With over 300 miles of driving and 2 days in Wales we came away having climbing only 4 single pitch routes. I bet there’s quite a few people out there who’d be pretty disappointed with something like that, but not me. I had an awesome time.
If you’d not guess I’ve been to Wales, specifically Rhoscolyn in an attempt to finish off the cliff and get it all done and dusted. Well it didn’t exactly go down like that, the cliff is not finished but that almost doesn’t matter. There was a lot of exploring done, loads of scrambling around the base of little zawn, walking along to top of the cliff trying to make head or tail of what’s actually there (poor guidebook descriptions) and some dangling around on abseil ropes cleaning off loose rock. Considering the rest of North Wales was experiencing flash flooding, I’m pretty happy I came away with a little sunburn.
Saturday was spent wandering around various bits of the coastline because the weather refused to actually settle. It wasn’t wet enough to bail on the entire trip, neither was it actually dry enough to go climbing. Every brief period of dry weather lulled us into a false hope that maybe it would stay dry this time. With all this interesting weather we actually had a pretty good day out. It all started like it normally does with an early start, picking up Soames and breakfast somewhere along the way. Early was clearly the key word here because we’d made it pass Llangollen before 0800. This “forced” us to stop at Pete’s in Llanberis instead and sat drinking a pint of tea and watching the rain. The rain was supposed to have let up by 9ish that morning thus we arrived to park up for the cliff around that time. It was still raining.
And that
pretty much described the day. Arriving at different places and watching the
rain, which was never too bad to justify not being there! Our first walk into
the cliff confirmed our suspicions that it was damp and greasy, so with hope of
it drying out anytime soon Soames suggested we have a little explore up “The
Range”, a section of cliff from Porth Dafrach to Gogarth South. I really should
have taken my camera out with me (god only knows why I didn’t) but we went
armed with waterproof jackets, print outs of the gogarth wiki and the old
gogarth guide. You’d have thought that with all this useful and informative
stuff we’d have had an easy time finding the cliffs, but no. The guidebook was
clearly written by someone who either had never been here before or someone who
was a local user and thus left out all the information that a non-local would
need. It was frustrating to say the least but we did get there in the end and
what a place to climb. The established lines look pretty wild on some
interesting rock. The guidebook kept referring to “mousetrap” like geology,
which would have been helpful if it wasn’t everywhere. Thus cutting a long story short we spent about 2 hours trying to decipher the old guidebook, making precious little headway in the process. Actually that’s a lie as we managed to identify a load of routes (and by load I mean about 7) and establish where most of the zawns are. Relating all this back to the information I’ve got off the Gogarth Wiki is going to be a pain.
As soon as the weather looked up we high-tailed it back to Crag X, only to arrive to find the air thick with either some air born mist which was greasing up the rock something rotten or just plain rain. We spent a lot of time sitting under a boulder before moving to the top of the crag… where I promptly feel asleep (so did Soames). I woke up about 3 hours later, feeling chilled to the bone and we bailed to the promise of Soames’s cooking, a few beers and a warm sleeping.
What a difference a day makes! We spent most of the evening watching the weather clear up as we ate our curry. The went the most amazing sky-blue-pink (I don’t care what anyone says, it is a colour) as the clouds started to break up overhead. It had all the makings of a cold night but we actually woke up to a warm morning with the sun streaking in and cooking me in my tent. Breakfast was a problem as we’d not actually brought anything but we were saved by the best £2.50 4 item breakfast bap we found in the bakery attached to the shop in Treardur Bay.
We soon
found ourselves gearing up and complaining we were too hot at the cliff. Due to
its reasonably sheltered location it just became a suntrap and we’d both been
expecting another cold day. We jumped straight to it really with Soames leading
a fantastic route which he called “the Lineback offensive”, HVS 5a. I hung
around belaying and trying to keep the weight off my hip (bruised hip, yet
another injury from football) and watch as he climbed up the wall, trying in
vain to shoot some decent pictures. The crux of the route required a really
high foot jammed in a horizontal crack, heel-toeing like crazy to keep you on
the wall. It’s a really wild move and a great addition to this section of
cliff. I put a route up called “sunshine and showers” which probably goes at
about E1 5b. It’s more of an eliminate line really and took a flat wall with
shallow horizontal breaks and cracks in it. I took ages leading it, trying to
build up the courage to make these tentative little moves (which formed the
crux) off the good ledge, conscious of the poor cams placed above me. It was
quite a weird climb for me in some respects as I just felt like I didn’t have
the complete control over my body and I couldn’t trust me limbs properly. Still
I didn’t fall off. Then we finished off Gambler’s Wall with Soames putting up a
lovely HS 4b with hidden pockets and odd gear placements (and a hands off knee
bar for those in the know) up the arete at the end of the wall. I lead a direct
start to Joker’s. It’s a good route in its own right, but nothing compared to
Joker’s (original). 
And short of me soloing a Diff gully out of the back of coffee pot area that was pretty much it for the climbing. Sure there is some big lines to be done at the cliff, but it was still a little greasy. I opted out of abseiling the line of “elephant graveyard” simply because it overhangs the sea so much that it I’d have had to prussic back up the abseil rope rather than get a soaking. Instead I abseiled the groove line to the left of The Vipper/Hydrophobia again. This time I made a serious effort to work out the moves and find some decent gear, which is something I’ve not done before. I’ve never worked a route on abseil before but because of the nature of the line (overhanging, with big wild moves involving some heel hooking above bad gear) I figure that ethically it’s alright. If and when I do lead it I know it’ll be right at the top end of what I’m capable of, and I don’t want an accident on it. We have to abseil in anyway so getting out would be hard.
I said “if and when I lead it” because well I didn’t lead it this weekend. The rock was pretty greasy in the bottom section, which although doesn’t look that hard it does have pretty poor gear. My head also wasn’t with it. It’s easy to make excuses for yourself but I can just be honest and say I didn’t have the motivation to focus on a single route. There was too much stuff flying around in my brain. I swung round the arete on abseil and soloed a Diff gully next to coffee pot to get out of there.
This left
us sitting at the top of the crag wondering what to do and me feeling pretty
responsible for our lack of climbing. I’d opted out of leading and there wasn’t
anything Soames wanted to do either. I don’t know why I ended up going back
through the guidebook again (the gogarth wiki one) and trying to identify
different lines and I noticed some of the lines like the Vipper have either
descriptions which are wrong or we’ve marked them in the wrong place… like on
the wrong crag. We set off back along the coastline looking for new lines
instead. I think the original idea was to find the original line of the vipper,
but instead we found something more interesting… much more interesting. |
| (route cleaning...boom) |
And then even more fun. After leaving the first massive slab and scrambling around every piece of rock and zawn that we could get to, we found another slab of compact hard black rock with a series of about 30 metre high single pitch possible lines on it. Soames started cleaning it on abseil and we found that a lot of the material at the top is pretty loose but it can be cleaned off.
So I’m pretty excited to get back there. We’ve added brushed to our sacks and I’m trying to find some decent stakes for our next trip. I just simple can’t wait to get back.
 |
| (no one said new routing was a light excerise!) |
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