Works, Burbage and Foundry...

A slightly hungover Gav joined me in MK, before driving North to Shef, to squeeze in some pre-Christmas activity of the climbing sort. We'd originally planned to climb Mam Tor gulley on Sunday, but shelved that for later, with more people.

Sat evening saw us down at the Works, having a bit of a bouldering session and me still very much recovering from my hacking cold/cough (actually have been coughing up blood and what can only be described as 'skin', or lung... not nice). Good fun as always.



Then back to see Jen and off to sleep as we were both shattered!

Next morning, we were up bright and early and at Burbage North for 09:20. Windy, and very overcast, but not too cold, so after a false start when Gav realised he'd left his rock boots in the car, we were off! The rock was slightly greasy and green in the shaded bits, but mostly ok. As a result, we were limiting our selves to low grade v.diffs and Gav had a good go at his first lead, which was almost successful, but needed a pretty bold finish for the grade, which I ended up leading - probably the fist multipitch 12m route ever!





Anyway all was fun and you really got a wind blasting as you came over the top of the routes! Then it started raining and we did our last route in waterfall conditions which was novel. Soggily, we retired to Jen's for tea and to dry off, before heading back out to the Foundry for a bit more action. Not very much, mind as we were now knackered!




Off home and it took me four hours to get back as they'd shut the M1! Rubbish! Nice one G+J good fun before Skiing next week! CAN'T WAIT!

Happy Crimbo, one and all!

This is good:

http://www.snowzone.fr/video/Vids_2008/Rockon_teaser1.mov

thats all you need to know....

Sheffield scramble.

With beautiful sunny weather and a slightly under the weather Daryl, we got out early on Saturday to have a go at Elbow ridge, a limestone diff route in a gorge in the Peaks.


Route outline of traverse in red.

Its quite a strange little gorge type affair, with a road running through it and strange limestone cliffs and stacks running up the sides. Having driven past it an had a recce, it didn't look too bad at all, but with a cold night, the air and ground were frostly and the downward sloping rock was a touch slippery, making for an interesting bit of a climb.

Pitch one was the sketchiest for Daryl, as we'd roped up in a three but forgotten the rack, so only had slings for protection, which was not really any protection, at all!



There was one crux move on this pitch, which would have resulted in a nasty fall if not careful, but Daryl got through it to a good belay and brought us both up nicely.
Then it was the start of the traverse, which was good fun, if not a bit undignified - the ridge is quite thin and its safest at some points to 'ride' it by straddling your legs either side for secure progress. Some of it was done on two legs, but there was a lot of unorthodox technique being employed!










We did this traverse in two pitches due to rope lengths and the moving in threes (which was a first for us and good practice), finishing up on a grassy ledge on the other side. After which, we avoided the v.diff continuation because of lack of gear, and scrambled up to one side of the Matterhorn Ridge, topping out for a photo and discussion of a thoroughly enjoyable route.

After getting down, it was off to lunch with the girls and hook up with Jim and Sarah, who'd come up from London on the train. After lots of pizza, the boys headed off to the Works bouldering wall, to embarrass ourselves and have some fun trying their routes. Its such a good wall, with loads of cool stuff, tea and all sorts. It very nearly got off to a bad start as paying on my card, a machine error nearly debited £65,000 of my account, rather than the £6.50 it should have been. Luckily avaided at the last mo! Price of climbing walls has gone through the roof!












Anyway, we all had a good time and polished off a few nice routes before heading back to meet Rich, Anna and some more locals for food and Wii games at Jen's. All in all, I'm absolutely stuffed senseless!





Thanks for a wicked weekend and get well soon Dr Jen!!!!

NEWS FLASH!

Watch out, 'cos we've revolutionised the look of this here badboy. We are reverting to some kinda basic layout type thingy - it may be long or short term. I'm not in control, Gav is. Basically we can now receive abuse on the comments front. Anyway, we will have a tinker over the next few weeks.




Can't wait to get out to France over New Year to see Chris and Kate and shred up the pow all extreme-like. etc.

Dave

Pedal!!

Last weekend saw the Hong Kong 24hr PedalKart race, a great event with about 50 entries competing to see who could clock the most laps of an 800m track over the course of the day. My school entered 5 trusty steeds, including our elite ride with carbon-kevlar shell and everything. We didn't win any speed prizes this year, but got the best team trophy for having the, er, best team. Cathay Pacific won overall, they were machines! But we had better t-shirts.

Looking forward to catching up at Christmas - back to blighty on Saturday 20th.