Climbing in Wales.

I just spent an hour writing this blog. Then I saved it and the computer crashed.

So I spent another 30 minutes rewriting it - because you write faster from memory - and then the computer crashed again.

I'm not rewriting it again. Instead here are the photos. 

3 days of climbing in Snowdonia with my bestest mate, Harry, who I have known since I was 20 days old. Incredible sun, views, rock. Stuff that the heart feasts on. All traditional climbing so that means placing your own bits of metal into the rock.

Inexplicably Harry found a piece of rice cake had been trapped under his helmet the whole way up the face. How it got there is soon to be one of the great mysteries of climbing history.

Has anyone else ever noticed but nature can be rather beautiful?

The  face of Main Wall on Cym Las  (below) which we climbed on the second day. 6 pitches of near vertical rock. We got there as a party was stuck above us, a teenage boy freaking out and screaming the valley down as competitive-dad shouted at him to pull himself together.

 Trad climbing (a british ethos of not placing anything permanent in the rock) means placing temporary metal gear all the way up. You genearlly climb well below your technical grade as it can be v scary to be 30 feet above your last point of protection when its quicky jammed into a crack.

Here is someone on the crux pitch.

And he is Harry rounding the same pitch taken from above.

This is the feeling of climbing. When you are leading (being first up the wall), then this is a typical view down. If you were to fall from here you would hope that last point of protection that you see at the top of the picture would hold and you would then swing well below where Harry is. he would not be able to see you (on this pitch he is well round the corner) so you would hope he would he prepared to hold the fall. You would also have to throw yourself off into space so that on the way down you did not hit the jutting rock. And this climb is considered basic stuff, one of the absolute classics, easy. Still craps me up though.

But the view from the top was spectacular. We hardly got down as the sun disappeared below hte horizon as we were descending a vicious gully. I just wrote about that so I'm not going to again but it was a little hairy. Particularly because my trousers ripped at the crotch as I was coming down and I had no pants on.