Wednesday, February 21, 2007
What a day today on Skye! Up at 6.00am & after half an hour of sipping brews & wieghing up the dawn cloud cover, I packed the axes, flask, dog, football, stickies & brushes, & set myself on trucking on up into the 20mtr calcareous sandstone overhangs of Torvaig - Am Bile. When I left I was wrapped in my Rab jacket, thermal hatted, quietly tapping along the lanes through braes to erratic bird chorus, only briefly interrupted by Nobby, wearing a contorted face, pressed into the windscreen of the red scud, wrapped in lunatic delivery concentration. He beamed as he approached, rattling at mach 4 & went back to his concentrated scowl before the van turbulence even hit me.
Mad as a lorry that fella, I thought to myself. Then everything went back to how it was before...
Through the shotgun loch paths, over stone walls through trees. Take the long drag up through the dip where Giant Hogweed grows in summer. The crunch of frosted grass leaves you in the hands of a reign of icicles & solid mud before the crag proper fills your vision & the ground behaves. Without conscious thought, I settled under my own Latino Chrome arranging kit, kicking sheep shit down the steep incline into the sea loch. A brew later, I was set for tooling all day, & what a day it's been. A few hundred meters of steep traversing all told, setting myself headgame technical problems to escape up...then some more overlap roofwork, some impossibilities, then more traversing.
Am I trying to get good at going sideways? Do I secretly aspire towards becoming a sideways beach dancer with castanets?
By midday I was down to a ragged old T-shirt, trying wild footless campus moves on steel claws, barefoot but for my Merrels, attempting speedy triple twist one point contacts, then climbing slow one armers, breathing calm, throwing balance off centre, this way & that to learn more; confirm this & that, & undo any established form that crept into my engraming, keeping intuitive movement free & purposeful, going up against the borders, where nobody is master & questioning them. It's a voyage. A foolish man defines movement, & within that definition - he sets his own limitations. The motivational rage for climbing everything hard, that had me by the ears long ago as an intemperate youth, has levelled out in comparison to the way I apply myself today. The relevancy has almost been dealt with & climbing well has long since taken priority. If you climb well, climbing hard becomes in simplicity, a by-product of your actions, rather than an achievable target on which you set your sights. To that end, things become alot easier when you don't expect to win, you abandon the masterpiece you are trying to create & slip into the real masterpiece. Anyways... on with the blether...the sun all the while was slowly creeping into my cocoon of shadowed cold air, my protected world beneath a stone umbrella of enormous overbite.
Mad as a lorry that fella, I thought to myself. Then everything went back to how it was before...
Through the shotgun loch paths, over stone walls through trees. Take the long drag up through the dip where Giant Hogweed grows in summer. The crunch of frosted grass leaves you in the hands of a reign of icicles & solid mud before the crag proper fills your vision & the ground behaves. Without conscious thought, I settled under my own Latino Chrome arranging kit, kicking sheep shit down the steep incline into the sea loch. A brew later, I was set for tooling all day, & what a day it's been. A few hundred meters of steep traversing all told, setting myself headgame technical problems to escape up...then some more overlap roofwork, some impossibilities, then more traversing.
Am I trying to get good at going sideways? Do I secretly aspire towards becoming a sideways beach dancer with castanets?
By midday I was down to a ragged old T-shirt, trying wild footless campus moves on steel claws, barefoot but for my Merrels, attempting speedy triple twist one point contacts, then climbing slow one armers, breathing calm, throwing balance off centre, this way & that to learn more; confirm this & that, & undo any established form that crept into my engraming, keeping intuitive movement free & purposeful, going up against the borders, where nobody is master & questioning them. It's a voyage. A foolish man defines movement, & within that definition - he sets his own limitations. The motivational rage for climbing everything hard, that had me by the ears long ago as an intemperate youth, has levelled out in comparison to the way I apply myself today. The relevancy has almost been dealt with & climbing well has long since taken priority. If you climb well, climbing hard becomes in simplicity, a by-product of your actions, rather than an achievable target on which you set your sights. To that end, things become alot easier when you don't expect to win, you abandon the masterpiece you are trying to create & slip into the real masterpiece. Anyways... on with the blether...the sun all the while was slowly creeping into my cocoon of shadowed cold air, my protected world beneath a stone umbrella of enormous overbite.
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What we see depends mainly on what we look for...
By midday on the other other hand, I was getting clatty, I had more dust in my skin than a hoover bag, more grit in my mouth than John Wayne, electric hair & an empty flask. After a quick psychological gear herding session, I found also, that after several highball dismounts from the 3rd overlap of LC, I also owned a singlular, highly dense entity that carried a vague resemblence to lots of little independant apricots...Even the food was having a good time, see. By midday I was also happily wearing several fine abrasions & a numb hoof, which I'd given myself by deftly swinging the tappy end of the axe into my ankle while wrestling an out-of-control figure 4 contortion. Am I an anarchist if I fling one of my DMM Anarchists down the crag? By 3pm I had tendons resembling strung ferry mooring ropes & the dog had also joined in with the electric hair thing. The cold shadowed air was moistening in the heat of the day & orange flies had started to gang up on me in legions. The sheep shit was on a nasal march as well. I was sweating lactic acid through a body searching every anatomical niche for a recognizible sugar count.
Dream steep - climb steeper
By 4pm, the collie & myself had retreated back from the hieghts & jumped gleefully into the sea loch with his football, having jogged the depth of a hot hillside together. Around 4pm also, the instant Harold Lloyd style rock leap & contact with wintering February sea water was a shocker & I never once stopped to think, even in mid flight, that there was snow just above the tooling crag. I hadn't packed my factor 10 & I should have noticed, & warm as it was, this wasn't a late summers afternoon....but what a day. Didn't see a single twitcher, farmer, bagger or climber for the duration either. Which was nice... As for the mid-low toolering traverse, that's a Hole In The Rain, full bhoona horizontal T9... Toolering 9. Arguably D10 if you laced it with bling, but Toolering is always more intense than Tooling aye.
The first person I came across back in the dusky village was 3ft tall, female, & enquired in a helium voice: Hey mister, can I clap yer dug?...
I guess what i'm saying J, is I'm just hoping since I've had my share of a good day, it will nip over to the Inversnecky & follow you down for the grit session, dry the peat bogs & keep a cool wind on those slopers for gurning. I'd come wi you if you said Cow & Calf aye. Havn't played there in years but a tiptoe up that arete south of the boulder again...
The Coire will be here for later aye, as will the juice bar - & don't break the rollerskate again if you're taking it....maaaaaan.
This was a personal reply to John on the comments involved with the Storms of Light entry, but a few phone calls have insisted it should be a post in it's own right. Toolering photos up soon.
The Coire will be here for later aye, as will the juice bar - & don't break the rollerskate again if you're taking it....maaaaaan.
This was a personal reply to John on the comments involved with the Storms of Light entry, but a few phone calls have insisted it should be a post in it's own right. Toolering photos up soon.
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Now for the technical bit. Grades...yuk. Using D grades in Scotland has become common-place in reflecting the dry ethic, of routes being climbable all year round. They roughly equate to M grades but allow for a cleaner representation of DTing & all season tooling where there is no ice, mixed turf pitches or chance of ice, providing a clearer distinction between winter & DT activities. Sport on picks basically. Agreed, comparison with Scottish winter grades is pretty meaningless given the total contrast in styles, so I've added the grades as I understand & apply them, running close to the M system & they stack up like this:
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D1-3: Easy. Low angled clambering, usually no tools.
D4: Slabby to vertical with some technical dry tooling.
D5: Some sustained vertical dry tooling.
D6: Vertical to overhanging with difficult dry tooling.
D7: Overhanging; powerful & technical dry tooling; less than 10m of hard climbing.
D8: Some nearly horizontal overhangs requiring very powerful & technical dry tooling; bouldery or extended crux sequences.
D9: Either continuously vertical or slightly overhanging with marginal or technical holds, or a juggy roof of 2 to 3 body lengths.
D10: Possibly 10 meters of horizontal rock or 30 meters of overhanging dry tooling with powerful moves & no rests.
D11: A ropelength of overhanging gymnastic climbing, or a 15 meter roof.
D12: Basically a D11 with bouldery, hard dynamics, full bhoona moves & tenuous technical holds.
D13: Phone Scott Muir & alert the style police.
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Just trying to get a soundboard going here really. So anyways, feel free to comment constructively or correct me on any points you feel are contentious...
