Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

Ali Coull cranks out another V7...Boltsheugh In a winter such as this, more an extended wet autumn, sunny days have been at a premium, but the NE bags the best of the rain shadow days and glorious sunshine on dry rock is a strong lure away from the dreich overhangs of Dumby... a couple of phone calls from an A90 layby and I found myself basking in the sheltered sunny rock bays of Boltsheugh at Newtonhill. Always a good local bolt-hole and training ground, the sports walls are now more regularly bouldered, including the excellent eliminate traverses and straight-ups... Guy Robertson was quick to point out the many 'illegal' holds I was using, but hell, I didn't mind, it was dry, the sun sank slowly like a lost flare and my eyes hurt to look at it all, no wonder really... Updates on the next Stone Country books: Stone Play - a global collection of bouldering writing and photography - should be out in May, just finalising a few last articles and photos, then it's off to...

Ian Taylor at Rhue The red gold that is Torridonian sandstone is being mined in a hurry, lots of ancient Greenland pebbles being popped from their mother stone by scrabbling little rubber toes... winter up here, between the frenzied fronts of painful hail (which can bruise your ears and lips), provides windows of flash-pump traverses and numb straight-ups, hardcore heaven for the masochistic boulderer. I dug Ian Taylor out of his winter slumbers and persuaded him to don beanie and show me the local sites - a tour of Rhue blocks, Ardmair and Reiff in the Woods led to no ground-breaking problems (we wilted off Richie's 'Main Issue', too cold and scaredy to go for the dyno!), but the highlights of the day were The Forge V4, Skinshredder V5, Corkscrew V5 and Ian repeated his own excellent solution to the pebbled arete that is Clach Mheallain V6 (little stones in Gaelic ie. hail)... a very hard supple hip and heel lock being the secret. Then it darkened blue and black, the skie...

A recent post on Scottish bouldering dyno's had me trawling through my video collection and I found a few interesting ones and it made me think of the great Gill era of American dynoing and the whole ethic of using dynamic moves to bypass difficult static sequences. There are those who swear by 'static' methods and sneer at these athletic shortcuts of dynoing as a form of cheating gravity, or giving in to a lack of forethought. these are usually hardbitten trad climbers, who naturally wouldn't countenance a full on throw half way up Torro, or on the Etive Slabs (though I know people who have fallen on the slabs and attempted to turn and run down to the ground). Dynoing is mostly a bouldering art and fits it perfectly, allowing impressive 'parkour-style' solutions through gravity's well, without the threat of crumpling groundfalls or nipple-grating slides. Boulder mats allow a little more adventure in this respect as well, so it's not unusual for bouldere...

Well done to Richie Betts for sending the very obvious project at Reiff in the Woods! The severely overhanging wall has a mid-height rail, from where the lip seems to test your commitment to the jump as the landing can be dangerous if not padded and practised... here's Richie's description of completing the line: 'As for the grade.....well I'm not really sure. I was thinking around V8/Font 7b 'cos I cant really climb any harder than that! I guess comparing it to things on grit that seems about right, although it took me lots more goes than most of the Peak district dynos (Deliverance, Buckstone etc) but I think that's probably down to conditions and the landing. It's one of those....could be V6 if you are tall and like dynos or V9 if you aren't and don't. I was hitting the lip on every attempt but holding the swing is the crux... Barry pointed out that the temperature had really dropped just before I did it, maybe this made the difference. It pro...

At last! After a stalled bouldering season, the high pressure has nudged in and settled the skies, the weeps are finally shrinking and withering at Dumbarton. While the Aberdeen crew have been lucky to have had dry conditions at Clashfarquhar, here on the west coast Dumbarton has been green and soaking for two months. Today I managed to get down and find some dry rock, working a few moves with Dave on some suddenly obvious unclimbed lines - it always surprises me that a little time off from a favourite venue refreshes your 'eye' and you see things that were not obvious when you're there all the time. Anyway, a small step as I managed to get the heel on the project again and 'look' at the next hold (yes, even that's an improvement to a boulderer) with Dave managing to go further and throw for the final move, which resulted in a couple of spectacular dynamic body swings, the resulting coiled tension propelling even the spotter into the brambles... a lot of pent-up...

...of rain... which has put paid to the Scottish bouldering scene for this year... everything is weeping and green, we need a benevolent high pressure to restore some normality to the bouldering scene, everyone's frustrated by the deluge, and it doesn't look like stopping. Grabbing windows of opportunity between the fronts is the only option and running the animated satellite forecasts is like watching the old broken back of Scotland being whipped by sadistic Atlantic fronts. That said, I squeezed in a pleasant afternoon at St Bride's wall near Strathyre... a quartzy bulging wall with perfect landings and some good testpieces, just after the parking for the Ben Ledi walk-in. It is not extensive, but in bad weather it is only two minutes walk and facing south, so it's worth a visit when the higher boulders are not worth the risk. It catches the sun and a few hairy-knuckled gestures from passing white-vans, which you can feel free to return. The main lines are fingery str...

From: Scottish Mountainner 25 Climbing on Mars By J S Watson ‘Like morality, mountaineering ethics looks to be a matter of discovery rather than decision, and to some degree always a matter of conscience.’ Rai Gaita – ‘Sacred Places’ What if we colonised Mars? Think of all the new rock, the new gravities, the new climbs? And what about ethics; what lessons would we bring from Earth-climbing? It could be argued that we are more ethical climbers these days and ‘ready’ to colonise: we have a well-documented knowledge of the do’s and don’ts around this inanimate, oblivious stuff called rock and ice. We know we are not supposed to take drills to mountain crags, or retro-bolt others’ more vital achievements. Most feel secretly guilty pushing winter climbing onto bare summer rock routes. Or we watch films, instead of relying on the traditional mythic story-telling, to reassure ourselves the ‘purity’ of ascent is guaranteed. We resist hammering and hacking at the stuff because we know we’re j...