Rob Lonsdale Climbing

 

I can’t believe how lucky we are having such fantastic climbing conditions just recently. Oh wait….. were not.

But finally there’s been some cool dry weather so Lee and I took advantage and headed out to Brimham for an afternoon in search of some classic gritstone wrestling.. The niche area was rammed full of families giving us strange looks and asking ‘what’s yer mattress for?’ we sent a couple of the niche problems Niche Arete 6b, left flake 6a+ and right flake 6a+ before we’d had enough of the crowds and went in search of more solitude.

The Grouch 7b is something we both tried last winter, but never managed to link after working the beta. My amazing memory meant Lee had to remember the beta. After a couple of tries we were hitting the powerful compression moves Lee could keep a heel toe in to do it static, my tyrannosaurus arms were hindering the process slightly so came up with a dynamic slap and a heel hook to unlock the send process. Lee topped out first, I two goes later. Its a shame the rock quality is so poor on this problem because the moves are excellent. Here’s a short video of Mr Frodo demonstrating his epic footwork.

Following our success, we planned to goto the outlying area of Crimpy Roof and have a spin on crimpy wall 7b+, whilst bushwhacking towards the roof we stumbled across a chap trying Harvey 7b on a nice shady buttress. It seemed like a good place to maul my cheese an cucumber butty (one of my 5 a day obviously) and get some beta to steal a quick send.

Lee pulled on while I was busy with lunch and worked a good sequence, using a poor sandy foothold out right, and crimped his way to success in a couple of goes. After my caramel bar and salt an vinegar squares it was my go.

Try as I might I couldn’t use the poor foothold, so I did what I do best & did the start footless, once on the problem I used my precise and faultless footwork to despatch it. Excellent.

After getting lost in the bracken we eventually found crimpy wall / roof 7b+. The starting moves were great, a laying down start with a couple of powerful moves out to a crimp on the headwall. Which I was no where near. Skin was in short supply so I sacked it off and took up photo duty. Lee invented some good beta and managed to wire the problem in 2 halves but didn’t have the reserves to link it at the end of the day.

We finished our very productive grit session at Drakes of Knaresborough with Fish & Chips!

 

 

 

Tags: Bouldeirng, Brimham, Grit, Harvey, The Grouch