Tales of the Unexpected

The magnificent Bernia Ridge

If there's one lesson this winter has written large on the blackboard of life, it is to expect the unexpected. Whilst quietly smirking at the good fortune of flying out of the UK before the first snows, we were hit with the news that our 'hot rock' winter getaway in Catalunya was already nestled under a foot of snow.

Some quick thinking was required. The rustic finca in the hills, our base for the fortnight, was snowed in and no longer an option. In a flash, a devilishly simple Plan B appeared: to keep driving south until the rock got hot.


In a thick fug of exhaustion after sharing an early morning flight with sixty excitable Liverpudlian school-girls, we had the unenviable 500 km drive south to contend with. Still, we were on holiday, we told ourselves.

Lemon leaf

The safest option was to head to the Costa Blanca. Here, at least some hot rock was a possibility. Yet it is an incongruous destination in some ways and a place of stark contrasts. Climbing on some of Europe's most prized cliffs means being up close and personal with the retired ex-pat holiday fleshpots of Benidorm, Calpe and Alicante. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but perhaps it's just not my scene. The problem is, the old Spain has been washed aside in a race for development. The stillness of climbing at the beautiful Sierra de Toix is often broken by the sound of pile drivers hammering footings into the limestone or jackhammers taking up pavements. To accept the luxury of climbing in the dead of winter, one has to take the flip side too.

The sixteenth century Moorish stronghold of Bernia

Even so, there are hidden gems like the Fort at Bernia, used by the Moors as a final hiding place before their eventual routing, and the inland towns of Xativa, Guadelest and Xavo.

A Monty Pythonesque cathedral frontage, Xativa

Long-awaited and uncertain though it appeared to be, we had some great days of climbing and walking despite some unusual twists and turns.

Airborne at Toix

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....

Getting Your Bearings

Unknown climber, Gandia, Costa Blanca, Spain

There's a funny thing about climbing that goes something like this: sometimes, getting to the crag can be the hardest thing, and even finding it at all is never a given. I'd even go so far as saying crag-finding could almost be classed as a sport in itself. For some guide book writers, the actual geographic position of a crag is a mere add-on to the main business of route description. It's clear from our ramblings in Spain that guide book writers must have been taken to some crags wearing blindfolds. On the back of a scrambling bike.

Take our recent trip to Font D'Axia. The crag is described as a small but pleasant crag in an idyllic setting, and so couldn't have sounded better. After driving several bumpy kilometres down a gravel track, we came to a clearing where the path surely weaved off to meet the crag. We parked up and started heading into the bush in approximately the right direction. The guide book assured us that we needed to climb up a couple of terraces and onto a plateau. So we climbed a few terraces, scratchily swashing past thorny undergrowth. I could tell from Stu's demeanour that he'd already given up hope of finding this one cleanly. I soldiered on, battling flicking spines and broken terrace walls until it dawned on me that we'd commando-crawled in a full circle, and were now right back at the car....

We decided to regroup over a lump of Manchego in the shade of a tree. A group of walkers were already sat having their lunch, and it occurred to me that they may have local knowledge, or even, maybe, just maybe, A Map. We approached them, quickly establishing that they were English.

Stu: "Do you know the paths around here?"
Walker "Ohhh, YESSS.....like the back of our hands! We've been walking here for over twenty years..."
Stu: "You don't happen to know where this path is do you? (pointing to map of crag and path)"
Walker: "Err...no..."

One of the others offered to phone a friend, while another told us that he had a son in Cambodia who might be able to help.

We decided to go it alone at this point. I eventually found it a few kilometres back, on a lovely path, absolutely nothing like the book's description.

Hot, tired, and a little scratched, we felt like we'd done the hard bit by the time we'd got to the climbs.

Set in Stone

If you take one of the myriad paths leading to the river Eden at Armathwaite, then squeeze between a few trees splaying their roots in the tiny gap between water and rock, you might find these unexpectedly whimsical carvings.


William Mounsey travelled the length of the Eden from its source in Mallerstang to its end, carving beautiful memories into stone as he went. One of them, I'm told, is a sonorous poem in Bardic Welsh. This one is an extract from the Compleat Angler by Isaac Walton.


The moon-like faces with impassioned stares probably pre-date William's time, and along with a large salmon carved at rest on a sandstone slab, are perhaps the work of an angler. An intriguing place to climb.

Of Men, Stones and the Feeding of Rats

When Al Alvarez eloquently summed the need to climb as 'Feeding the Rat', he probably didn't quite envisage the way it would set the paradigm for describing the compulsion to climb to the outside world. Whilst the insatiable gnawing from the inside that he describes is undoubtedly a good analogy, there's always the personal question as individuals as to why we climb. A Russian doll of enigmas that is never quite resolved.

Sometimes the rat is more bloated than hungry, and it all seems like a bit of an effort. At other times, there it is.. a circular feeding frenzy of risk and reward.

Our latest pilgrimage of the hungry rodents took us to another great swathe of European limestone: Provence. The seductive combination of hot, dry rock, wonderful food and wine was quite enough to feed any number of rats.



Of Stones and Men

Of course, the weather turned wet, and in contrast to the highly planned nature of climbing days, we followed our noses into old, medieval walled cities and let fate decide what we should see. It has not let us down so far. In the back-streets of one city, we found the remnants of a wonderful exhibition, 'De L'homme et des Pierres'. The natural masters of the trompe d'oeil, this purely French exhibition was stunning in its subtle interplay of black and white and warm limestone. Quite something.

Christmas in Andalucia

The white pueblo on Christmas Eve

I guess it was a tell-tale sign that it had been a less-than-stunning climbing year. Just before putting my foot in my rock boots at the sun-drenched crag, I found that a mouse had decided to call it home. To be honest, I couldn't fault his logic or his interior decorating skills: a pile of wheat nesting in the heel (neatly extracted from my not-cheap wheat bag for heating up sore muscles), some tufts of yellow fluff no doubt pulled out of an expensive fleece, a few nips out of the boot's lining to add a bit of interest, and a name plate nibbled out of the heel tab. And above all, it smelt of cheese.


A mixed, roller-coaster of a climbing trip really...starting out gingerly on a duff knee, slightly dodgy weather, mixed with climbing highs and lows in unexpected places.


A memorable experience was a pilgrimage to the mighty El Chorro. A knot of limestone, pushed out of the plain and slashed with knife-like river gorges that expose a dizzying number of hard cliffs. Flooded in the 1920's for a hydro-electric scheme, there's a blinding number of man-made constructs to negotiate- train tunnels, wobbly, crumbling bridges, wires and the fearsome Camino del Rey. It is a mad, vertical world, like the workings of a crazed mind.


A Perfect Dawn Rising Over El Chorro

Stuck to the vertical cliffs way above a dizzying drop is the Camino del Rey, a pathway built for the then king of Spain in the 1920's, King Alphonso XI. I would have liked to have seen his face, quite frankly. Now replete with bits that fell off, huge sections just disappeared and the like, people crawl along it, attached in via ferrata style to rusting fragments of time's passing with more than a prayer on their lips. This is the recommended route to the crag.


The Space Between Your Feet: the Camino del Rey

We chose the other, less risky route- skipping through the tunnels shared by the Spanish train system. Yes, up and over a 12 foot steel fence and into a series of eery tunnels, with all the trepidation and excitement of meeting the 11.05 from Madrid when you least wanted to.

An iconic place to climb, with a unique atmosphere induced perhaps by the challenge of even getting there. Andalucia has a well-known charm in photographic circles. Somehow even the pattern of furrows in farmed fields, the shades of drying earth have a devastating photographic richness to them. It's all abstract art painted with earth colours.

For us middle-grade climbers with bad knees, the best place to be was the smaller, greyer crags. There's a neat, natural colour coding that goes on with limestone: steep and nasty=orange, nice and slabby=grey. You can't go wrong if you stick to the grey ones...The crags here tend to be on the steep or overhanging side, meaning we ended up driving a long way to find gentler ones to pander to our pathetic climbing standards.

It didn't matter though. Tucked up in a medieval street of tiny white houses, burning olive wood in the stove, the goats bleating outside, it seemed as though richness isn't about money at all. It's a quality that can come upon you quite simply, and probably isn't far off what my ancestors would have had within their grasp.


Happy New Year.

The Element of Surprise

Perhaps we're a little weird, a little unconventional. But to us, it's just as likely to be the accidental meetings, happenings, eddies in the current, that make our days. Yes, we climb, we go sea kayaking, biking or fell running. We are lucky enough to get to some fantastic places, in a way that makes us happy. But it's often the things that happen by chance that leave us smirking.
Last weekend, we found ourselves camping in a field of alpacas. They had a canny ability to display "formation curiosity". All in a line, each with a palpably questioning look on their hairy little faces.We had gone to the Peak District to sneak some climbing in under autumn's door. As it turned out, a layer of frost on the ground early on Saturday alerted us that we may have cut it a bit fine...In the end, a walk over the gritstone edges was the best option. There was an extraordinary quality to the light in the Peak. It was as faint and golden as I'd experienced. Sunday saw us heaving desperately on Curbar's unforgiving cliffs. Definitely a hard man's crag, that, and perhaps not the most appropriate for our needs, soft and crusty as we were. It's been an atrocious year for climbing, and it's sad to think that our climbing year might already be over. Dreams of hot rock (and dare I say it, bolts) are haunting us, though, and we may yet make that Easyjet booking.
And so, it may not have been the climbing that captured our attention this weekend, but the things we saw along the way.

Climbing, Suiseki and little vegetable worlds

Climbing has been a bit of a washout this season. Two months of unsettled and unsettling weather has meant that climbing is generally restricted to a strategic stab between showers, somewhere that you can get to, and from, easily. No long weekends camping high to make the most of inaccessible Lakeland gems, no languid days on hot rock with dips into plunge pools afterwards. Just damage-limitation climbing, at best.
Last weekend, planting ourselves optimistically in a place where climbing was in theory possible (weather permitting), the rain clouds once again put pay to our plans. Instead, a walk along some limestone edges. Inadvertently, this took us to some incredible little vegetable worlds. These micro-climate havens were smushed into tiny spaces between grikes (or are they clints?), where a little pocket of soil and moisture allows ferns to bask in the windless, damp conditions. There was a striking, minimalist beauty to these worlds, pretty much invisible unless you are standing above them.

In some ways, they are reminiscent of the ancient Japanese art of Suiseki, stones which, though only inches high, have the appearance of mountains, lakes, and other large landscape features. Microcosmic worlds intended to bring the spiritual uplift of mountain scenery into one’s every day world.

Anyway, I digress. A lovely way to spend a day, in a Suiseki sort of way. And climbing? The rain has got to stop sometime…

Queueing for routes

These furry locals were on the route we perhaps should have been on, but weren't, due to a little problem with the guidebook. Still, the climb we did that day was a great 6 pitch beastie with a few difficult moves/pitches which kept us amused. You'd think that it couldn't be that hard to create foolproof topos that work, but a lot of them seem to fall down at the last hurdle. Come the revolution...

What do climbers do when it's wet?

..Well, apart from get frustrated that is...Armed with a guidebook of fantastic routes, we sogged through three days of visits to Annecy, Chamonix and a variety of wet and orange crags. Then we discovered the utility of the umbrella. It's funny, but somehow the umbrellas had slipped our brains until the final (very) wet day when we cracked and went for a walk in the snow. The brollies seemed to do the trick. Stair rods aside, we managed to stay out for a goodly while longer with them. So no climbing, but some fantastic funghi. It's amazing how they grow in rings, just like their parent trees.
I managed to stay sane by running every day through misty forests and low cloud. This was fine, but just meant being completely wet through each time, and slightly sad at the knowledge that beyond the clouds was a stunning mountain vista.

Even in the wet, this region was fantastic to be in. The weather forced us into the idyllic chalet, and particularly onto the raclette maker in a big way. We inadvertently discovered that we could turn the dishwasher into what Stu described as a "showcave" by adding things covered in raclette cheese. That kept us busy for a while...ahem...

Paradise...

This little plateau of very crinkly land squashed between Annecy and Chamonix turned out to be our idea of paradise. Wonderful mountains, great climbing, fantastic villages, the list goes on. It was chocolate box Alpine scenery without the geranium overdose. More rugged, real. Fantastic.

The Limestone edge, Brough

When you look at a crag such as this one, you might just see..well...grey rock. To me, the underlying impression is one of time. Great stretches of unimaginably vast time. Would it be tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years? Not sure. What's even more amazing is that these sutures represent even more time for which there is no rock to even testify to its passing.

Anyhow, Windmore End is the perfect place to be on a Bank Holiday. Very quiet, with some excellent climbing. Interesting grading though...

Climbing in Borrowdale

We found Sergeant's Slab near Stonethwaite today, as it was out of the wind. Almost as soon as we set foot in the valley, we knew it was going to be a good day. The place was beautiful, with a wide, clear river in the base of the valley. The rock up at Sergeant's Slabs was fantastic, with a few wet spots, but we did a pair of fantastic routes up there before stomping down to the idyllic pub at Stonethwaite. Magic.

Hot rock (or not)

Well, the much-anticipated holiday dawned, and with great excitement we got up to the sounds of...well...wind caking horizontal snow on the window. As a weatherman's daughter, I should have realised- the jet stream that seemed to have lowered to ground level the day before, and well...the weather forecast...A Siberian cold snap was about to descend. The snow was blatted horizontally onto the trees, which created a weird effect, and because no one predicted such a snap, the M6 was covered in snow, and passable only on one lane. Cool. Sadly, by the time we reached Sardinia, the beautiful warm weather had been displaced by the wet, soggy tail of the Siberian weather system. It would prove to be decisive in our climbing plans.Still, we had a laugh at the strange unfolding of events during the course of the week: the rope being confiscated by the airport security men (perhaps not helped by Stu quipping "yes, it is a bit sharp, isn't it?"...), finding our villa only to find that it came with an owner as mad as a box of spoons, inventing the new sport of "cave running", and the final hoop of fire, a cancelled flight home. We were informed that instead of heading to Liverpool we'd be flying into East Midlands Airport (where, I hear you ask)? On arrival we found it to be positioned in a place called NottinghamLeicesterDerby, and that we were going to get from it back to Liverpool by coach. This is when Stu told me he "didn't like" coaches, and that it was my job to get a seat as close to the front as possible, otherwise there "may be consequences"...With trepidation I managed to bat my way to the front (displaced Ryanair passengers can put up a bit of competition) and relaxed in my seat. I was beginning to see a pattern in all of this when we realised that we had a two hour journey in the company of the Big Band sound of Radio 2. A double-edged sword, because we were perfectly positioned at the front, yet right next to the speakers. We did manage to have a great time though- cave running and climbing for three days, sometimes in heroic conditions.