Day 257 - Smear Test 101

stride

A day out at Cratcliffe and 'the Stride today...Robin Hood's Stride that is, in North Derbyshire, in the south eastern corner of the Peak District.

It's a beautiful place, a jumble of rocks and trees and boulders and cows on a hill in the middle of nowhere...lovely!

style

We have some good memories there...it's the first place we climbed outdoors, as it has lots of easy bouldering (a rarity in the UK)...it's also where I broke my leg on one of these easy boulders in May 2012, not 5m away from where the photo below was taken.  

sun dappled

Of some significance, it's also where we started to really get a feel for climbing on gritstone, the hard, abrasive rock that is largely confined to the Peak District, and is heavily symbolic of what Peak climbing is all about. 

Gritstone is generally rounded and weather worn, which means many of the cracks and edges have been smoothed off.

When first trying to climb on grit, it just seems impossible - there's no holds for hands and nothing to stand on with your feet either!  And it feels very abrasive, so cuts your hands and arms to ribbons, whilst at the same time being slippery and polished to get a grip on. 

A critical skill on gritstone is smearing, which means placing the toe or ball of your foot flat on steep rock, pushing some weight through it, and ultimately standing on it.  

Not only is this physically very difficult, involving fine control of body weight and a significant test of balance, but it's also quite challenging psychologically.

You just don't believe that you can put any weight on that foot without slipping off and scraping yourself down the rock...and this mindset makes you hesitant, which makes you not weight the foot much, which makes you slip off.  

But if you trust that it will hold, and really positively put some weight on it, some sort of mystic magic happens and you can stand, and even push on what seems to be nothing. 

Here's Anna taking her smear test...

delicate

The prescribed challenge here is to smear along this slab of smooth rock from right to left, relying almost solely on the friction you can create between your shoe and the rock, and a carefully controlled state of balance.

easy does it...

The gritstone does feel slippery and damp (not helped by sporadic rain from the turbulent grey sky), and whilst this may look like a simple problem, it really isn't...what it does is force you to pay attention to detail, to climb carefully, and most importantly, to trust your feet.

Here Anna reaches the left arete, and escapes upwards with relief.

phew

Meanwhile, there is a classic climb at Cratcliffe called The Egg Arete, on the Egg Boulder, which I've been battling with for two years now.

As its name implies, the boulder is like a huge, oval egg, and there are climbs of varying difficulty on all sides of it.  As it happens, this is the very same boulder that I broke my leg falling off of!

The Egg Arete is a blunt, smooth corner of this big boulder...it's a V3 problem, which makes it sound easy-ish, but it really isn't.   Just getting on the rock is very difficult...the first time I tried to do this problem, in late 2012, this is about as far as I got:

almost off the ground

During 2013, I tried it 2 or 3 times, and managed to consistently get here:

solid step up

Today I made some more good progress, but still nowhere near getting up the thing...this is about as far as I got:

push/pull/etc

We took loads of videos of each other failing to get up climbs...fortunately (for you!) I haven't had time to upload any. 

Usually, of late, we've looked to do as many problems as possible...but today, we just felt like working a few harder climbs.   We didn't actually complete any of them, but we made bits of progress here and there, and feel as though given the right conditions (cold and dry - basically the opposite of today) we might get up a few things. 

And we wanted to spend a little time on actual rock before Font in two weeks time...

A good day out...and I'm officially very tired indeed!

)-zzzz