Spring Has Arrived! St Bees Bouldering, Slate Multipitch and Craig Yr Ysfa
I started writing this post a few days ago amid, warm Spring sunshine and lots of warm UK climbing psyche. As I add the final photos tonight it's only a few degrees C outside with a fresh dusting of snow on hills! Its' going to be chilly fingers climbing at LPT tomorrow!
Anyhow, this is what I've been up to for the past month or so since my last post.
Climbing wise I've been trying to take it easy as my elbow has been aching a bit, however indoor climbing seems to be the worst culprit and it seem to be holding up ok to pulling on rocks outside. Fingers crossed it will get better soon, as I've recently been reading Steve McClure and Ben Moon's books which bring on a dangerous level of enthusiasm for training and trying really hard! What I've got seems to be classic golfers elbow, something that is seems most climbing have to deal with at some point. Probably time to try and be a bit more strict with warming up, down and stretching. Nothing new hear...
St Bees Bouldering
I couple of weeks ago I made the long journey up to the coast of North Lake District to climb on the boulders at St Bees. The bouldering there is almost unique in the UK, beautiful golden soft sandstone rock with great landings and a scenic coastal location. I was not disappointed:
Amazing rock at St Bees
Headbanger 7a
Undercooke 7a
Craig Yr Ysfa
Last week with good weather and all the crags being amazingly dry for this time of year we headed up to Craig Yr Ysfa for a 'mountain day', we linked up Aura and Pinnaclissima both E2 to make for three pitches of fantastic climbing. Step but with good holds on the best mountain rock I've ever climbed on, 'better than Cloggy' was whispered but don't shout this too loudly!
Luke on first pitch of Aura E2
Slate Multipitch: Longest in the UK (for a while)
Another recent highlight was climbing The Desolation of Smaug! 6c in Twll Mawr. This 6 pitch 145m route was claimed to be the longest sport multipitch in the UK, however this title has now been climbed by a new neighbouring route Long in the Twll/The North will Rise Again! Anyway details aside Smaug is a good route and does not feel too forced. Plenty of varied pitches and keep going when you think it should end.
View Walking Down from Twll Mawr
Stunning view topping out Twll Mawr
Llanberis looking good in Spring sunshine
Energy Monitor Unit Kickstarter Crowd Funding Video
Another very exciting event in the past month as been making a video to promote our new open-source web-connected energy monitoring unit at work. Together with +trystan lea we run OpenEnergyMonitor.org, a project to design and build open-source energy monitoring tools. We design, manufacture and sell the units ourselves as well as work on the web-based graphing and analysis software. We had fun making this promo video driving around Snowdonia in Trystan's electric car demonstrating the monitor installed on various low carbon installs. Thanks to +Llyr Hughes for filming and editing.
The crowd funding was successful and the unit is now in manufacture :-)
Thanks a lot to everyone who helped back us or help share the video.
