Glorified uphill walking

Is how I have often thought of gritstone climbing. My opinion has changed a bit this weekend as I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day out in Yorkshire with Dave P and Steve Honeyman.

Ilkley

We met up at the back of the calf and had a good warmup on the woody style warmup problems. I got spanked on most of these so decided to head round the corner for my goal of the day, Ringpiece.

It was steep, had big holds and looked both reachy and burly, perfect! Thoughts of an easy flash were going through my mind so I made sure every hold was chalked and the ring was dry! A chalk up and a stretch then into action as I got the fat pinch, wedged a toe in and came into the undercut, feet planted and lunge to glory... only to fail and hit the mat. Should have tried a bit harder!

A couple more tries and it went down without a hitch getting stood up above on to a snow covered block. I decided retreat was the best option and reversed to the lip.

Dave crushed it in a similar fashion soon after and Steve got close before making the decision to get on the main goal.

We popped over to Curious Yellow wall and it looked pretty luminous on top. I decided to warm up for Curious by crushing the simple looking arete to the left only to receive the hard shutdown for the next hour or more! It felt a bit glassy on the holds but was probably just our general punterdom at play.

I had a handful of goes on Curious getting stood up on the thin RH undercut and trying to find the correct place to wrap the left toe in order to come over to the small LH intermediate crimp (before you lunge to the pocket/edge). Got close on 1 try on this move but no cigar. Steve got to a similar position a few times which was quite impressive as I reckon it is way harder to get standing up without the long reach and having a bent arm to pull in on. One to go back to for sure.

T' Cliff

With the light starting to fade we sped over to the cliff and climbed the fantastic Matterhorn arete that i had shamefully never done! I then almost had an epic on the 5C problem to the left of this which felt fully hard.

Dave suggested a quick look at Matt's roof and with our literal sea of pads (about 8 between 3 of us) We just about made it appealing. It looked pretty amazing and something I could do. So we booted up and I watched Dave have a go like the beta whore I am.

First go was a near miss of catching the hold. 2nd go was going past it and 3rd go, it was in the bag. A truly lovely basic board problem.

A final dash as the stars came out over to the Demon Wall Roof area.... Dave crushed Stu's Roof LH all the way to being stood up above the lip and then fell off due to a total lack of light making it a case of braille climbing!

An athletes diet of a pint in the Hunter's bar was followed by a kebab and some more pints in the metropolitan town of Huddersfield.

Sunday morning

We opened the curtains at Steve's and it had totally fucked it down with snow! Donnelly rang to say he had bailed the cave with the Mills. We had a lazy morning of coffee and watched some psyche which made me long for dry stable weather that seems widespread in a lot of the US!

We attempted to leave around 2ish and Dave's van required a jumpstart to let us limp back to Merseyside, tired but keen for the return leg on Tuesday (weather permitting).