It's been a good few weeks, with a good few days out. The weather gods have been unusually merciful and the typical sunshine and showers bollox has been interspersed with days of decent dry weather instead of days of more persisent rain. Of interest to me:
Fun / Fatigue - Iron Crag:
I've been a bit obssessed with Iron Crag this summer. Partly because I was never really aware of it until getting the very useful new-ish Eastern Lakes guide seeing a good crag for the first time is always exciting, and partly because having thoroughly revised that crag section and been recommended it by the old boys we met at Burnt Crag, I've been rather inspired by the bold and tasty wall climbing on offer. After several aborted chances I finally got down there for a good afternoon out, managed the crucial 15min (25min) final walk-in crux up a grass slope so steep you could turn it into granite and call it Etive, and managed to rattle off the two adjacent classics of Marble Staircase and Amabalite in reasonable order. Both were rather involving with delicate and intricate climbing and thoughtful and well-spaced protection. Classic Lakes-style wall climbing, and curiously enough as enjoyable as the routes were, they took enough out of me that I actually got a bit of mental fatigue and was happy enough not to climb the next day. Maybe I got a bit spoilt by the climbing-wall-style join-the-dots climbing at Reecastle ;)
Frustration / Fun - Glen Shian:
I've been a bit obssessed with the Glen Shian slab for 3 years now. With the typical obscurity and obfuscation of the Scottish climbing scene, this delectable slab of rock was made famous with a Dave MacLeod E10 7a and two videos featuring that route and an adjacent E7/8 repeat, yet not publicised in any useful form. UKC added well to the confusion by providing no crag details but mentioning it as "at Glenfinnan, a few miles west of Fort William". It's at Glen Shian, 25 miles west of Fort William and 10 miles from Glenfinnan itself. GG!! Anyway I managed to scour a minimal topo from somewhere online, approach details from Kev Shields, and a couple of addition routes from people's blogs and Andy Nisbet. Finally I got there the other week, and it was worth the effort.....just. "Just" because of the effort involved, not because of the climbing. The effort being a god-knows-how-many-fucking-hours round trip to collect the Spaniard from Falkirk, then hoon across half of Scotland to the slab, then climb all afternoon, then drive back to Crianlarich, have the great idea to post the Spaniard back on a train from Glasgow, saving us both a bit of bother.....then get stuck with a completely unmentioned 15 minute delay at the Pulpit Rock roadworks, leaving us with about 45 minutes to do a 1 hour journey to the station. Suffice to say we made it, but I'm not proud of my driving - slowing down to errrr 90 to take bends safely is a bit much even for me.
Anyway, the climbing. It took a bit of experimentation to work out the correct onsight grades and make the most of this fine sheet of rock, but in the end we had a cool day out. Things didn't start so well, falling off a so-called slab route that ended up with desperate footless jamming, lowering off RPs on a so-called E4 (E5+) only to rip two RPs and a cam and snap another micro-wire, gulp. Then it got a bit still and midgey and I still wanted to give the mega-classic Frustration a go....well I got on it "just for a look" and then the first tied-down skyhook was pretty bomber and I could see some good quartz blobs to go for and suddenly there was no frustration at all and all the weirdness of previous encounters was washed away in a clean tide of pure slab climbing pleasure. To have the same experience, here's all the details.
Crucial Times...
Frustration....
Fatigue / Fatigue - Binnian Shuas:
Finally something a bit out of my comfort zone. I know I can do 1 hour flattish walk-ins from semi-regular trips to Reiff's Leaning Block, I didn't know I could do that THEN stack a half hour uphill walk-in on top of that. Turns out I can, I think the early flat traipsing helps me warm up. Turns out I can also climb a mega-thuggy 40m crack pitch after all of that and after having crag supplies of the day consisting of: 1 small bread roll, a few spare salad leaves, some grapes, and a can of Red Bull ... But only just. Anyway BS just seemed like the right choice for the day, too warm for Creag Dubh and too far to drive elsewhere for a day, I only had one route I wanted to do (recently cleared by the legendary Iain Small, I'll be sending the bill for my finger skin grafts to him...) and the rest of the expedition would be good training whatever. Anyway I was mildly fatigued by the walk-in, very fatigued spending 30 minutes under the crux roof of Delayed Attack, trying to milk the cramped non-rest for what it was worth and wondering what the fuck was going on until I removed my wire from the crucial finger slot and removed a large chunk of skin from my finger pulling on it, and fatigued to the point of hallucinating beer and fish and chips at the end of the 4 mile walk out. Thankfully the Pitlochry Chinese/Chippy stays open late and freshly fried dinner ensured survival after all. Coping with the exhertion might open up some other possibilities (Creag Glhas, Stac Pollaidh) but I might restrict myself to once a month for such slogs, even when my legs can cope my sanity can only take so much plodding along!
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