Well yesterday sort of went as planned, Toby, Whisper and I made our way to Crookrise and quickly jumped on the trad routes around the Arsenic Slab area. We quickly dispatched Diagonal Crack (VD) and Octopus Direct (VS) after that I had a quick try at Winter Rain (E2 5c) but having not brought along any gear small enough I decided that the consequences of falling off the hard sequence far outweighed any possible glory of bagging the route and so reversed the route. We made a quick trip around the corner to knock off The Shelf (E2 5b) and then onto the first boulder problem of the day - Barry Kingsize. Lacking any real beta we just jumped straight into it and managed to make it to the final move without any real problems. I had been told that to go to the top static was easier to hold though took a lot more figuring out, needless to say with limited time on our hands we decided to go for the harder to hold dyno option. 30 mins later we'd run out of time at Crookrise and needed to head off to Crag X.
Driving over to the new venue into the sunshine we were sure that this was going to be a satisfying afternoon, following a short walk-in we soon decided between us that we should go for the largest " alter of the moon" boulder as I've dubbed it. Through the rest of the afternoon we put up 12 new problems at around V0 to V3 with a mixture of sit starts, mantles and slabs. Toby soon bagged a great slab problem "Thai Green Curry" V0, in Toby's words it was "green and a little bit spicy". Moon Arete soon followed another little gem at V0 with a nice V2 sit start, Larry Smallsize V1 and a collection of other problems followed at around the same grade.
Next visit we'll try to tick a few of the harder lines and one more visit after that should see the majority of the problems up to around V6 ticked. After that I'll submit topos, grade and pictures etc to
www.yorkshiregrit.com and
www.ukclimbing.com and put them up on here.
