Outliers

Here's a video with strictly NO big numbers, no epic first ascents, no tales of struggle and victory, no scintillating exposition about the philosophy of the bouldering journey, and of course no drone footage no close-ups no slow-mo no choppy edits no coffee-making and no driving to the crag.

Just 39 off-piste Snowdonia classic boulder problems from 6A to 7A in 32 minutes, set to a soundtrack of uplifting jungle, serious techno, and bassy ambience.

Here's the deal: The "Outlying Crags" section (i.e. away from Llanberis / Ogwen) in the new fantastic North Wales Bouldering bible has grown 20-fold in the last decade or so. So whilst you could be queuing up to get run over after falling off The sodding Edge Problem, you could also explore a vast number of areas from the reasonably well known to the fully off-piste. And that's exactly what I did, and I had a bloody great time, and I wanted to show it off to other people. There's a few more things I wanted to fit in but ran out of weather, and thus maybe there will be a follow-up at some distant point. One thing I learnt was that the quality and variety in North Wales Bouldering is truly great, even if the conditions aren't quite as convenient as Albarracin ;).

The video kinda says it all, solely by the medium of pure simple climbing footage. The only other thing to add is that I'm pretty chuffed with the (hopefully accessible) soundtrack which took quite a bit of effort to segue etc but makes it a lot more fun I think.

Since this early Autumn excitement, the weather got terrible, I got manflu and then injured my back doing weights on de-oxygenated legs after running to the gym, then all of the above cleared up and I went out on the grit recently and it was mostly terrifying but I'm pretty psyched to keep going at it during winter and early spring...