A damp afternoon at Shipley

Yesterday I had a failed trip to Caley with Matt: went to crag, it was piss wet, went back to mine and Nicky's for tea and biscuits.

This morning after virtually no sleep due to consuming the quantity of coffee that gives me the required motivation to go to a notoriously green, North facing crag on a damp day the alarm at 7:15 was pretty unwelcome. Nicky had booked for both of us to go to the Turkish baths at Harrogate and offered to drive so I had no choice but to drag myself out of bed and make some coffee. The baths were great and 2 1/2 hours of steaming, plunging and hot-rooming left me feeling surprisingly awake and very relaxed.

Matt was keen to get out and I persuaded him to meet me at Shipley Glen as I've only been there a couple of times and not done much there apart from Manson's wall (multiple attempts on a sweaty june day - what was I thinking?!) and Red Baron (flash on a perfect November day). It was a bit damp but after Matt's surprise at my not-touching-the-rock-as-my-tips-are-thin warm up we headed to headed to Manson's Wall.

I had hoped to retro-flash this but kept slipping off the big footholds and the crimps felt terrible. I wandered up to the top and climbed down onto the tree and the top crimps felt damp and minging but the top of Phil's Wall (1 m to the right) felt much drier - weird.

We constructed a brilliant terrace below Phil's Wall with 3 of the 4 pads we'd brought to the crag and after watching Matt have a couple of goes I pulled on for the flash attempt. I screwed up the sequence and got to the crux but couldn't get my weight in the right place to move my feet. 3 or 4 attempts later and I was on the final crimp reaching up for the slightly damp top. Matt offered to take a glory photo with my hands on the top but I was too worried about slipping off so declined and topped it out for another 7A/+ tick for 2011.



It wasn't quite as dismal as this photo makes it look!

Matt then fell of Red Baron a couple of times before announcing "this time I'm going to do it" and he did. I'm not sure if he's repeated this before but he looked solid on it - even posing for photos:



We then wandered along to look at Millstone Grip and Grit but a couple of minutes of rain were enough to puncture our massive psyche and it did look very green from above so we headed back to the cars just as another rain shower helped convince us that sacking it was the best plan.