Toby Rees and big H - bedtime stories for outdoor folk

Near the coast somewhere very exciting live two brothers, Toby the youngest brother has the courage  and strength of a full grown Atlantic bull seal and was just as happy in the water. His big brother Harvey could move over rock like a ballet dancing Ibex, one day Toby and H were making their way down to the river for a swim, when they got there they saw quite a fuss. There was a big crowd of people shouting and pointing from the bank, what's going on asked Toby? "He's stuck!" Said a little girl at the back of the crowd. The brothers looked up stream to see a small boy stranded on a boulder in the middle of the river.
Toby stared through the boy at the features up stream, knowing that there had been a lot of rainfall in the night on the surrounding hills, meaning the boy on the rocks day, would get worse before it got better. Toby, even though he was very young had spent thousands of hours playing with purpose, in and around rivers whit his dad. He wouldn't just throw stones in, they would throw stones at Eddie lines and surf sticks in surface stoppers or rescue bottles from deep stoppers, so reading the river was never something he did on propose it just kind of happened.
He nodded to a noise stopper up stream of the little boy on the rock, H smiled knowing his little brother intended to body surf the stopper across to above the boy then float down feet first on to the boulder. "If you don't get out here, I will get you out there" said Harvey pointing at two eddies on their bank. Minuets later toby was approaching the boulder feet first just as he had visualised moments earlier. "Room for a small one?" Asked Toby as his feet touched the boulder. The little boy smiled he was very happy to see Toby, "are you going to help me?" Asked the little boy. "It's on my list of things to do" said Tobs nodding to his brother on the bank and establishing communication, he scans the river confirming both eddies (& his big brother) were in his line of sight, he chose a route to safety that should mean he would be able to avoid problems insted of having to cure them and his brother was clearly in the position of maximum usefulness to give assistance when needed. "Can you swim?" Asked Toby, the boy nodded "I'm just sceard ".
"That's fine, we are going to swim a bit, we are going to aim at that tree up river, we won't get there but keep swimming for it till I say stop, are you keen for that?" The boy nodded, after a nod to his brother Toby watched the boy jump in and unknowingly set a perfect ferry angle. Toby plopped in after him and began the job of shepherding him with his big powerful front crawl strokes. Moments later both boys felt the current disappear around them as the entered the first Eddie, "your such a show off" smiled Harvey as the brothers helped the little boy on to the bank where he could sit down and cheer up in the sun. Later that day, the boys got home soaking wet and covered in mud. "What on earth have you two been up to?" said their mum. "We saved a boy in the river mam" said the boys. "And what was this boys name?" Asked their mum "uummm.... We don't know mam" said the boys looking up and right, trying to remember if he had said his name. "Well, if you have to save a little boy again, then please don't do it in your new clothes" said their mother with raised eye brows and folded arms, "now, out of those wet clothes it time for your bath"

Heading out

Here is an article I wrote for an online magazine recently hope you find it useful (there is a little bit of repetition in there sorry in advance)

Looking through the rain smeared window of your local climbing wall, sipping a latte after another heavy plastic pulling session. You’d be forgiven for putting your aspirations of gracefully gliding over rock on hold for a bit, but don’t put it off all together!

While most of the crags in the UK don’t come with their own coffee shop, stockpiled with back issues of climbing mags, the pro’s for heading out onto real rock are an article in their own right (probably several volumes). Here I hope to give you a few points to make the transition a bit more pleasant.

Tony’s top five tips for climbing outside;

Racking:

1. Orientation of kit on the harness

Now this is a subject that is always close to peoples hart, usually because when it goes wrong you’re probably doing your best Elvis impression, while staring into a crack, holding the wrong piece of gear in your hand with no idea where the bit you need is. Sometimes the soundtrack to this scene is your belayer giving you directions around your harness with your free hand to find what you’re looking for.

I find It useful to put my protection (nut’s, cams ect) on the front loops of the harness, starting with the smallest pieces first getting bigger the further around your hips you go. This means you can usually see what your looking for by glancing down and by putting the smaller stuff at the front the bigger stuff less likely to get in your way when moving about. Also if you have any monster kit (really big cams or hex’s) stick them right around the back out of the way.

Then put your extenders on your back loops, as these are a bit easier to sort through by feel. Ill stick my longest ones furthest back getting down to my smallest at the front, this minimises the chances of any cheeky bits of protection getting tangled around the longer sling style extenders.

Lastly all your bits and pieces like you belay device nut key, and prussic’s right round the back out of the way 

2. Racking Nuts

Heading off in the vertical world is always a gamble of efficiency do you go light and fast and run the risk of not having the crucial bit of kit to see you through the crux, or do you take the kitchen sink and struggle to get of the floor? With the majority of decent length trad pitches, I find it useful to have two sets of nuts (DMM wallnuts are my weapon of choice).

Split the nuts in to four sets, two sets of large and two sets of small. And rack one large and one small set on each side of your harness, this will enable you to do a number of things. If you were to drop a set of crucial sized nuts in to oblivion or can’t get at the set you need then all is not lost simply reach for the set on the other side.

Plus if you clip the nuts in towards yourself and you need to replace a nut on the rack then all you need to do is rotate the crab on your harness, this will put the crab in the best position to re-clip the nut. All this can be done one handed!

3. Helmets:

Now, I know your all big boys and girls, and can think for yourselves weather or not you want to climb with a helmet on, and I wouldn’t have it any other way! However I’ve notice that. When heading out to the crag people often only associate helmet wearing as safety while climbing…. Your helmet is designed to deflect rock fall from above, not to protect you from a reverse penguin dive of the crag at half height. So on arriving at the crag (especially if you walk to the bottom) it’s worth thinking about the following:

·        How loose does the cliff look

·        Can I see the top and how does that look

·        Are there people climbing above me while I gear up, because a number 9 hex from 30m is not best caught with your naked cranium, nor is anything else they may nudge off.

·        Is there a safe area near by where I can sort my stuff out (I don’t mean a police station, just somewhere where the chances of something landing on your is as small as you can make it) sometimes at steep crags this is right at the base.

·        Are there wildlife (sheep ect) wondering the ledges above nonchalantly kick stuff off.

It takes seconds to do and could really make a difference to your day.

4. Harness:

A harness is a harness is a harness right? Sort of, well no not really, sizes and colours aside. There are some things to think about when heading out of the climbing gym:

·        Gear loops obvious one when you think about it, some sport climbing harnesses only have two gear loops which is ideal for carrying the hand full of extenders needed while climbing indoors or at a sports crag, but if your going for the kitchen sink approach to trad climbing then you will need to get more space on your harness. There are trad specific harnesses on the market that have three loops on each hip and one around the back (but just because you have all this space it dose not mean you need to fill it!)

·        Adjustability when and where are you going to be climbing outside? One trip to Gower once a summer, or all year around chasing the snow line on mountain crags? If it’s the latter you may want to invest in a harness with adjustable leg loops, to allow for the change in “leg girth” as a result of putting on all your winter layers (not to mention the insulation gained from the odd Christmas dinner or two).

·        Width of waist and leg loops often seems trivial when stood in the climbing shop trying to match the colour with you belay device, but if you intend on spending hours sitting in it on hanging belays with the ocean angrily nipping at you heels, then getting a harness that has waist and leg loops that are as thin as chickening wire will probably result in you enjoying the day considerably less. Not to mention probably building an impressive hatred of your climbing partner for climbing so slow!

5. Placing protection:

Shaking on your tip toes, dry mouthed, tears in your eyes, trying to stuff your nuts in to any crack within arms reach is a sure fire way to get yourself in trouble!

Take a minute to look up the route before you start and see what’s up there:

·        Are you following a crack line, if so what size nuts or cams does it look like you’re going to need? When you get there make a note of weather you guessed right or were they bigger or smaller than you first thought.

·        Are there trees on the route that you can put slings around? Over time you will become pretty good at spotting gear from the ground.

·        Are there obvious places to stand comfortably where you can get gear in?

When you’re on the route:

·       Are you in the most comfortable place to get gear in, there’s nothing worse than looking like you’ve just come 1^st in the Vegas Elvis impersonation championships while placing a runner only to look and find the hand hold of your dreams is just above your head!

·       How much contact does it make with the rock? When placing protection you want to insure that it’s in as deep as reasonably possible and that the entire surface of the protection is touching the rock. This is a subject in its self and will be covered in a later article.

So there you have it some things I’ve found useful while out climbing, I hope they help get you started.

www.welshadventures.com

Diary of an idiot Part 4

30% of the time…. It rains every time!

Our trip was going swimmingly, we had done a load of free climbing including a fantastic day out on royal arches a rather straight forward 19 pitch route (after the 1^st pitch chimney) involving everything from cracks to face climbing and a pendulum thrown in for good measure, all this with the impressive back drop of half dome. It came to pass that blindly assuming everyone from boulder Colorado can move fast on rock, was an error that added a number of hours to the outing and saw us racing a storm of biblical proportions down fourteen 60m abseils. We literally were pulling the ropes through on the last abseil as the cats and dogs began to fall. Deciding that this wasn’t cooking under the stars weather we opted for the all you can eat buffet (and got our moneys worth!). We later found that the storm had buried the entrance to our tent in a foot and a half of debris (my how we laughed in the darkness while digging away the mud with our bear hands in our flip flops)

                                                  the last abseil

Anyway on this particular day we checked the weather forecast which to our delight gave only 30% chance of storms. We had our sights set on a few single pitch aid routes at the base of El cap this was all part of our master plan of getting on a big wall (lurking fear) by the end of the week. Off we trotted like good little school boys up the path to our days education, today’s lesson ….. YOU KNOW NOTHING!

After a few false starts on awkward ground that really we would have freed had it been on a route, we set off up a rather steep thin corner crack/ chimney thing, the aid proved delightfully thought provoking and profanity inducing, two and half sweaty hours later Matt arrived at the belay fixed the ropes for me to clean the pitch. We both flirted with the notion that our preparation for this trip may have had the odd weak spot, if challenged we could have defended this conclusion with a compendium of amusing anecdotes that had taken place over the past few days. Anyway we decide that Andy Kirkpatrick’s approach of “fail… fail again better” was our best course. So I set of up that same pitch after cleaning it with the sole purpose of learning from the difficulties I could see Matt had encountered and to improve on his time even if just by a second.

Things were actually going to plan; I felt that I had dispatched the awkward chimney with relative speed and minimal swearing, and seemed to be making progress on the corner above… than Matt muttered the immortal words “I think you might want to come down mate?” that was my 10 minute warning before Thor himself unlashed his full fury the captain. Later while running like our lives depended on it back the to the car it became evident that we were not the only ones have a bit of an epic time, it began to rain climbing equipment, teams high on the face in the teeth of the storm were clearly in a fight for survival and were dropping all sorts of kit in the process (crabs, nuts, aiders).

We felt morally obliged to collect this kit and to claim it as our own, so that we would remember these warriors and tell their tale! It turns out that earlier in the day Matt had been chatting to a local who had told him if the forecast says 30% chance of storms it means 100% chance of storms!

www.welshadventures.com

Diary of an idiot (Part 2)

Are you drunk sir?

After a sizable American breakfast, we were off just 40 minutes to the Yosemite national park…. Its on!

Thoughs who have been to the park know, that as the road comes out of the trees and you get your first glimpse of El Capitan you instantly turn in to a camera swinging, giggling tourist, and Matt and myself with out world travelled experience…. Were no different. After asking passers by to take our photo and dramatically high fiving each other (and strangers) we settled down and headed in to the park to try and sort out accommodation.

So our luck continued, at the camp reservation hut we were told at 14:30 that the fabled camp 4,( where climbers sleep in a the dirt outside the office to get a space for days) there was availability just head over and book in SWEET!!

Booking in walking around the camp and the valley for the first time was like walking amongst celebrities, there’s El Cap, there’s Half Dome, lost arrow spire.. That is the boulder with mid night lightning on, Andy Kirkpatrick has stayed here, John Baccar, Royal Robbins, Ron Fawcett, Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard…… Everyone, climbing royalty from every country in the world, this is it we are here we have the kit, I’m feeling fit there is not much that can stop us now! (How wrong was I??).

Camp sorted time to get food, in our hast to get to the valley we had not bought food outside the national park (don’t do this the valley is expensive). Matt was feeling the strain of having driven all the way from san Francisco so I offered to take over for a bit, I was quite excited to get on the rock so I was rather …Hasty? With my driving I figured the quicker we buy food the quicker we would get a route in!! This state of mind was swiftly accompanied with flashing blue lights from behind…..

At this point in the story it’s important to point out, that when renting a car from Budget car hire it will cost £X for one driver to hire the car, to put a seconded driver on the policy the number doubles! So before the trip we talked it trough and decided to save money we would only put one driver on the policy, which was fine except that driver was currently sat in the passenger seat!!!!

After me trying to open the driver’s door to get my drivers licence from the boot, and after the police officer trying to pull out his gun to shoot me for being a terrorist who keeps his driving licence in the boot. We got on ok…. Well he accused me of being drunk, I apologized for my erratic driving style, he then read our insurance documents, at this point Matt and I were trying to work out if driving with no insurance was a fine a prison sentence or both? The officer was still rather excited from my act of terror and did not seem to read the documents properly, handed them back to us and sent us on our way. From here on things got a bit out of hand…..

www.welshadventures.com

Diary of an idiot (Part 1)

This is a quick rundown of my recent trip to Yosemite, it all seemed so easy! Found Matt at the airport with no problems, we then sailed through baggage submission with nearly 50kg of kit each and no one batted an eye lid. A comfy seat with more videos than I thought possible to watch in one sitting! (It’s possible).

                                               Matt the lightweight alpinist?

There we were before we knew it in the Promised Land (through customs even though we had to lie about our U.S address... we actually had a harder time getting into morocco a few years back!!!click here to like my picture from that trip) car up graded to a frisking monster truck and we are trucking. With no map we followed our noses out of San Francisco heading roughly in the direction we thought Yosemite was (and it worked). Found a motel for the night and recharged the batteries. In the morning I called Jodie (my wife) it felt good and bad all at once, Harvey is only 5 weeks old and even though Robyn is 9 she is finding sharing the house and mums attention very hard. stay tuned for the next instalment...

www.welshadventures.com

The Road to the nose

Myself and Matt Barratt formally of Skye Guides are off to Yosemite for some big wall action this September, we have spent the last year begging borrowing and steeling anything remotely big wall related. We have also been doing a fair bit of fitness training, that and staring at pictures, guide books and YouTube so as you can imagine we are feeling pretty prepped...... I spoke to a hardened big walling friend of mine the other day for some advice on the trip:

He said you’ll be fine just make sure you get lots of mileage in with your partner before hand, so you climb as a tight unit where one knows instinctively what the other is thinking and doing even when you’re out of sight of each other...

I said the last time I rock climbed with Matt was over a year ago we did a route together on Gower?? And the next time will be in Yosemite....

Looking a bit awkward he said Well that’s ok just sort you systems out get ninja good at setting up the poterledge, while hanging in you harness do till you get your times down, do it in the wind do it in the dark.... do it lots.

I said the poterledge is on Skye.... Im living in South Wales

He raised his eyebrows and said well that’s just a small part, its hauling that important; sort your hauling out practice from a ledge, hanging from your harness, practice packing the bag so you know where everything is with your eyes closed

I said the haul bags are waiting for us in Yosemite we had them delivered there

He straightened up, scratched his beard a bit. His eyes glazed  over as if searching through all his big walling experience for another shiny pearl, he looked me strait in the eye and said you better be climbing like a spider monkey son or you’re going to be an article on UKC!

I said... Nothing

Despite this we have got some sponsorship for kit from www.shoothouse.co.uk to which we are eternally grateful, and I for one am feel rather optimistic. So please keep an eye on this blog as i hope to update it with stories and video for the big stone.

Please note: the “big wall” character in this story is entirely fictitious, his likeness was note based on a real life person, if you know someone like this good effort! However my part was based entirely on me and everything I said though probably poorly spelled was entirely true.

I hope you enjoy the blog, and that it maybe helps you in the future

www.welshadventures.com

Book Review: Pembroke Range East Gary Gibson

This is the long awaited comprehensive update by the Climbers Club of possibly the busiest, most diverse and beautiful climbing venue in Wales (or the world). It did not disappoint! “1000 routes between Vdiff to E10”.
It is one of two from the new serise, that have been released and there is another four books set to come in the next year (that is a life times supply of climbing).

This book has fantastic photos and crag descriptions making navigation off the area simple, leaving you more time to climb. The knowledge and experience of its author certainly shines through in its text with very accurate route locations and descriptions (a must if your abseiling blind towards a boiling sea, the last thing you want is to find that the VS you have come to do is actually E5).

All this in an A5 book that fits in your pocket (just like a guide book should) this book is a must no matter where you live in the UK, Pembroke has it all from the Tim Emmett types, to those making their way throught the grades.

so head to pemb's and maybe ill see you there. if your keen but nervouse check out my intro to sea cliff climbing courses Click here

www.welshadventures.com

Tony's Top Tip's - Racking Nuts

Sort your nuts out!

Heading off in the vertical world is always a gamble of efficiency do you go light and fast and run the risk of not having the crucial bit of kit to see you through the crux, or do you take the kitchen sink and struggle to get of the floor? With the majority of decent length trad pitches, I find it useful to have two sets of nuts (DMM wallnuts are my weapon of choice).

Split the nuts in to four sets, two sets of large and two sets of small. And rack one large and one small set on each side of your harness, this will enable you to do a number of things. If you were to drop a set of crucial sized nuts in to oblivion or can’t get at the set you need then all is not lost simply reach for the set on the other side.

Plus if you clip the nuts in towards yourself and if you need to replace a nut on the rack then all you need to do is rotate the crab on your harness, this will put the crab in the best position to re-clip the nut. All this can be done one handed!

there you go just a few thoughts, hope they are helpful. feed back is always welcome

www.welshadventures.com