As a teenager I climbed HVS
at pretty much my top grade. The legends soloed Vector down at Tremadoc and Ed
Ward Drummond put up Great Wall on Cloggy. They were legends and god
like in their fearlessness and we were mere mortals bumbling around the lower
order higher grades.We bumbled around so much
that I used to say that “if I could lead it, it was HVS, and if I fell off it
was Extreme”.
The only bolt in the UK at
that time as I recall, was somewhere on Cloggy- someone correct me if this wasn't the case-
and there were no climbs on Malham Cove because there was not any pro that
worked there at all. In fact, cams had not yet been
invented and a well placed Moac was something that you could moor the QE2 up to.
Time shifts; I move to hot
Australia and the decades pass. On doctors orders I return to rock climbing and buy
a new pair of climbing slippers- high tops are no longer cool- and a new rack of
hexcentrics and cams. Wearing a helmet that doesn’t protect the nape of my neck
(what happens if I get hit on the head by a rock when looking down?) I venture
forth to the cliffs and begin stumbling upwards again.
Several years and many
hundreds of dollars in gym fees later, I stagger gloriously up a ring bolted
Ewbank graded 21 and then look at the grade comparison - E2? Blimey dandy,
that’s two grades harder than my best at the age of nineteen.Is the 5.10 rubber on my
resoled, low cut climbing slippers that much stickier? Are my resin hardened and
white chalked fingers that much stronger than my brick wall trained teenage
fingers?
Somehow my geriatric free
teeth, wigs, glasses and bus pass mind will not accept this. There can only be one answer
- New Age Grade Slip. Now there are lots of grading
systems around- USA - 5.11 and all that, Ozzie numeric and the extended
British E system- but none of them really compute for me because they don’t
reflect the personal reality of my distant climbing past.
In my youth the legitimate
ascents of climbs were achieved in a number of ways. Sometimes by combining
several of the methods detailed below.....
The Sewing Machine - (Now
largely renamed as Elvis Leg) this technique is self explanatory and is
typically the result of either fear, malconditioning, prior over
indulgence or a combination of all of the above.
Shagging The Rock - As the
name implies, much grunting and pelvic thrusting was involved in this technique
as verticality rather than horizontality was slowly and very inelegantly
achieved.
Upward Cycling - A method of
ascending that saw legs and feet being used in a panicked,
scrabbling fashion that gradually propelled the leader towards the top of the
pitch.
Falling Upwards - Yup,
similar to the above but including arms desperately windmilling towards the
next safe ledge.
Steadily Ascending- Cumulative Terror - Fear, gradually increasing in direct proportion to the
distance from the last stance and / or the last piece of decent trad pro that
was inserted into the pitch.
Sometimes Steadily Ascending
Cumulative Terror often switched into the next condition of the leader’s mental
state:
Ledge Amnesia - On arrival on
a stance there occurs a sudden realization that the previous pitch had been
climbed with absolutely zero recollection of what was included in the pitch due
to the active mind blanking out the awful terror that it had just encountered
during the preceding minutes of leading the climb.
There may be more techniques
that fall into to the above portfolio that have been lost as a consequence of
the ravages of time, but I think that you begin to see the general picture. Most of the time
on bigger, harder climbs,my peers and I were in a heightened state of certainly fear, and sometimes terror during the act of ascending a climb. It’s different now, the pro
is better, there are often bomb proof bolts everywhere and we delicately
point our ballet dancer toes onto holds, cooly ascending our way upwards in a
beautific and controlled manner.
In the past, my meager pocket
money and wages enabled the purchase of just a set of four Chouinard Stoppers,
two Clog Zero’s (one hand filed down) and a miniscule brass hex on a wire. I
now carry perhaps 30 beautifully sculpted, anodized, drop tested and serial
numbered wires that will fit just about anywhere, and a sequential rack of shiny
cams that fit into previously hopeless parallel cracks with stunning geometric
precision.
I guess the unprotected
monster climbs are still out there waiting with dripping fangs festering in a
gaping maw. (Has anyone done The Black Spring on Dinas Mot recently?)
It’s perhaps just that a significant number of these
horrors have probably been tamed by modern pro - or just plain vanilla glued
and bolted-so, maybe you got conned into
reading these words by the title of the article. But I leave you with just one
simple thought:
Is there a place for a
grading system that includes a narrative that highlights or brings to the
attention of us mere mortals that there are still some climbs out there that
are still truly “Trouser Filling”?....“HVS, 5b TF anyone?”
Michael Combley:2013
