Friday Night on the Rocks

It's hard to know where we are with Lakeland climbing these days. Endless routes on crisp, grey Mediterranean limestone have lead to a slight feeling of...well...anti-climax on the local cliffs. In between bolt-clipping holidays, we've slunk away from many a Lakeland beauty spot with little more than an abseil off a tree trunk to show for it.

Determined to break the spell, we'd decided, from the comfort of a sofa, that maybe a season of climbing nothing more than classic Lakeland V Diffs was a good plan. As well as being spoilt on bolts, I had had a run-in with a Hard Severe a while back which did nothing for my confidence. And then there was the business of Walthwaite, or Yosemite Crack. Climbing up the ever-increasing off-width, yawning crack, I mentioned to Stu that this yawning pillar was moments away from a major rockfall. He casually dismissed my concerns, although 100 tonnes of rock did crash to the ground a month or two later.

So as the blue hues of interleaved hills faded into the distance, I stood holding the ropes under a hanging garden of Babylon at Quayfoot Buttress on Friday, hopeful for a clean pass at a route. Balls of moss were rolling down under Stu's footfalls, and the Borrowdale-brown, blotchy rock looked a little soapy. The first pitch was moist, then increasingly damp, then frictionless, but undeterred, we carried on. It was a stroke of bad luck that the route we'd chosen then wove onto a side face of the crag, where the rock went from patchy dryness to torrential rivulet.

I started looking for a tree.

We set up the abseil in silence. The tree was quite a bouncy one, and my imagination had already lept to conclusions about its weight-bearing capacity.

"Well, you'd better b******r off then.." Stu intoned in his dry Geordie way.

I collapsed into a fit of laughter, which Stu took as a spirited attempt to diffuse the situation. It was really the ridiculous and over-melodramatic thought that these could be the last words we spoke to each other.

As our climbing degenerates into part-farce, part hilarious pastime with ever-decreasing goals, it is hard to know where we go from here.

But we do know with some certainty that the only way is up....