Yet one spring day I found myself out at Llandudno and the Great Orme, a premier and revered U.K. Being brave is not really helpful in sport climbing, and so I lose most of my assets. My bolt clipping ranks only a little above my bouldering. It’s relatively easy to impress others while doing something that people with half a brain wouldn’t do.
I have fared a little better with rock climbing, but do best when the genre is traditional, on dubious rock, and with very little protection. Bouldering is a difficult visual sell even if I was any good at it.
Parisella’s Cave, at the Great Orme near Llandudno, is one of the premier bouldering spots in North Wales, yet a picture taken looking in, from a position standing next to the road-which very old people frequent-will be one of goat shit, bits of wet rag, car mats, dust and soaked perma-chalked rock. It is also harder to create drama for the general observer. I suck, and disguising poor form on a boulder is very difficult, although being disingenuous on social media helps. I could climb the easiest boulder problem in the world on the side of a mountain, add a stunning backdrop-and get a thousand thumbs up.īouldering is at the opposite end of the scale, and for me always the most difficult of the genres in which to hit that happy level. The mountains are photogenic and have dramatic backdrops, which helps the awe factor, another reason a person with a low level of skill can still impress anyone. Not as many people (sensibly) want to get involved with the mountains as other arenas, hence it is easier to impress others.
They require less skill and training than other spheres, and also require a whole cartload of luck, and my dad always said I was born lucky. The mountains, for me, have always been the easiest place in which to maintain happiness and hit publish. I prefer to perform in all genres at a level where I’m happy because happy is good, it’s the reason to do something … right? But on occasion my ego takes over and the sense of being happy includes: to be watched, reported and gossiped about, and to appear in a magazine, all at a level at which I want to hit the publish button on social media. This feature originally appeared in Rock and Ice 263 Ascent under the title The Great Orme and Other Hard Places.Ĭlimbing has, on occasion, been a multi-faceted frustration for me.
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