts
Thursday, July 06, 2006
s
Inside here, are all the seven oceans, & hundreds of millions of stars..the acid that tests gold, canyons & pine mountains... When Kabir wrote those words I knew that Kabir saw the writing, on the inside of the skin. Inside here, are the only things precious to me beyond daylight...This tiny box & this scented plant, are my soul jewels. Being all I would rescue from this house, I have placed leaves from this box on Ama Dablam & carried the remnants, those I discern of her spirit, her light & her smile, inside, safely through the high peaks, to rest under our own constellations. You can measure each of these two objects by macrometral size & apply physics, equate their individual mass, down to point zero zero, & give them a squared mathmatical presence, a scientific reason for being, just as you can with a climb. You can say that my route at Cairn Liath, south of Kilt, Iconoclast, is E9, or E10, or, 6c or 7a, or f8a+ or f8b+, but you miss it's importance, the skyward audacity of the line, black corridors of movement, thrown raging defiant across the daylight. One thing is for certain, it's real E9. It'll kill you. There's no multiple screamers to take here, you commit & do it faultless or you never go home. The line is uncompromising, horrendous madness, eerie & raging. Or is my last boulder V13 is it V12.6? You can muse over Ama Dablam being 5563 metres or only 18251 feet? You can train scientific grip, & I do, but you must feel, what is right. Seeing the world in such ways, you would miss the soul, the life inside the stillness, the movement & invocation tearing through pompous kingdoms...the undergound drone & drum of why you do what you do, with such conviction...the soul jewels. Tha mi am chadal, na duisgibh mi.
 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 2:16 PM | 1 comments
An Clisэam Gleann Scaladale, Na Hэaradћ.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
A new horribly sobering arete.
This bampot arete weighs in around f8b. The climbing is bouldery & powerful. The holds are frighteningly poor, as is the one piece of gear in the roof below. So poor in fact, that to fiddle about, inverted, trying to make it stick, is in itself, an exercise of futlile dilema when more crux waits above. If you can get it to bite, it's E8 & might take a gentle fall. Remember the gear in If 6 was 9?...When I squeezed Davey Birkett about that sawn & glued peg, he said it might hurt to fall off above it. The cam in An Ataireachd Ard is slightly safer, slighty easier to sort, & there's no wire in the top....but it's not E9. This one of many soaring lines between An Cliseam & Sron Ulladale waiting for climbers with bones of stone, roots of veins coarsing under dirty skin & pilon wires for tendons. There are no second chances taking a screamer off here aye & I have already described this arete as: slightly more dangerous than running with scissors - totally bampot in fact. Well, Na Hearadh has been great as usual, & since I literally have no skin left, I'm going nip home across the Minch, rest, & kick the ball for the dog, who has tanned his nose a wonderful shade of pink... A full write-up soon.
Would you let this brawling Guga fisherman belay you on a death route?... I'd leap off Rubha Robhanais with the fellow hoodlum to be honest...nb: Despite putting my mobile number up as The Climb Line on this trip I heard zero from zero other climbers.
 
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 10:43 PM | 0 comments