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So what's it all about? This High Definition?

It's amused me for a year or two now that TV companies have been advertising High Definition programmes and hardware on regular televisions! They make the picture look pretty by using slow motion photography. Sky are particularly prone to it because of their HD channels. My dad emailed a few days ago asking me whether I thought they should subscribe. I don't myself yet, but advised him to get himself down to a local showroom and ask to see an HD picture next to a regular one. He called today to say that they've taken the plunge and the results are amazing. In his words 'it makes you want to put your glasses on to watch any analogue picture'. The sound is loads better too.

Running a film festival I've had to tread a cautious line for the past 5 years: film-makers inevitably use the latest kit and produce their films in HD. However, DVD is still the default medium that we use to view the said films at home, and DVD is seriously compressed compared to HD. Film-makers are obviously keen to move away from DVD so that viewers can see their stuff in its full glory. Of course it's been possible for many years to play these films in HD - you can simply hook up the camera on which the film was filmed to a projector or TV that is capable of accepting an HD signal, and hey presto. Such practices have been used for important screenings at festivals, premieres and the like, but it'd never been viable to run a whole festival like this.

Until now.

We've just purchased a couple of magic little Media Players which seem to play pretty much whatever you throw at them: video, music and picture-wise, so we're pretty excited that at last we've caught up with the film makers and can actually show their stuff, with relative ease, in HD. ShAFF is unfortunately just one week after the Llanberis Mountain Film Festival which is going down a similar route which means we can't make the claim to be the first of the adventure festivals to 'go digital'. Still, they are only showing HD films in one of their venues and we'll be doing it in all of ours :-)

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I'll never tire of winters like the one we've just had / are just having (he says, crossing his fingers for another cold snap!).

My memories of childhood are of sledging every year, days off school, walking up the River Glaslyn on the ice, my Dad's ice axe in hand, hacking away out in the middle of the river. It was like a blast from the past, the cold weather we've just had. I completely forgot about climbing for a whole month. Every spare minute (which tended to be during the hours of darkness so head torches were essential) was spent walking, sledging, running, jumping and scrambling in the white stuff.

Perhaps fittingly, the best was saved until last. After an epic run up to Higgar Tor a week ago last Saturday, when I spied a very, very wintry looking Stanage Edge, a plan was hatched to get ourselves up there. The plan soon snowballed (excuse the pun!), and on Thursday night at 6.45pm, 11 of us convened at The Sportsman's Pack in Hathersage, ditched the cars in an icy car park, and trudged up School Lane to the Edge (actually I cadged a lift in Marty's 4X4 part of the way as a farmer had ‘cleared' the road to his drive way). The walk was epic in itself, thigh deep snow and no tracks whatsoever! Granted, it had snowed the previous day, but no sign of people at all? It amazes me that with Sheffield so close, and a massive number of people psyched for the great outdoors, that more people don't venture out when we get snow, especially on this scale.

We finally arrived home at around 1 in the morning, exhausted, already seriously aching, and happy beyond words. Steve even opted to voluntarily miss the last train out of Hathersage and doss over for an extra couple of hours at the crag. Oh what fun! Tool-less winter ascents by the dozen, bum-slide descents, holes in cornices, soloing VS's in big boots and big gloves. One of the guys out with us took some awesome pics (see above). See for yourself.

Check out this photo posted on UKClimbing of somebody snowboarding at Burbage North a few days previously.

My only regret is that we didn’t manage to make it out in the daytime on a sunny day. That would have been a photogenic session!

I'll leave you with one final image (in case you haven't already seen it) from the BBC:

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 Yesterday I signed an online petition to the leaders at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Here's a bit of info about it in case you want to sign too:

Dear friends,

Wow. Yesterday, the media was calling the crucial Copenhagen climate summit dead on arrival.

But 24 hours later, after millions of petition signatures, hundreds of thousands of phone calls, and a massive outcry across the planet, a deal could be back on!

Leaders are frantically doing in hours what they've failed to do for years, but we're still far from a pact that will stop catastrophic global warming of 2 degrees -- and the talks could still collapse. We know our pressure is working, let's use these crucial final hours to ramp it up, and get a real deal, not a dressed-up weak agreement. Sign the staggering 13 million person petition below if you haven't yet, and forward this email to everyone:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_copenhagen

The petition has become the centre of the global revolt against failure in Copenhagen. The names of petition signers are being read out by young people who have taken over spaces in the Copenhagen summit and in governments round the world, including the US State Department and the Canadian Prime Minister's office.

Amazingly, leaders themselves are appealing to the public for action. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an impassioned appeal to 3000 Avaaz members on a global conference call on Wednesday, calling for an historic 48 hour internet based campaign from citizens around the world, calling our impact crucial. Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu also appealed to the world at one of 3000 vigils organized by our movement, proclaiming "We marched in South Africa and apartheid fell, we marched in Berlin and the wall fell, we marched on Copenhagen and we WILL get a real deal".

History is being made in Copenhagen, but so far, it's not being made by leaders, but by us, millions of people round the world who are directly engaging, hour by hour, like never before, in the fight to save our planet. The pressure is working, let's ramp it up.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_copenhagen

With hope and determination,

Ricken, Alice, Iain, Ben, Paul, Luis, Graziela, Benjamin, Pascal, Veronique, Paula and the whole Avaaz team.
 

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Just over a week ago I returned home, exhausted after a very long weekend's work at the Kendal Mountain Festival. Kendal is the biggest festival of its kind in the UK, and some say in the world.  Some 7,000 are reputed to travel to the famous Lake District town for the weekend of films, lectures, awards and socials. I've been visiting the festival on and off for about 7 years, and for the last 2, have been involved in a professional context as film programmer. Most of this job takes place long before the festival weekend screening the films, writing copy for the programme, and working out a sensible sounding timetable. The weekend itself is still pretty hectic, troubleshooting technical issues, gathering feedback, programming the awards ceremony, contacting winners etc. But it's also an opportunity to absorb myself into the world that quite literally supports me. I make my living organising events for the world of climbers, and Kendal is a superb example of the spirit that that keeps this world alive and buzzing. Hang around in one of the many bars or in a queue for a film screening or lecture and you'll quickly notice the place is a veritable hall of fame. This year, to name but a few, I saw Johnny Dawes, Alain Robert, Tom Hornbein, Andy Kirkpatrick, Ian Parnell, Andy Parkin, Leo Houlding, Kenton Cool, John Bracey, Zoe Hart, Jim Curran, Ken Wilson, Sir Chris Bonington, Rich Cross, Matt Heliker, Pete Robbins, James McAffie, Nick Bullock, Dave Pickford, Dave Birkett, Lucy Creamer, Steve McClure, Chris Sharma, Ueli Steck, Stefan Glowacz and a whole host of others who I either didn't see, or simply didn't recognise. Then there's the film makers and photographers of whom there were at least as many. The reason I listed these people is not as some sort of super-sad tick-list, but to point out that every single one of these people is there in the bar talking to whoever they happen to be standing next to. At the end of the day they are, by and large, every day people with some unusual skills and exciting stories to tell! The atmosphere is simply electric.

If you do make it out of the bar - and many don't - into a film screening you may wonder why bother when many of the films are available on DVD and even online. There are a number of reasons: a big audience will always respond better than you and a mate at home, laughing, wincing, oohing and aahing together; the sound will invariably be better and louder than a set of speakers plugged into your computer; the screen will certainly be bigger; there's a good chance that in this day and age you'll be watching stuff in high definition; presenters will tell you a little about the film you are about to watch; in many cases the filmmaker / director / producer or even the cast will stand and say a few words about their film and may even answer your questions if you ask nicely; and perhaps most importantly of all, some of the films at the festival will be screened for the very first time ever - all stuff that you just don't get at home. As you leave the theatre you'll inevitably be drawn into conversations with others about what you've just watched. All in all it can be a very memorable experience.

Aside from the films and the social scene in the bar you've normally got a host of interesting lectures on offer, book and poster signings, bargains, free whiskey tasting, photo exhibitions, stands to peruse, literary award ceremonies, hog roasts and sponsored climbs. That's Kendal anyway. There are other festivals. They're not on quite the same scale as Kendal, but the principles are very much the same and the atmosphere equally good. Here's a list in case you're not aware of them:

In the UK

Fort William - March

Dundee - March

Edinburgh - October

Sheffield - March

Llanberis - March

Big ones abroad:

Banff - November

Graz - November

Autrans - November

Telluride - May

Trento - April

Wanaka - July

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Last year my Dad invested a lot of time and energy into scanning a load of his old slides. The results are a little fuzzy at times, but I'm so grateful to him for having buckled down and recorded so many shots of my childhood that were slowly deteriorating in his study. I'm also incredibly gratful for the wild and adventurous childhood that my brother and I had. Check out some of these photos! Here's a collage of them as a taster.

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A while back I Blogged about Deep Water Soloing (or DWS). Bacl then I was sitting in a rainy office dreaming about it. Well we just got back from a pretty awesome 10 days actually doing it in Mallorca. We went last September and had such a good time went again this one. A shame we missed some of the best weather the UK has had to offer all summer whilst there, and an even bigger shame that it rained a fair bit whilst we were there! Still, I managed to climb on 10 days out of 10! I tried to take a couple of rest days, but got sucked in to messing about on 'easy traverses' which proved to be less easy than we thought!

One of those 'rest days' we swam out to the mega-arch made famous by Chris Sharma in last year's 'Es Pontas' chapter of Dosage. It's about a 50m swim and it was a choppy sea so it felt fairly adventurous. We'd gone out to have a play on the traverse around the left hand leg of the arch, a 5+ described in the guidebook that turned out to be more like 6b+ and pretty pumpy in places! Chris's route looks truly awe inspiring, and the level of commitment necessary to climb the thing must have been monumental. I'd be interested to know if he scared himself silly as I did by climbing the stone totem pole on the cliff-top overlooking the arch. It's essentially about 10 huge table sized slabs of limestone planed smooth on top and bottom, stacked on top of each other to make a giant climbing frame about 25 feet high. Stood on top for a photo I did a bit of a wobble to scare a few onlookers and was more than a little surprised when the wobble didn't stop and the thing carried on swaying! I waited a while for it to stop and very gingerly climbed down!

We even managed a bit of new routing action this time around. Mallorca is pretty much one big hulk of limestone with a million holds ergonomically designed for climbers! Although plenty of crags have been developed it is still very much in its infancy with potential new lines all over the place. Three trips to Cala Mitjana eventually saw a first ascent of 'Balsa Boys', a classic 7a+ tackling some impressively steep terrain out the back of a cave on perfectly spaced monster buckets.

One bonus to the trip was meeting Team America who were staying with a friend in a nearby villa. Cedar Wright, Alex Honnold and Matt Segal were all there with a bunch of others, absolutely loving the place. What impressed me most was Cedar's blog postings. I seem to manage to post once a week if I am lucky, he was posting pressty regularly out there, but was managing to edit some pretty decent quality videos for uploading at the same time. Check out Vertical Carnival.

And on top of all that it seems I'm actually reasonably fit after 10 days of steep jug-pulling :-). Hopefully more on that in another blog posting soon enough.

Here's a few photos of the trip.

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I watch a lot of films. It’s part of my job. I run the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival and also programme for the Kendal Mountain Festival Film Competition. In the last year I reckon I’ve watched 300 adventure films so I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on which ones are the better ones, and which ones don’t make the cut. I figured it might be useful to put down a few of the more common characteristics, mistakes and traps that film makers make that result in their films not making the cut. This is, of course, my own opinion, and based on choosing films for a festival audience. That last point is an important one, and brings me on to the first of the issues:

1. Film length. Festival audiences tend to expect a varied compilation of films. Compilations may be themed or mixed, but they usually comprise a number of films. As such feature length films are difficult to programme into compilations and often get left out. This is a headache for festivals as many feature films are feature length for good reason and deserve a wide audience. That said, many films are generally on the long side and could easily be edited down. It is quite common for film makers to produce a lengthy film, and to then produce a shorter edit specifically for festivals. This is the perfect situation as a 20 minute film should be plenty long enough to put together an effective trailer for the main feature.

2. The second most common, and highly frustrating, issue is narration. Employing a decent narrator to give a voice-over to a film is of paramount importance and so often under-appreciated. Unintelligible accents, over-enthusiasm and dumbing down of the story are all common traps. Once a decent narrator has been found, who doesn’t irritate or offend, it’s essential that what he or she says is aimed at the relevant audience. Language is a major issue in the international world of film festivals. It’s no good submitting a German film to an English speaking festival, so narrators are often used to translate a film. This translation often renders the translated version of the film laughable when it is clear that the end product has not been proofed by somebody native to the language of translation!

3. In most cases films work best if the original narration is left alone and decent subtitles are added. Of course, if the original narrator has an irritating voice this can still render the film unwatchable! With regard to subtitles it’s surprising how many film makers pay scant attention to the placement and colour of them, meaning that white lettering disappears on snowy mountains! White lettering with a black border works well. It’s also essential to make sure that the captions are on screen long enough to be read – this is particularly true when subtitling into a language that is spoken at a slower pace than the original!

4. Exaggeration. The very nature of most adventure films dictates that the narration points out the level of difficulty, the grandness of scale, or the degree of hardship. Festival audiences see through exaggerated claims and tire of repetition of such claims. Many of the best films underplay the illustration of how hard-core things are through narration, and let the pictures speak for themselves.

5. Music. A very difficult one this. Getting the music right for a film can be a costly and very time-consuming project. That said, it’s a shame when an otherwise good film is let down by irritating, cheesy, or plain bad music. Including un-licenced music in a film is a no-no and will automatically mean that a film is not eligible for festivals.

6. Lingering on personal moments. If a film is made largely for the protagonists of the expedition / trip then these are excusable, but if it is to be entered into festivals and thereby the public domain these private jokes and moments can become tiresome very quickly. Incidental shots are an essential part of most films, but linger on them for too long and they can appear egotistical on the part of the film maker and also cause the film to drag (see point 1).
 

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I saw this today and figured it should be passed around. It's pretty graphic, but all the more sobring for it.

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If you like ticking things, and you like traveling you'll love this site. Tick the countries you've been to and it fills in a map of the world and shows you where you've visited (and where you haven't!). I've managed 44, a paltry 19%...

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It's been over a month since I last blogged. The reason? We've been relaxing at a friends' place in the South of France. John and Anne Arran moved to the Ariege region of the Pyrenees about 8 months ago and I now know why! They've bought an amazing property down there and are slowly but surely converting it into some top-class accommodation (with our help! - well, it wouldn't have been fair to invite ourselves along without helping out some would it?). Within 15 miles of their house must be at least 5 or more decent quality sport climbing crags, some of Europe's largest show-caves, plenty of other caves that you don't need to pay to enter, a decent leisure-kayak river, stunning wild camping, marked mountain bike trails, and more! Less than half an hour away is the ski resort of Ax Les Thermes. This must sound like an advert, which in a way it is. They are friends of ours and we'd like to see them do well. We just spent an incredibly enjoyable month with them living the dream - surely converting somebody else's French farm-house has got to be less stressful than doing it yourself! What I can't get my head around is why somewhere like this is hardly even talked about in the UK as a climbing destination, when somewhere like Kalymnos, Mallorca, or Sardinia, all of which have far less climbing potential, are world renowned destinations. And it's closer. Sales pitch over. I'm hoping to head back out in October before the weather breaks for the winter...

Want to know more? ChezArran

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In the pub after the Raft Race somebody laid down a challenge: to come up with something equally good fun, as well as being totally pointless, but very competitive. Pete, man of many talents, rose to the challenge and devised a fantastic 15 'hole' Frisbee golf course along Froggatt Edge.

It works much like regular golf. Each hole (normally a rock, tree, or something a bit bigger than a proper golf-hole!) has a starting point, and a par. Players launch their Frisbees towards the hole, throwing again from the point it lands at. There are penalties attributable to anybody with expensive Frisbees! Chris and Amy brought their dog Poppy along who made life interesting by moving people's Frisbees - not always closer to the hole! Wind, rain, and 8 foot high water-laden bracken meant it took five of us over two hours to complete the course, but we didn't lose a Frisbee.

I'd heartily recommend that anybody gives it a go. Make your own course and share it. I am sure there are plenty more - a Google search yields 321,000 results! If it's too mainstream for you, ask me about Shoe Golf, a game we invented walking back from Castle Hill boulders in New Zealand a few years back...

Photo courtesy of Steve & Louise.

Download the map and instructions.

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A quick one. Been busy of late recovering from Cliffhanger and tidying up loose ends. It was a roaring success with 20,000 people there over the weekend. It rained heavily, but after we closed the site on the Saturday night and before we opened it on the Sunday morning :-). There are some cracking photos here.

More importantly, on the Tuesday after Cliffhanger I had arranged for an experimental event in the shape of a raft race from Grindleford to Calver Bridge. Exploring the river is something that had been on my wish-list since we moved in, but a combination of consecutive poor-weather summers and never finding anybody to do it with had meant I hadn't got around to it. I sent out an email to a load of friends a couple of weeks ago inviting them to turn up in teams of two with an inflatable boat. I'd expected one or two teams, and wondered whether even those would turn up when it decided to chuck it down at 6.15! I was surprised to see 10 boats in the car park when I arrived! Well, I say boats, but some were in canoes (inflatable), one team was on an airbed complete with pillow and duvet, and there were even a couple of rubber ducks! It was unanimously agreed to be a whole heap of fun and I would reccomend that anybody who lives near a river of any size organise something similar. We've promised to make it an annual event and are contemplating trying to raise some money for this. More on the disgracefully little amount of access we have to our rivers in the UK another time.

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Cliffhanger is on this coming weekend. It's now in its third year and seems to be going strong. Sheffield City Council approached me having seen my website back in February 2005. I was abroad working in Jordan at the time, taking a short break from event work to work on the Iraqi Diaspora election (now that was an event and a half!), but met with a guy from the Parks and Countryside department shortly after returning to the UK. His name was Kevin Cheetham and he was head of events for P&C. He was responsible for putting on such events as The Highland Fling, Sheffield Show, After Dark and Art In The Gardens, all of which attract in excess of 10,000 people annually. He had an idea to put on a large event celebrating the outdoors, the Peak District, and the folk who live in Sheffield so that they can combine the two. I'd been brewing similar ideas for a couple of years, but had yet to take the plunge and do anything about them. We got excited when we realised that he had somebody with the expertise, contacts and drive to organise something that was otherwise out of his comfort zone, and I had somebody who had the take responsibility for, and promote locally such a large event.

That was then. We're just 5 days away from Cliffhanger III, we're not only still talking, but get on well and are continually working on how to improve the event, not just for the next year, but through until 2013. The phone has rung pretty much non-stop today - 'we need more wood for the climbing wall', 'where do we collect our passes from', 'i can't make the press event tomorrow night, something's come up' etc etc. Stressing out about any of it is counter-productive. Each call and email generally brings with it its own problems, which usually have knock-on effects on other elements of the event, but by approaching each one calmly and individually it's fairly easy to keep up-beat about them. We're three years in now, so some of the problems that we had in year one are now predictable or have even been ironed out, but there are always new ones, not least as we are always trying to develop new angles.

The biggest worry, and the one thing that stresses me out no matter how hard I try to ignore it is the weather. We live in a country with very fickle weather. Today it was hot and sunny one minute with monsoon rain the next. Weather can make or break an event. In year one we had it bad. Just enough people came to make it worthwhile putting on again. In year two things were significantly better - the sun shone most of the time and visitor numbers were doubled. The long range forecast is currently seesawing between sunny and rainy. We'll see...

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A couple of weeks ago we were awarded a grant from Yorkshire Forward for Cliffhanger. We didn’t get the money we'd applied for for additional PR and general event growth, but we did get the money for a couple of TV projects which is very exciting. The larger of the two projects is a sizeable amount of money to pay a production company to attend the two day event, filming the British Bouldering Champs and the rest of the activities at the event, and to produce a TV programme which will be aired on national TV. Brilliant. And a bit daunting at the same time. The last fortnight has been busy with tenders, bids, proposals, meetings and score sheets deciding who will get the job. It's a Sheffield City Council event and everything is done by the book which is frustratingly time consuming at times, but educational, and dare I say illuminating at other times.

The other project funded by Yorkshire Forward is to produce a short viral video to associate with the event. A similar process was undertaken to select the production company (Blue Hippo Media), with inspiration coming from the Danny McAskill Youtube video I blogged about a few weeks back. Given the time constraints we've been working to it's a miracle that we have anything to show, but by tomorrow morning I'm promised that the finished film will be online for the world to see. Will be very interested to hear what people have to say about it
 

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Without a doubt one of the best things my parents did for me as a young kid was to teach me to swim. I didn't get my first bike until 11 (failed my cycling proficiency test two weeks after getting it, but quickly mastered the art of front wheelies - I forget the name of a front wheelie), wasn’t much of a football player, and didn't really get ensconced into the world of climbing until I left home, but swimming I did a lot of. Countless hours were spent driving my brother and I to and from the two local pools for a multitude of badges and galas (I remember well how to turn a pair of pyjama bottoms into a temporary float), but the biggest treat of all was being old enough and responsible enough to trot the hundred yards through the woods fro our house to our local swimming spot, a huge pool in the river Glaslyn in Snowdonia. During hot summers we'd jump of the school bus, run in, change, and spend the next three hours down by the river jumping out of trees, cycling off the bank and generally larking about. That pool was one of dozens of spots in the local area. We were blessed with them. There were always a few mates who'd be game to join us, but I could never get my head around why so few people were at these places.

20 or so years on and it's much the same story. Based in the Peak District the swim spots are less numerous, but they are there. I was down at Calver Bridge on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend with mates. The water is still clenchingly cold, but incredibly refreshing at the same time. Cars hooted us regularly as we sat on the parapet in between jumps, but none stopped to join us despite the sweltering weather. Perhaps air conditioning is to blame - ours is broken so even a short journey in a car in such temperatures leaves one sweaty and desperate for a cooling off, but I fear the problem is rooted more deeply. The friend I was out with last night had tried to persuade another mutual friend to come. He'd turned us down with the argument that a mate of his had put his arm in a Peak District river and it had come out covered in 'wormy things'. Rubbish. I'm sure there are a few unsavouries floating around in the Peak waters, but I reckon it's a mix of lethargy, fear of the unknown, and air conditioning that keeps people away.

I regularly bemoan the loss of our lidos around the country, citing a trip to Southern Spain many years ago with jealousy. Down there every single village has a free communal, open-air pool where the entire village congregates every summers afternoon to see out the heat of the day. Sheffield is ringed with reservoirs and rivers, but most have signs up declaring that they are unfit for swimming. One of the most popular spots was recently drained, presumably as it was more effort to keep open than it was to allow it to sit, un-managed, but well-used. Why can't the local council put a bit of time, effort and money into transforming some of these reservoirs and other venues into public swimming spots, encouraging everyone to engage in a bit of old fashioned fun and exercise?

For any lovers of wild swimming out there make sure you check out this website, and buy the associated books. The first I have on my shelf and treasure. The second (coast) is on it's way to me and I'm very much looking forward to reading it when it arrives. I've even posted a few of my favourite locations on their interactive map and would urge others to do the same :-)

The bridge at Calver (over the river Derwent).
 

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Thought I'd post a few of my favourite 'useful' websites on the assumption that some people may not have discovered them:

First off, if you have a phone account that includes all calls to geographical numbers like I do then Say No To 0890 is an invaluable little resource of many of the alternative (i.e. original) numbers to their often-premium-rate equivalents.

Then there's money saving website Martin's Money Saving Tips, actually one of the more popular sites out there, and cashback site TopCashBack. In essence cashback websites can save you stacks of money if you pay for stuff online. All you have to do is check the listing on the site when you are about to pay for something; if the site is listed, as many are, then start your buying process again from the link within TopCashBack, and the cookies in your web-browser will remember that you started your search at TCB. TCB will then automatically alert the site you have bought stuff from that you did so as a result of their 'lead', and claim a finder's fee which they pass on to you. It's magic. I've made around £200 in the last year. Insurance companies are particularly good payers. It just shows what margins there are on many products! The key is to find your bargain first, then check the cashback sites of your choice (there are others besides TCB), and not limit yourself to just the sites who partner with the cash back sites.

I like the concept of these two sites which use user feedback to rate tradespeople so you can hopefully avoid the cowboys out there. Rated People and Problem Solved.

A pretty impressive Norwegian weather forecasting website called YR

By far and away the best flight website is Skyscanner.

Will post some favourite 'cool' sites another night.

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Two very different videos to lighten your mood:

Over 6 million hits on YouTube in just over 6 weeks. That's almost on a par with Susan Boyle! What this guy can't do on a bike ain't worth doing... And a great soundtrack to boot.

And then a blast from the past which never fails to make me laugh :-)

For more great adventure films check out my ShAFF playlists on Youtube - 2008 | 2009 | 2010 (feel free to send me links to any of your favourites).

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How excited am I? Not only do I have exotic friends who go off and live abroad, but I'm going to stay with them for a whole month. I've known John and Anne Arran since the early days of planetFear, when I first moved to Sheffield, and the fledgling website was based in a bedroom of their house! Well, last year they sold the said house, made a wedge of money, bought to smaller ones, one in Sheffield - who likes to burn their bridges - and one in the French Pyrenees. Apparently it's a typical rambling collection of out-buildings and falling down barns, bursting with charm and undergrowth. It was at least, until they got their hands on it and began the transformation into ChezArran. I haven't been yet, but am pretty excited to be heading out there for a whole month soon to see them, and help with the renovation. Bits of it are ready already I believe, a 4 berth unit they've called, somewhat originally, 'The House' looks great in the pics on the website. And they've promised a pool of some description by the time we arrive :-)

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Sheffield is home to two very important guys in the world of sport, both named Steve, yet if you were to ask your average Sheffield resident if they’d ever heard of either I suspect the answer would sadly be a resounding no. Steve Peat is the greatest ever downhill mountain biker – and we’re talking worldwide here – and Steve McClure is quite probably the UK’s best climber of all time.

Steve Peat took his second consecutive win in the men’s Downhill at Vallnord and the 17th of his career, breaking Frenchman Nicolas Vouilloz’s record for most World Cup wins, and extending his lead in the overall standings. He’s from Wharncliffe, is responsible for most of the singletrack in the woods in that neck of Sheffield, runs the Wharncliff Weekender, and is an all-round very nice guy. Interestingly his brother Andy Peat climbed with Jerry Moffatt back in the day and was pretty handy! Born in June 1974 he’s no spring chicken, but is still delivering the goods, having won the last two downhill races of the season, one of them only yesterday! How can it be that Sheffield, the UK’s national ‘City Of Sport’, doesn’t do more to raise this man up and celebrate the fact that he’s here? It’s not like we can even blame the Olympics as Mountain Biking is an Olympic Sport! We should have streets named after the man!

Whilst we’re on the subject of mountain biking check out Danny McAskill’s incredible video that was uploaded to Youtube four weeks ago and has gone absolutely bonkers since then with over 5,000,000 hits. I hear that his phone hasn’t stopped ringing with offers from all manner of celebrity chat show hosts wanting him on their show. Strange world…

Steve McClure is a climbing phenomenon. Approaching 40, and with a 3 year old kid, he’s still climbing at the absolute top level, and so far above any other British climber that it beggars belief. Last week he returned from another of his lightning trips to Spain where in six days he managed 1 F8b+ on sight, 4 F8bs on sight and multiple F8a+ and F8a on sight, coming within a whisker of that elusive first F8c on sight. A forum poster on UKClimbing had the audacity to ask what might happen if Steve were able to spend longer on one of these trips? Steve has just been dropped by high street lifestyle sponsor Fat Face (they have dropped virtually all of their sponsored athletes in an attempt to stave off the recession which has hit them particularly badly – they’ve also pulled out of sponsoring any Heason Events for the time being). Aside from a few other sponsorship deals Steve makes his living driving up and down the country route setting at climbing walls. It clearly keeps him fit, but it ain’t exactly Chris Sharma’s lifestyle! My point should be fairly clear: give him the means to go to Spain for the winter and I am sure he’d jump at the chance and we’d no doubt see something quite special. If he can operate at the levels that he does on the income he does, and with the workload and family commitments he has, heaven knows what he’d be capable of if he was given some financial stability! Perhaps we, the climbers of the UK, should sponsor Steve collectively for a couple of years and see where it gets him?

He’s another sportsman that Sheffield should really be recognising and nurturing. Rant over, but perhaps this Blog entry will help enlighten a few more people to the two great Steve’s we have in our midst.

Steve McClure in Mallorca on a DWS trip in 2008:

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I thought I was a fairly experienced climber. I am a fairly experienced climber actually - I started doing it 17 years ago so blinkin’ well should be. However I learnt the other day that being an experienced climber doesn't necessarily mean that one doesn't make mistakes, and when climbing, mistakes can be fatal. Fortunately I'm here to tell the tale, but it was a hairy moment!

It was a sunny afternoon, I was bored with work, so decided to go shunting for an hour at Electric Quarry, an esoteric little venue with its own generator and resident buzzing, just a few miles from the house. Cabbage Crack is an E4 that had been my nemesis for a season a few years back, taking three, maybe four visits to make a clean ascent. Shunting, for those who don't know, is a method of climbing whereby you set up a fixed rope on the line that you want to climb, tied off to a belay at the top, and then climb the route, self-belaying up the rope. There are a large number of methods, techniques and devices which lend themselves to shunting, or self-belaying, but it would appear that there are none that are foolproof.

Having never shunted before I did a little searching on the net before heading out, and decided upon my method. I set up a rope, tied off to a tree, abseiled down the line, tensioned off the rope with a camming device in a crack to make the rope tight (lesson 1 - I should have used a weighted rucksack as I you can at least lift the rucksack to give yourself some slack rope if necessary), and attached myself to the rope with a belay device called a Faders SUM (See review). This is rather like the more commonly known and used Petzl GriGri, but is suited to thinner ropes than a GriGri (I was using a 9mm sport rope). They both use a self closing camming mechanism to bite the rope if you fall off. I climbed up a few feet and jumped off to test the system. It worked fine. The only issue was that I didn't have the kit necessary to make a chest harness (lesson 2) which meant the device was sometimes 6 inches below my waist meaning a longer fall if I fell off - though nothing to drastic.

Approaching the crux, some 50 feet up the route I looked down to see that the pear shaper karabiner (lesson 3 - should have used an oval karabiner with a locking device to stop it turning around) that I had clipped the SUM to my harness with had turned around (lesson 4). The narrow end of the krab had caught on the lever on the SUM that is used in order to release the camming mechanism once locked. In effect it was locked in the open position, stopping the cam from being able to bite the rope. I calmly reached down to turn the krab back around, and realised with horror that I couldn't, it was all under too much tension and I couldn't move it. If I fell off now I would hit the ground! I climbed up another move to try to free it. This didn't work either. Panic started to set in. I grabbed the rope with both hands and began to down climb. After half a dozen hand movements down the thin roped I decided I would not be able to continue like this without my sweating hands slipping, so reached for a rusty peg. With a finger through the peg I was able to unclip a spare karabiner from my harness, somehow clip the peg, and then clip into the karabiner. From there I was able to use two hands to forcibly free the lever, unclip from the peg, weight the rope, and then use the lever for its intended use, and abseil back down the rope.

On my way home I stopped off at Calver bridge and jumped off it to cool off and calm down!

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Check out this telescopic ladder!

No need for fiddly stick clips or long brushes ever again. I might just buy one!

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Continuing the theme of fringe-climbing activities I headed out on Sunday to the Llanberis slate quarries with some friends on a mission to follow 'Snakes & Ladders', a 4 hour adventure exploring some of the more remote and exciting parts of this gargantuan scar on the landscape. I grew up just a few miles from Llanberis and it was only last year, whilst driving past on a bouldering trip to the Pass that I looked up and thought 'that really is a scar!'. I must have passed underneath it hundreds, if not thousands, of times during my childhood and since and never once gave them a second glance. I guess it was literally a part of the landscape to my young eyes. Imagine if a mining company wanted to do something like that right in the middle of a national park now! (check out Red Gold - it happens!).

Anyway, I heard years ago about a devious route that takes in some of the ladders, tunnels and scree slopes of the quarries, but had never managed to find a description. There’s a new guide to the Slate due out soon so I asked the author if he'd ever heard of it. He emailed back with a brief description and said that he'd be including it in the guide! I won't publish it here, suffice to say that the guide will be worth buying just to do this route / adventure.

It took us 3 hours, not 4, and that was fairly leisurely as a group of 4. There wasn't really any climbing to be had, but it helps to have a steady head as there are hundreds of metres of wobbly ladders to climb and a massive old chain to pull up. Torches are strictly forbidden (it's an adventure remember!), and not really needed anyway. If you do it, just make sure you take a decent camera and a spare battery (mine ran out half way around)!

Left hand two photos courtesy of Kat Cartwright

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Its official definition is to be evasive. It's modern definition is somewhat different. Practiced for decades my a few, weaseling seems to be on the up. It's a cross between rock climbing and caving; it takes place above ground and not in caves; it requires no equipment, though some choose to don a boiler suit and a helmet. It's basically a fun way of going for a walk. I was out at Higgar Tor on Saturday afternoon with a couple of mates and we all had our lads with us. Put a two and a half year old in amongst a bunch of boulders and they will automatically climb on to them, jump off them, and squeeze underneath and between them. That's exactly what we were involved in - seeking out the best squeezes, mini-caves and holes for the boys, when a group of some 20 youngsters popped up from behind a lump of gritstone and promptly disappeared, one after another, into a hidden tunnel. A minute later the first of them popped his helmeted head out of an equally invisible hole some 30 feet away. with plenty of wheezing and deep breathing the group slowly extricated themselves from this squeeze like a team of grinning Indiana Jones'. They were clearly having a lot of fun.

The following day I was out with just a couple of mates for some bouldering at the same place. Along came another group of similarly clad outdoor enthusiasts following what was clearly a well trodden route through the boulders. This time, without the kids in tow we tried a few of the squeezes and tunnels after them. What a laugh. It's obviously claustrophobic, dirty and sometimes a little painful, but if that doesn't put you off it's well worth a try.

There's no guidebooks to weaseling, there's not really even any websites (though a few outdoor centres offer it as one of their activities). You just have to know the rough areas to go to and explore yourselves.

It reminded me of Under Milk Wood, a classic of it's genre, and not for the faint of heart, at 3 Cliffs Bay on Gower. If you haven't done it, it's well worth the trip!

Whilst out with the boys we were egging them on to jump from boulder to boulder. This of course led to them asking us to jump bigger gaps which subsequently led to howls of laughter that only toddlers can summon - the kind that sounds forced, but you know isn't! Now I'm 6 foot 5 and was a reasonable long, high and triple jumper at school, have a head for heights, and quite enjoy freaking people out who are none of the above. The day's activities were halted when I made a particularly long jump above a very pointy landing, only to be completely blinded by hair in need of a cut mid-jump. The blind landing onto a car sized boulder was not as in control as it should have been!

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Am experimenting with the various social networking sites out there and have just set up a Cliffhanger group on Facebook, and tried to get my head around a Twitter account. Feel free to sign up if you want to be kept abreast of what's going on in the world of Heason Events. There's also a ShAFF Facebook group.

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Am loving this spell of weather. I can't actually remember the last weekend on which it properly rained. We had a brief shower on Saturday morning, but that was a mere blip in another, otherwise stunning weekend of running, climbing and having a lot of fun. Am feeling the worse for wear today after doing battle with Cave Crack at Froggatt yesterday. Inspired by a few mates who'd been to climb Strapiombo on a nearby buttress I warmed up on that, then followed Chris up Cave Wall - despite being virtually exactly the same height he proceeded to ignore all my beta and did it his own way without looking unduly worried. Cave Crack is one of those routes that can gather a crowd of people who presumably look at it with horror. Personally I get my kicks out of routes just like it (Sentinel Crack, The Vice, Ramshaw Crack and Right Eliminate being particular favourites!). Don't ask me why, but I do. A few years ago I remember bouldering out the moves to the start of the route, deciding that everything felt fine, and subsequently soloing the route. Yesterday was a different affair altogether. I'd opted to try on Chris's cheating gloves - a kind of open handed glove with a padded rubber backing to protect the back of the hand and give more friction whilst jamming. A bad move. I'm not dissing the gloves, but this wasn't the route to try them on! Mid crux I had to remove them with my teeth and spit them to the floor. Now thoroughly knackered it was all I could do to cut my feet loose and swing out to the lip of the roof, grunt, squirm and drag myself around the lip, and limp to the top, bruised hands and bloody knees (serve me right for climbing such a route in shorts!).

I sat at the top of the route, thoroughly spent, but incredibly happy that I have such routes so close to my own back door. I think I will be making a few more visits to this incredible crag over te coming months and years :-)

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It’s raining, cold and windy outside my office windows. Perfect running weather, but not much good for anything else. Perfect weather for dreaming of summer plans. After last year’s dismal attempt at good weather we’re surely due a scorcher this year. Aren’t we? It’ll be too hot to climb on the gritstone and too muggy for the limestone, so mountain crags and sea cliffs it will have to be. Sea cliffs. Mmmm. Reminds me of last September in Mallorca. Two weeks of beautiful warm weather, sandy beaches, incredible cliffs and not a rope or harness in sight! I’m talking Deep Water Soloing.

It’s a real shame whoever coined the phrase used those three words. Sure, they’re catchy and sum up the activity in a nutshell. But they also serve to put off the majority of climbers from even trying it. ‘Why would I want to go soloing? It’s dangerous. Deep? That sounds like ‘high’ to me’. And so say many of my friends as I enthuse about my new found favourite pastime. ‘Have you ever tried coasteering’ I ask? ‘Sure, it’s a whole lot of fun’ is more often than not the answer. Well DWS needn’t be high, scary, or akin to soloing if that’s not your bag. Find a bit of rock that’s above water that’s deep enough that you won’t hit the bottom if you jump in and do your own thing. There’s no need to use guidebooks or topos to follow desperate lines if you don’t want to. It’s without doubt the most free and open type of climbing there is. Go as high as you like. Climb as hard or easy as you like. If you find yourself unable to continue just jump off. Unless you are sticking to pre-defined routes you are unlikely to have climbed above your comfort height so jumping off shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, you need to be able to swim, the sea needs to be calm(ish), and you need to make sure you don’t land on your back, but these are all fairly easy boxes to tick. Once you’re in the water you can take a rest, spot your mates as they try to get past the point you just fell off at, swim back to the cliff and try to get back on with wet hands and shoes, or swim to the nearest beach for some dry boots and chalk.
 

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It's a bit of a taboo subject Wild Camping. It's not encouraged, there are no guidebooks, but people do it, and generally get away with it. We went to Snowdonia at the weekend for a family trip. The forecast was iffy and most people opted to stay in the Peak, but I put complete faith in the BBC weather forecast and it came up trumps. We had 4 days of perfect blue skies and warm April sun. Friday night we arrived at our destination - can't tell you where it was otherwise everybody will be up there. Realised we didn’t have any matches for the stove. Went to the kiosk in the car park to buy some and bumped into a ranger who gave me a bag of wind-proof ones. He then casually asked if we were going camping? I answered honestly and he said, go ahead, but just tuck yourselves out of site, don't leave a trace and strike camp early in the morning before the hoards arrive. That's exactly what we did. The evening was magical. Chilly, but clear, crisp and so incredibly quiet. woken at 7.30 as the sun hit the tent (which by the way is a very good wild camping tent as it's two tone grey and light green make it virtually invisible - see review) and encouraged us all out onto the beach where we watched the cliffs around the lake light up. A few minutes later 4 figures came into view - that's early for walkers I thought. It was my folks who live nearby, with a couple of friends who were visiting, arriving with the ingredients for bacon sandwiches! No sooner had we finished the sandwiches and started to pack up the tents than we noticed a couple of other people packing up a tent on a knoll a few hundred metres higher than us. It made me wonder how many people are wild camping on a nice sunny weekend in Wales / England / Scotland? Heading back down to the car and driving around over the rest of the weekend was a bit of an eye opener. Some of the camp sites literally resembled music festivals they were that busy. It was hard not to feel just a little bit smug. If you haven't tried it, I'd urge you to do so. Choose somewhere where people won't see you and don’t leave a trace, definitely don't have a fire.

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I get to watch a lot of films as part of my work. Ski films, bike films, adventure travel films, and of course, climbing films. It's one of the more fun sides to what I do. If I'm being frank, a lot of the photography, the action if you like, is a little bit repetitive. What often sets one film apart from another is its soundtrack. Ski films especially often strike a chord with me. Perhaps it's because there is more money in the making of ski films, hence producers and directors are able to spend more money on sourcing decent music. Perhaps it's just a simple matter of skiers having better taste in music.

Lately I've started jotting down tracks and artists (they are usually listed at the end of the film) with a view to trying to source them for my own collection. One song in particular hs haunted me ever since I heard it back in September last year. It was the first full track on a beautiful ski film called Hand Cut by Sweetgrass Productions. I met the filmmaker Nick Waggoner at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. He gave me a bunch of copies of the film and I watched it again and again, largely because of the track. It's called 'Empty' by Ray Lamontagne and blows me away every time I hear it. I did a little Googling this evening and have just bought the album Till The Sun Turns Black from Amazon for a knock down £6.78. I'm very excited. I'm even more excited to see that Ray is touring in the UK and even coming to Sheffield in September.

Time to track down a few more soundtracks...Most of the rest of Hand Cut was incredibly listenable to! The film won a special jury award at the Kendal Mountain Festival in November last year - largely because of its soundtrack I think. I can highly recomend it.

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Bit of an experiment this. First Blog post on the new site.

The new site. It's incredible, the feeling of elation at having a new site at last. I had no idea that I wanted (or needed) one so badly until the time came to actually turn it on and go live. The process of design was fun. The process of transferring data from the old site to the new one was an eye opener. I always knew that keeping a site up to date was very important, and chastised others for not doing so. I even waxed lyrical about the power of Blogs, and the dangers of Blogging too rarely for it to be worthwhile (note to self). So it was a bit of a shock to see just how much stuff on the old site was out of date, incorrect or just plain old fashioned! The fact that I can update this site so quickly and easily has been like a great weight lifted from my shoulders, but interestingly I didn't realise the weight was there...

I sat in a car for 5 hours with Ian Parnell on Sunday on a round trip to Wales for some much needed trad climbing, and chatted with him about the ins and outs of Blogging. He updates once or twice a week and seems to be able to find interesting things to say. I'll give it a go for a month or so - I can always simply turn it off if it's too much trouble.

Ian wrote a piece about our trip on Sunday so I'll not re-invent the wheel.

Good night.

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