Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The climbing out at this venue is wild, untouched, heathen, uneducated & generally harder than ourselves, surrounded by fantastic bouldering. Hauling gear in, overloaded against the swell can be arduous, porta-ledging in pitch black above the rolling thunder, unnerving as much as it is exciting. You brew up, waiting for mornings creep of first light & a days climbing. You drag with you, the stench of sea material, salt, dust & stone when you leave. Often a 50 mile jolly in the kayak or in the heavywieght canoe, lashed for high swell, will lead to the discovery & dedicated development of arenas like this. Or at least, traditionally, you do a wee rake of monster lines & pass it on locally, qiuetly, smiling at the mainstream fight for an inch of rock, as they swear at eachother, accuse who they can of this & that, & I guess, eventually implode.
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17ft Nordi launch into playful surf - just the ticket in between climbing hard gneissian projects
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I feel another Foula trip coming on. Getting Jim to raft us up with the maggie prawner at the bottom of Wester Hoevdi, the Kame & Nebbifeld & get as many kayak belays as we can out of new raids inside Breis Holm, & I'll take some Rum for Isobel & we'll haul gear, spending days like ants, clanking, inching up soaring 1000ft banded black verticalities, pierced only by the echoes of silence & seabirds bouncing back off eachother, vying for rule inside the ariel boundries. Out here, on the tops when you check the cuts in your fingers, when the sun bows down for evening, shadows are cast planetarilly, not by buildings or chimneys & mans architectural folly. Out here there is an extremely acute sense that you are climbing on the protuding bones of the earths personal geology. The very building blocks of hemispherical dna, a welded seam binding the polar caps, running deep below the streams of evolution.
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These places out here are like a reverse Gasherbrum, you can't accidently climb it, you purposefully navigate towards it with intention. There is a stillness, a peace within the action, woven with blinkered commitment. Only a handfull of us truly understand the full location, & it's already given way to some fierce climbing in a venue millions of years old, previously untouched by 20© man, & I'd venture, even the Neolith hord. One of the best outings so far is my own, ironically named, Òran a' Caochladh, crawling multi-pitch style across the main arch & equally, Finns steep testpiece, Luathaich, bounding up the outward leading arete. And they waffle on about Dumbarton being some amazing climbing ground...It's a plug in a rusting wasteground...you can keep it. I'd need 5 lifetimes just to develop all these outer cathedrals we've found in the Hebrides. Not a bad back garden to have overall. My sponsors are hoping I'll do it all in one I think...
The standard sea-taxi gear haul approach into E9 country - Cuilidh Domhan, Hebrides..agus, siud an t-eilean às an t-sealladh na phrìomh chomharr stiùiridh, cunnartach, do sheachaint gun fhaochadh.
The standard sea-taxi gear haul approach into E9 country - Cuilidh Domhan, Hebrides..agus, siud an t-eilean às an t-sealladh na phrìomh chomharr stiùiridh, cunnartach, do sheachaint gun fhaochadh.
posted by ※Sgian Dubh ※ at 3:59 PM | 
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