Outdoor Video Magazine

I was sat at a climbing wall the other day reading a magazine. It featured an article on ‘Hard Grit’, a term that has come to mean crazy, difficult climbing on gritstone in the English pennines. With very poor protection. A good example of just how poor the protection is is
given by a route where the last piece of protection is less than halfway up. If the climber falls near the top, the selfless belayer must jump from the ledge they are on in the hope they can take up enough slack to prevent a ground fall. Nice. Unfortunately I can’t find out the name of this route….you’ll have to trust me though.

The term “Hard Grit” was pioneered by the DVD of the same name that first made it big in 1998. Below are some clips of the DVD from youtube, including a trailer.

First off we have Seb Grieve on his first attempt on ‘Parthian Shot‘, a ’safe’ but sustained E9 6c. The final protection is 3 RP’s placed behind a dodgy flake. No-one ever thought these would really hold a fall, but Seb decided to put to a test in this video. He’s the first person to fall on them. He also did it another 5 times that day. They held.

Gaia, E8 6c. This route was made famous by a falling Jean Mihn Trin-Thieu who I believe broke his leg. You can see this (in low, crappy qquality)) below. The video quality gets better as it goes on though, so persevere!

The Bad and the Beautiful, E7 6B:

Here’s another one detailing a whole bunch of ‘Hard Grit’ routes, and also giving you highlights from a LOT of climbing. There is another big fall of Gaia at 6mins 43secs.

Elder Statesman, E8 7b. This climb has one particularly funky move in. Good vid. (but the guys voice kinda annoys me!).

So here is the video from my third day at Heart Creek. Three of stayed on for one more day of climbing. We tackled an easy 5.8 on First Rock (my first ever lead…and I only did half of it. Booo! haha). Matt also top-roped a fun 5.10 here. Then we moved onto Bunny Hill, which is some interesting part-normal/part-slab climbing. There are a lot of routes on this wall. We tackled a 10b and a 10c/d. Both very fun. This wall is probably a bit more different than Waterfall Wall, First Rock and Jupiter. It adds a bit more variety into the mix (plus you have to cross a river again!).

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So last weekend I had my second outdoor climbing trip, this to time to Heart Creek near Canmore, Alberta. This is a beautiful little area, featuring over 130 sport routes (plus a few trad I think) on 15 different walls. They are all single pitch, and vary from short to long with a nice variety of routes too. To get to Heart Creek from Calgary, take the Lac des Arcs turn off, around 20km east of Canmore, then immediately get BACK on Highway 1 heading to Calgary. There is a gravel pull off after a few hundred metres, just before a creek (which is actually Heart Creek). The first routes (First Rock) are around a 10min walk following the very obvious trail along the side of the creek. Expect this area to be busy, especially First Rock and Bunny Hill, and especially weekends.

We made this video while we were climbing for the weekend, it’s around 8mins long. Should give you a good idea about a few of the different walls and the sort of climbing to expect. And probably entice you to try it out. Heart and Sole, Jupiter, First Rock and Waterfall Wall are all featured.

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This website has details on a lot of the routes, and gives you an idea of the grades. Some more info can be found here and a local climbing gym put together a very useful pdf of all the routes available here.

Since spring is clearly here, and summer is on the way, it was time for the years first outdoor climbing trip (not counting early January in Joshua Tree…that’s cheating!). It was a very last minute affair, plans to go in Canmore broke down on the Saturday…and it was around 11.20pm when I had just finished filming a wedding all day that I got hold of a friend on the phone who said he was leaving for Nordegg, right then, and would be passing my housein 10mins if I wanted to come. Yikes. I said ‘yes’ of course, and packed in a crazy rush. My food for the day being an apple and a loaf of bread and a lump of cheese, all I had knocking around.

We made it into Nordegg around 3.30am, and crashed by the road side (not literally..bad choice of words!). I set up a tent, Matt and Luc just slept outside in their bags.

The next morning, we set off for Abraham Slabs, on the side of (who’d have thought?) Mount Abraham…located 5 mins drive east of the David Thompson Resort, around 3km or so West of Windy Point. Park by the roadside, and you can find an unmarked trail that leads up to the base of the limestone slabs. There are tonnes of routes to do here….s

ome top-roping, around 6-10 bolted sport routes, and trad climbing too. We decided on a 4 pitch 5.8 called ‘Pacemaker’. It was my first ‘real’ time climbing outdoors, having only started in January. Not counting the twice I went in Joshua Tree which was before I had started climbing at all.

Matt lead all 4 pitches, with no real difficulty apart from a fall on pitch 3. Cheese grater. That slab is SHARP! Luckily it was pretty cold, so he had a bunch of clothes on and it was only his hands that got cut up. He also dropped his camera…hence the lack of actual climbing pics for this post. Needless to say, 3 pitches of fall didn’t do the camera much good, and we couldn’t even find the memory card.

From the top, it was an easy rappel down in two stage. Easy-ish. Easy if you weren’t the one going first who had the problem of one rope getting stuck and hanging in the air, ultimately just rappelling on one half of the double rope, trusting the end snagged on the rock would hold. Matt.

It was an awesome day out, and a great place to climb. Loads of fun, interesting routes on good rock (but loose, bring a helmet). The views were great and the access is an easy 10-15min walk from the road. It was windy (it always will be there). I will definitely be going back to check out some other routes.

On the way home we stopped for a play on the big boulder on the outside of Rocky Mountain house, on the edge of town heading towards Nordegg, right by the main road and a church.

Well I’ve found another good collection of climbing videos to post. The first one is Dean Potter making it solo from bottom to top of El Cap in Yosemite in under 4 hours. A mix of free-climbing and protected climbing…it all looks pretty crazy to me.

While we’re on the subject of Dean Potter, I thought I would mention the controversy surrounding his semi-legal climb of the Delicate Arch in Utah. Here is an article that explains in detail what happened during and since the news caused a stir in the climbing community.

This next video isn’t too good in terms of the climbing, a little repetitive, and he’s top roping, but the rock formations are worth seeing. Really unusual, and would make for a cool climb I think. It is somewhere in Washington I believe….

Sticking with the theme of crazy rock formations…here is a great crack climb (5.12) called Anunnaki, located in Indian Creek, Utah.

This video shows Patagonia climbing ambassador Dean Potter free-soloing Heaven (5.12d/13a), a 40-foot overhanging crack that starts over 2,500 feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. It’s a really good quality video. Kind of erie because of the lack of any sort of sound..makes it very atmospheric though.

Heaven was first freed by Ron Kauk in the mid-90s. Another of Potter’s free-solos is Dog’s Roof (5.12b). When asked about this climb, Dean recalled his late friend Jose who he used to climb finger cracks with, “Somehow soloing Dog’s Roof brought me closer to Jose. We had the same size paws [Jose and I]. He always thought I’d enjoy Dog’s Roof. I could hear his sarcastic laugh and brutal honesty while I trained on it.” Besides rekindling the memory of his friend, Dean felt an attraction to the route. “I was drawn to solo it and could barely slow myself down, resisting the temptation to solo it before I was ready. This solo scared me because near the top it has a finger lock where sometimes my fingers would just pop out.”

Here’s a nice compilation video showing a number of different free-soloing routes from Dan Osman. That means no ropes by the way.

Dan Osman trying his hand at some rather late-season ice-climbing. I.e. he’s in a goggles with a snorkle climbing up a very flowing (very cold?) waterfall.