A little epic, epic

Today saw myself and Jake Hampshire take a trip to a new crag! destination Blawath crag, big thanks to lee robinson (betaguides) for the find and for letting us go and set some problems. Untill today, to my knowledge the crag had nothing on it, but that was all about to change!

We met in pickering at 9am and decided we may aswell make a quick ascent of the letter box to test our strengths for the day! The temperature was -9 and so we set off on ride up to blawath in icy conditions.

This was not helped by Jakes bike malfunction and my constand falling off! As we journeyed up to stape and then on to the roman road, we saw the road conditions grow dradaully worse and were suprised to find the river frozen with about 3 inches of ice.

Eventually we got to the crag after about 30 minutes of pushing through thick snow. Our first aim was the large over hanging roof which has great potential for traverses and lines over the roof, most of them hard. Despite constant -9 conditions prevailing throughout the day, we set our sights on conquering the big roof whih went well untill...
The key sloper was frozen :(. Still, a few traverses were done and the start of a hard line where you have to hold a one finger pocket and then hop out of that with the same hand, Bon. :).

Copyright Betaguides

(Not picture from the day)
After we realised that the roof was more 'in' for winter climbing than it was rock climbing, we set out to develop other parts of the crag. first, was a good fairly easy yet steep and sloping problem, sit start, then over a small roof and up an arete, called...(shall up date this when i think of a decent name!) around font 5+?

After that we had a ganda at the rest of the crag and then had lunch. To be honest we never really did much concidering the vast amount of unclimbed boulders but the cold kept our strenght at bay :P.

After lunch jake worked on his problem around font 5? after some of my helpfull beta and i worked on a project which never went, that i reckon will turn out around font 7a or more, uber hard!

After all this grappleing of sub 0 rock, we found our selves seriously de-stoked and cold. so we packed up and began the long journey home. All in all, not much climbing done but a bit of an epic, pushing, fixing, freezing, freezing some more, falling, freezing and leaving.

We then returned to the thing that is the great telephone box of middleton road, font 6a? from sit. haha. and returned home to find out it was now -12!

Please notice all grades have question marks because i do not feel i'm an eperienced enough boulderer to give acurate grades. i shall up date them as i gain experience in the bouldering relm!

Sam.