Newsletter #1 August 2019
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ANABASIS MOUNTAINEERING CLUB anabasismountaineering.org.uk | August 2019 Newsletter. The Rhône Glacier from the summit of Klein Furkahorn in the Urna Mountains, on the border of the cantons Valais and Uri, Swiss Central Alps. Dear Readers, At the most recent committee meeting, the topic of reintroducing a newsletter in digital-form was discussed: to share activities and stories of club members; highlight club meets and to deliver club news. We are aware that there are a diversity of demographics and interests within the club, extending beyond mountaineering into other sports and pursuits, often facilitated by the club hut at Garth. Hopefully this first issue will highlight a small cross-section of these and encourage others to contribute to future newsletters. Relevant contact details can be found below. Any comments and criticisms are welcome, and should be directed to: Newsletter: [email protected] Communications: [email protected] Secretary: [email protected] Summer in Snowdonia – Chris Alston The Alston Clan (Chris, Leila, Yvie & Finley) visited the hut 30th July - 2nd of August. We were joined by Leila’s best friend Sophia and club member Colin Spencer and his two children Freya and Leo. On Wed 31st July, we (the Alston’s) took a walk around Llyn Ogwen before heading to Siabod Cafe to dry off and share some coffee and cake. The Spencer’s went climbing and did a bit of sightseeing before joining us at the hut for an evening of games and toasting marshmallows by the fire. The next day, the sun had come out to play, so we all went down to the Secret Beach for a paddle before walking around Llyn Geirionydd. The kids played hide and seek for a while by the monument. We managed to find them all eventually. Colin, Freya and Leo left us at that point, and we headed back to the hut only stopping for coffee and cake (common theme for our trips to Garth). We then made the most of the sunshine by taking a swim in the river before settling down on the patio for dinner and games. On the whole, another fantastic visit to our second home. We’re looking forward to heading back in 2 weeks’ time. The Seven Ages of Grooved Arête – Dave Atkinson For those who may not know or who may have forgotten, Grooved Arête is a rock climb on Tryfan. There are other Grooved Arête’s but here the interest is the Tryfan one. It is widely held to be a good climb, the best of the rock climbs on the rocky East Face of the mountain. But a climb is not just a physical entity, climbing it makes it an experience too, meaning that you can have a bad climb on a good one and a good climb on a bad one. Subjective judgements apart, the climb begins on Heather Terrace and finishes some 750ft higher, close to the summit of the mountain. It is graded as ‘Very Difficult’ standard (Hard Very Difficult to be precise) which paradoxically means that the majority of rock climbers would regard it as not very difficult at all. Just as Shakespeare would have us believe of man; a climb has Seven Ages. But it is only in the first of these Ages, and perhaps in the last, that the climb has objective reality; everything else is subjective, a human invention. This is how it works, for me, and Grooved Arête. The First Age was as first ages should be, I suppose, one of innocence and ignorance. Growing up in southern England, the mountains of our land made little impression on me until I was introduced to the North Wales ones in school Geography lessons. The emphasis was on the glacial landforms of Cadair Idris, from which I came to understand that in the British Isles there were mountains which had names even though the one called Tryfan was yet to make itself known to me. But the rocks that were to become Grooved Arête were already there, the result of millennia of volcanic fire and tectonic mountain building given final form by ice, wind and rain. In the Second Age I discovered Tryfan and that it was not just the mountain that had a name: there were various bits of it with identities of their own. Adam and Eve sat on the summit, there was an East Face, a North Ridge, a Heather Terrace, a Milestone Buttress, and so on. Among these identified bits were vertically ordered sections of rock which were declared to be ‘climbs’ with the naming rights thereto generally falling to the people who first completed the climb. It was a formative time, and so Tryfan’s Grooved Arête took shape in my mind as a good climb and one that was not so difficult as to put it beyond my aspiration. I wanted to do it. And so, to the Third Age of Grooved Arête, the Age when I first climbed it. My companions were Ken and Els at a time when they were both already my long-term friends but had yet to become Anabasis members. Ken was in the lead and I remember the three of us assembling above roaring depths in the wind and the rain at the place on the climb known as The Haven. I remember too, afterwards, the generosity of another, more experienced on the rocks than any of us, who said that we had done well, that in the conditions it was worth another grade – Severe. And I suppose he was right, in our big boots in the wet we had indeed done well. The Fourth Age was not such a good one for Grooved Arête. As a mere ‘Very Difficult’ my mind relegated it in value as a fresh set of desirables came into view with the crossing of each grade boundary, even to the hitherto unimagined heights of ‘Extremely Severe’. During this Age the climb came to be seen as suitable for the unroped ‘solo’ climber and for the ailing. I remember doing the climb one chilly November day when I had a heavy cold and, I was told, should not have been out at all. But out I was and none the worse for it. Peter Burden (once of this Club) chose Grooved Arête for the return to the rocks of Stan Winstanley (now of this Club) after treatment for illness. All this may be seen as showing the climb insufficient respect. It did not forget. In the Fifth Age Grooved Arête returned to respectability. Now into my seventh decade, ability and aspiration went into decline and what I needed was cause to re-visit the old favourites for reason other than to find them more problematic than I remembered. I was lucky to link up with Margaret Hart, experienced in the mountains but new to the rocks. Grooved Arête reacted to years of hurt in the Fourth Age by expelling me from the chimney crack that is the first pitch. It was only overcome after effecting a personal size reduction by propelling my rucksack onto a ledge above and it was still – very difficult. But the meat of the matter is the top half of the climb where an intricate route finds a way up forbidding ground. The sun squinted through a skyline notch silhouetting the last of a team ahead disappearing over the top. Suddenly it The line of Grooved Arête from the felt lonely. On the bit of rock known as the Heather Terrace, photo courtesy of UKC. Knight’s Move slab I wished Margaret was a Castle directly below me on the chess board not a Knight working her way across, risking a swing into space. She did not fall but then we both found it tough escaping from a tiny edge-of-all things stance. But that was just about it, done. Unroped, we plodded wearily in shadow up to the summit, the jagged skyline rocks crested with gold. At last we stepped out of the gloom into the brilliant sunlight of a summer evening and only each other and Adam and Eve for company. It had been a good climb. Of a good one. So, what of the Sixth Age of Grooved Arête? Not climbing it, that is for sure. I have a bad ankle and the Fifth Age experience left Margaret concerned as to what she would do if something happened to me on a climb. So, we have done a couple more things, both within bellowing distance of the road. But mind and memory remain sharp and so I do what I am doing now – write about Grooved Arête. I have even resorted to lists, compiling a list of all the climbs I have done and wishing I had kept a diary. Desperate stuff, not the climbs, the resorting to list-making. Seven named rock climbs on the East Face of Tryfan, just in case you were wondering. The Seventh Age of Grooved Arête is yet to come for me, so I do not know what it will be like. Can I look forward to being sans teeth, sans taste, sans eyes, sans everything, the climb fading from my mind and the rocks becoming what they were at the beginning, just rocks? We humans imprint whatever fictions we choose on the mountains, whether they be our climbs, or the stories imagined onto the rocks of Uluru by the Aboriginal people of Australia. After all this is stripped away, only the rocks remain. I write now thinking of a friend who died recently and wondering what passes through the mind at the end of days.