Well, yes. As a young, fixated climber that’s where I met my wife.
Thirty years ago - this is nothing new! Climbers don’t really *do* anything else, do they?
Climbers say they didn't start bouldering to find a partner - but it ended up happening along the way.
BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk)
I grew up through the bolting debates in the UK, and there was very quickly a hard line driven between limestone and other types of rock. Retrobolting was seen as a plague, and chopping was common. It all got a bit silly, but the enduring refusal to place bolts on gritstone has been correct, I think.
Top anchors are different, and I think there are arguments for their use even at lower grade venues like windgather, but I doubt we'll be seeing it any time soon.
Plus, I've been sufficiently into bouldering in the past that I've literally written a small-scale area guide to it.
Despite having had arthritis for 35 years after being ejected off an unprotected VS in the Peak, I've still always carried a strong ethos of trad - but I do particularly like the continental approach to big routes, of bolting at belays and where appropriate.
Hasn't stopped me being benighted on a couple of occasions, but it's like the faff and unnecessary risk is taken out, and the climbing itself highlighted
Lean into it - it starts as a guilty pleasure, but does make you ponder on the very British tendency to seek epics on Hard Severes.
Thanks for that: currently doing dad taxi for offspring's sport, so that whiled away a good half hour.
It's a National Bloody Treasure, to be fair, and pretty much synonymous with Trowbarrow...
Been to the cuttings, when it was the awful combo of horribly polished and sparsely bolted on some of the easier routes!
The Avon Gorge is like Dignitas for climbers - you only go there when you're tired of life.
I think it's exactly 25 years since I was last there - and it was polished to Sod then. Good effort on a November day!
Apart from JJ, by the looks of it!
Ooh, Trowbarrow - haven't been there in decades. What did you do?
Most of those seem to be sectors within the same small number of crags. Pretty sure the UK has a lot more than one Lover’s Leap!
Wonder how many crags there are called Lover's Leap, and whether anybody has climbed at them all.
(This may be a rhetorical question...)
Central Groove is obviously the crag classic, and it’s a corker, but even some of the V Diffs are great, too.
Leviathan is a cracking route, isn't it? One of a number of good low-medium grade routes at the Dewerstone.
My position on this has always been - and will remain so - that every tiny crimp is a massive jug when you're nine.
This kind of stuff is why I gave up redpointing - every time I went up a grade, some wunderkind pushed the top end out by another two.
