Pennine Lines w/c 20 january 2025
|| Cold, dull || Keep looking forwards ||
Private Prow, Duke's Seat || Climber: John Coefield
|| Focus On... ||
Limping into 2025
And we’re back in the room….
First things first; that Christmas break for ‘a couple of weeks’ ran on a bit longer than I anticipated, so sorry about that. You remember when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, and most of us will have know at least one person who was trapped against their will on a sun-drenched sport climbing holiday in Spain or Greece, enduring yet another two weeks of immaculate mediterranean limestone, cheap continental beer and great local food, unable to travel, while they waited for flights to resume? Well basically this year’s Pennine Lines Christmas hiatus was a bit like that, but instead of an Icelandic volcano scuppering things it was a combination of a fairly awful bad back flare up, and generally uninspiring weather. And for “immaculate Mediterranean limestone” read “a visit to Duke’s Seat and a couple of lacklustre indoor sessions” and replace “great local food” with “an excessive amount of dried fruit, marzipan and Toblerone”. At least the beer was a unifying factor.
Smiling Buttress, First Ascent || Climber: Tyler Landman
But, we’re back regardless, nose to the grindstone…..a grindstone made out of grit - what else? So what’s been going down? The big news of the new year period was that Smiling Buttress received its long-awaited second ascent from Alex Moore. It looks like the new beta and padding setup makes it less of a logistical headache, and crucially less deathly, so maybe this will open the floodgates to more repeats? Even if not, it’s great to see the line get the attention it deserves, because it is a mega piece of rock. The arête immediately to the right just needs climbing now - from what I hear it’s almost all ’there’.
Anyway I wasn’t there to see Smiling Buttress get repeated, but in a cynical ploy to garner SEO traction here is a photo of Alex Moore on something entirely different, which combined with the photo of Tyler on the first ascent above will surely conspire to game the Google algorithm and create the illusion of currency. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Thick End Of The Wedge, Burbage || Climber: Alex Moore
The weather hasn’t been all bad, to be fair. We did have the snow to entertain us for a week. I trust all you regular readers made use of the snow tips from this email back in November and managed to get out and find dry rock. Personally, I was limited to limping around painfully with a heavy camera bag, questioning my life choices, whilst counting the minutes until I could have another gobfull of ibuprofen and paracetamol. Seeing familiar landscapes transformed by snow and ice is always a treat though, even when viewed through the haze of anti-inflammatories, and opens up many photographic possibilities that don’t exist the rest of the year. So I did manage to enjoy traipsing around with a big inconvenient camera, wherever the roads were clear enough to access. My job now, however, is to plough through not the snow but the mountain of film to be developed. Progress has been made on both the backlog and the back pain, so things are looking up. A couple of tasters from the film images are below.
So yeah, here we are, back in the email game. I should say thanks to everyone who dropped their thoughts, feedback and encouragement in the survey just before Christmas. It was great to read some kind words there, and the general feedback on the cadence / frequency of the emails seemed to be to keep it about the same as we’ve been doing so far. It’s a funny one this, because in some ways having a regular self-enforced schedule - like all limitations - can really stimulate a bit of creativity and force us into some discussions that aren’t just “here’s where me and my mates climbed this week”. The flip side is when times are harder or the weather is bad it isn’t easy. And with regular output there’s a very real chance you can just run out of stiff to say, although it doesn’t seem to worry most YouTubers or podcasters that much. And as this email hopefully demonstrates, a lack of actual content needn’t be the end of there world. And on that note, here’s to a great 2025 - cheers.
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
A couple of images on black & white film from the snowy week.
|| Fresh Prints ||
Here's a couple of contrasting images, made just a few metres apart, at very different times of the year, from Print Shop. You will have driven right past here many times, beneath Froggatt Edge.
