TEAM BLOG
Feet On The Ground
September 13, 2010 at 11:59 am | Dave Pickford | No comment
Hitting the ground with your feet running, so the cliché goes, is a favourable state of affairs. Considering the implications of hitting the ground with your head, feet are always my preferred choice, too. This seems like a natural, feline instinct – for a climber, surely a useful instinct.
I took off to Sweden at the beginning of August to investigate a secretive granite climbing area on the west coast: Bohuslan. What I discovered there was one of the best-kept secrets of European climbing, a world-class cragging paradise of fairytale cliffs and towers lost amid a miniature landscape of forests and fjords.
On the last day, I managed to complete one of the hard classics of the region: Electric Avenue (Swedish 9/ 8a+). This incomparable face climb is the best single pitch I’ve ever done on granite, and should be on the hit list of anyone operating at this level. It involves steady climbing up to ten metres, at the point where the big wall steepens. Then it’s all systems go: ultra-complex technical sequences of escalating difficulty culminate in a final, all-out punch for a horizontal break at 25m. But it’s not over – the seam the route follows continues on through the capping bulge, and a repellent layback on slopers and smears is required to breach this final obstacle. The last move is a bellyflop-mantleshelf into a holdless, water-worn scoop.
Back in the UK, I was soon back on the best sea cliffs in the world, luckily just two hours from my home. Pembroke is one of those rare climbing areas that just keeps on giving. Despite having done most of the better established routes there, I continue to find new ones every year, and at the same time, I’m frequently astonished to find unclimbed, hidden classics just metres from more popular routes. And, to go back to the idea of hitting the ground with your feet running, I’ve been wondering if successful climbing adventures are sometimes driven by increasing work commitments. I’m not sure if my success on the rock this summer would have been possible if I’d not had the time pressure element in play. Sometimes, the need to return to the office can increase motivation exponentially.
On the massive, leaning sheet of orange limestone that constitutes Keelhaul Wall at Bosherston Head, I noticed an intriguing, unclimbed seam running out left from the John Dunne classic The Big Issue (E9) and leading into the amazing traverse of Punks In The Tea Room. Could this be linked up to join Andy Long’s awesomely steep E6, Ocean Drive?
Sure enough, I found that after some very hard moves out of Big Issue, the seam did indeed allow better hold in Punks to be reached, and the whole thing joined together remarkably well. I climbed it in far from perfect style, practising the moves on a grigri and leaving some crucial gear in place on the crux, but I hope I’ve laid down a worthwhile challenge for stronger, more capable climbers to take on in better style. Pirate Punk (E8 6c) could definitely be climbed on-sight, ground up, by a really strong trad climber.
It was not as if doing the first ascent of this fantastic route wasn’t enough, but in late August I found myself back in Huntsman’s Leap – the best crag in Britain for high standard, single-pitch trad climbing – looking at the awesome unclimbed headwall between the Pat Littlejohn E7 Terminal Twilight and the still-unrepeated Gary Gibson route The Black Lagoon.
The line had clearly been tried before, presumably by Gibson himself or perhaps Martin Crocker, since several rusting pegs had been left in place. However, there was other, good gear in the headwall, rendering them unnecessary. The key to the line, I discovered, was an amazing cross-through move on a split pocket that allowed access to the weird, fluted crack system and impending wall above. The moves were hard all the way to the top, and I wondered how pumped I’d be by the time I reached the final tricky sequence at 45 metres!
I finally went down to the ‘Leap at low tide on August 31st, with Dan McManus, to try and lead the thing. A very dry summer had left the notoriously seepage-prone Terminal Twilight in remarkably good condition, so I set off with high hopes. Just the start of this route is hard E6 in its own right and I arrived at the strange hole at 2/3 height before its crux, and where my new line branches out, feeling pretty tired. After resting for at least ten minutes in the hole, I dropped down and set off into the crux.
The solution I’d worked out proved effective, and soon I was launching up the big, fluted crack, pumped, climbing half-in control, but knowing another good rest lay above. After placing the crucial cam 4 that protects the final section, I tried to rest by shaking out in the fluting, with only some success. When I’d recovered as much as I could, I lurched up into the big hole about ten metres below the top, and the final rest before the last crux at 43 metres! A crafty knee-bar in the hole proved a godsend, and I managed to recover just enough to get some life back into my exhausted arms. After a while, I stepped out of the hole and up into the final moves on the upper headwall.
Although not totally desperate (English 6b) these moves certainly don’t feel easy after over 40m of tough, pumpy climbing to get there, and I nearly slipped off an easy move right at the end. In fact, I don’t think I’ve put as much physical effort into any trad pitch in Pembroke, or possibly anywhere, as this one. As I collapsed in the soft grass at the top of the Leap, Dusk Till Dawn came into life at E8 6b/c (with the E8 very much for effort rather than danger) – and, more importantly than the grade, it’s yet another amazing modern classic on the best crag in Britain’s best sea cliff climbing region.
At the end of that day, as Dan climbed the ultra-technical wall of The Pulsebeat (E6) in the fast-fading late summer light, I looked back at the headwall as the tide began to cover the boulders under Terminal Twilight. It is surely a measure of just what an extraordinary climbing area Pembroke is, that a route such as this can still be unclimbed in 2010, with six thousand other recorded routes in the region.
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