Our Lot

I'll not dwell on the past few weeks, suffice to say the weather in the Peak has been as bad as I can remember - wet, dull, windy.

That's My Lot - originally E8 7a, now 7c+/ 8a?

Nige took his weather frustration out on lichen. One route in particular - That's My Lot at Rivelin quarries. A perfect twenty-five foot quarried edge, slabby on the right but leaning out on the left. A few footholds to get started, then nothing, just the square edge and smooth iron-plated smears. No repeats in ten years, since Nik Jennings' visionary scamper immortalized in A film by some climbers. After doing the sequence once on a top-rope Nige set to work improving the landing - a fallen tree across a rocky slope. With the stump tidied and the holes filled, things looked a lot more encouraging.

another good go from Ryan - even hitting the hold wasn't enough

And so yesterday, at last, the rain stopped, and the team assembled. Crisp sunlight filtered through the woods, a fresh breeze dried the air, and life was good again. I'm not sure I've ever been at the crag with such a strong team - Varian, Feehally, Pasquill, McHaffie just to name the big guns. A pretty good selection of folk currently pushing the Peak highball scene, and a good vibe. After a brief warm-up on the deceptive Sex Drive, it was on to the main event. The start was fine, getting established okay, then it was shut down time. Teeter, creep, lean, off. To cut a long story short, after three hours no one had done it and it was going dark. Testament to the quality though, was that nobody gave up. Only Nige and Ryan were making serious inroads, both tickling the jug. For a second it was over - Ry stuck the jug only to swing straight into a solid bridge across the corner, feet on a huge ledge. Cheers turned straight to laughter and hoots of derision. A perfect illustration of how arbitrary these problems can be, but it wasn't diminished, and the challenge remained. Next go there were no mistakes - Ry sucked in, extended like a leech, and snagged the break static.

Could Nige come any closer? Maybe if he wasn't wondering if he'd left the cooker on...

Even with our foam pit, nobody entertained Nik's original running scamper method. Chapeau!

Font video

Char has put his film of our trip to font up on vimeo. There's a fair bit of me climbing in it, and although I get up a few problems I look rather petulant. All down to Char's editing, amazing what they can do eh? I was made up really...

Some Mid-Grade Classics from alexander char on Vimeo.

Lookout - egg chefs!

I spent last week in Fontainebleau with a few friends and the weather was perfect, too good in fact. A full day's bouldering can be hard on body and skin - five in a row is debilitating. The first two days were spent at rather open crags enjoying the warmth of the sunshine, doing the kid-in-a-sweetshop thing which is hard to resist. With conditions on the fine-grained sandstone are less temperature and more humidity dependent than on grit, it was plenty grippy enough to get on some fairly hard problems. 

Back when I was an impressionable twenty-year old, I went to Glastonbury festival. Despite the rain and the mud, it was better than I could ever have hoped. Even so, I remember at some point feeling I was missing something, and left my mates and the big-name acts to go off alone in search of 'the vibe'. Font is a lot like that. Its very easy to get blinkered into only paying attention to the headline acts, despite my best memories always coming from seeking out the sideshows.

But day two saw me wasting rather too much energy failing on Rubis sur l'ongle, for which I'll use Daniel Woods' excuse of it being 'my anti-style'. The it was onto Hotline, which should have been better suited, but by the time I'd exhausted the other options and resigned myself to the only hard move being a disgusting pull on a tiny crimp, I was goosed. Consequently there were few beans left in the bank come colder weather at the end of the week... after climbing poorly at Isatis and Bas Cuvier, I got my mojo back at Cuvier est by finishing a 7a+ arete I'd tried last year, and then flashing Watchtower up at Rempart.

On the last day I finally got to climb at a couple of the best venues - Rocher Greau and Buthiers. Had a great day doing some superb highball aretes, pretty much all second go; frustrating to miss out on the flash though. Attention Chef d'oeuvre was one that got a team tick, though no one could translate the name - I've used one suggestion as the post title. On the ferry home I happened to be reading a review by Will Self, he of the giant vocabulary, where he happened to use the phrase chef d'oeuvre and the context made the meaning clear. Oeuvre doesn't seem to have an english translation - we tend to use the french - but I guess the closest would be genre, but as applied to an individual or group's body of work. Chef is simply chief, so the chef d'oeuvre is the chief of the genre - the one masterpiece that embodies everything about the genre. Applied to the boulder problem - a true classic of the forest - it makes perfect sense. I doubt I'll be lucky enough to find a new problem in the Peak worthy of the equivalent name - Uber classic alert maybe? I can imagine some dirty block in a woodland near Birchover becoming Lookout, egg chefs! though...

Climb

The November issue of Climb is now out with my Grand Capucin article as the headline feature - including Caff on the cover leading the second pitch. I'm pretty chuffed, its pretty much the most you can hope for after a trip, but was a bit surprised as I would never have picked this out as a potential cover. The main reason being, I suppose, that although its a tough pitch he's actually on fairly steady E1/2 terrain. Plus its pretty much the first climbing shot I took on the trip, and in my mind a classic 'out of options - shoot arse view from belay'. For comparison, the one I had got down as having the most cover potential was this one :


Judge for yourself! My choice ticks all the standard boxes - dramatic, mid-move, on crux pitch, good (hard-won!) high camera position. Though looking closer, there are obvious problems such as shaded face, and perhaps more importantly, none of Caff's three points of contact to the rock are actually visible. Climb's choice of course doesn't suffer from these, which just goes to show how hard it is to be objective with your own shots, and how much of my judgement is affected by the factors at the time the image was taken, and not just the image itself...

Its also nice too see how little of the image is obscured by copy - a consistent criticism of mag's nowadays. Although Climb's new look allows for more info to be placed on the border of the cover, I think the editors are actually making an effort to try to clean up the covers a bit - bravo!

Shooting the Cap

Mont Blanc range from the Lac Cheserys

I've always found taking pictures a lot easier than selling them, so its only now with plenty of confirmed sales for my Capucin shots that I can relax a bit and consider it a successful shoot. I've got a little video clip of Caff reflecting on how lucky they'd been to get it done. Although typically modest with respect to his climbing contribution, what he's really acknowledging is not so much what went right, but what didn't go wrong. Small things can have big effects in these situations.

The place is massively photogenic but not without its challenges - altitude, harsh light, inability to move around freely. There's a limit to just how much camera gear you want to carry up such a route, particularly as we didn't set up any shots; all the climbing was being done for the route, not the camera. Plus there are Heinz Zak's images which have been widely published - inspiring stuff for photographers as for climbers, but meant I'd have to avoid similar shots without ignoring the most photogenic spots.

not travelling light...

Gearwise then I was limited and had to choose carefully. Almost all Heinz's shots were shot with a fisheye, so tempting though it was I figured not having one might just be a good thing. Other than that it was my standard minimal kit - D300 & 50-150mm/2.8, plus either 12-24mm/4 or 16-85mm. For this kind of work shooting on DX has big advantages over FX - not just a smaller body but smaller lenses and overall a much smaller kit.

The crucial piece of kit though was the bag. I've used various methods over the years - various Lowe photo bags or just putting the body in a BD Bullet wrapped in a fleece, with lens pouches strapped to the outside - and not been happy. So as a bit of a last minute impulse I bought a Lowe Inverse 100. Turned out to be perfect - bum-bag design but with decent padded waist strap and a shoulder strap. A good fit for the body and two main lenses, plus room for an extra lens and water bottle strapped on the outside. Having the shoulder strap really works at stabilising it, without giving the over-balancing effect you get from a rucsac, and I climbed up to E2 with it on no problems. Sitting low on the back means a Bullet can be worn comfortably as well, handy for swapping with the leader on the harder pitches.

Caff on his successful repoint of the crux 8b pitch

After three days as a three man team I took a bit of a gamble by withdrawing from the big push. I wasn't too bothered about missing out on the summit, given the style I would have made it in - all the more motivation to go back and do it properly - but it potentially meant no more photos. I rationalised the decision on a few counts: firstly, it'd give the boys the best chance of summitting. Of course I really wanted them to succeed as they deserved it, but ultimately it's the biggest factor affecting the saleability of the shots. Trips with summits and sales are the best, but usually its a compromise in favour of one. Secondly, I'd got some decent shots so far but as a team it was hard work getting anything other than bum shots. Caff failing on his first redpoint of the crux pitch was actually a massive stroke of luck for me as it gave me a chance to get above him for his second go. By splitting I had at least a chance of getting something different.

So on day 4, alone, I gingerly crossed a very ropey bergschrund and set off up the Petit Capucin. I deliberately chose a more direct line to avoid the objective dangers of the Voie Normale, which at this time of year had begun to disintegrate. The first twenty metres were a bit steeper than I'd hoped, and after laybacking a nice VS corner I ended up posting my camera bag and helmet into a squeeze chimney. Thankfully it widened at the back and, with considerably less exposure, I was able to chimney up and emerge on easier ground. In the end I didn't go to the summit, stopping in a notch between the main summit and a gendarme on the south face on which the rock routes finish. The gamble paid off; I got a grandstand view of the upper part of the route and some of my favourite shots of the trip, very different to the standard stuff. In the end I left early concerned about rockfall, and ended up shooting Caff's onsight of the crux pitch from lower down. Again, it was a little stroke of luck, although I thought the angle wasn't as good, turns out back in Lightroom its as good if not better.

Lac Blanc - Mamiya 645 & Hartblei TS, Velvia

Although I took my full medium format kit it didn't make it up the mountain. Since upgrading to the D300 I'm finding it ever harder to force myself to use it -there's no resolution gain over the Nikon and it requires much higher levels of effort and discipline. However there are advantages in terms of colour, (in skies particularly, in comparison Nikon's look green), a big clear viewfinder and I much prefer the 3:4 format for verticals. I also believe the slower, manual approach is conducive to more considered images. However I'm shooting less than I was last year, and I'm looking carefully at options - the combined effect of the credit crunch and consumer DSLRs breaking the 20MP mark has seen second-hand prices for MF backs tumble. Having the simplicity of a rugged manual body, prime lenses combined with the flexibility of digital capture is very appealing.