Am I verging on an extinction event now, even as i write? Am I stumbling around in an arid desert, malnourished, hollowing out, meaning evaporating and leaking from my now defunct and semi useless consciousness? Or is there something I can offer, something vital, or am I just laying down a fossil, something to become…
Category: bouldering
opinion(s)
Short article published on UKC website. I thought it would drop in, have a short life and vanish, however it attracted quite a lot of views (thousands) and a fair bit of divided opinion. I thought about a response and decided getting into arguments on the internet was not a great use of time. Publishing…
What happens when a boulder problem falls down?
It depends, however in this instance, the problem in question was at the time my hardest first ascent. Madeleine eats cake, 8A, was a coastal boulder, the rock was shale and it faced out to the Atlantic at Godrevey in Cornwall. Some photos appeared on FB recently and appeared to show a large rock fall…
Targassonne. C’est la vie! You think you have found a benchmark boulder, but in the end it is a mere fiction and the game continues.
Nice conditions at Targassonne, happy day climbing Phantom Lord, 8A. It’s a bit of a weird boulder, with a chasm opening out at the base of the boulder. There is a bit of a feeling that things could go wrong and you could miss the mats and the wooden platform! I tried it three years…
sport or art
In 2015 I finished a Phd THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTING THE ‘BOULDERING’ EXPERIENCE AS IT EXCEEDS CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF REPRESENTATION in which I hope I argued relatively successfully that bouldering was in fact an art form. Since that time things have inevitably changed. Currently there are people practising bouldering as an art form consciously and…
website shop
Wooden climbing holds – Hand carved. You can find the shop on the menu or click here https://andywhall.com/wooden-training-climbing-holds/ The holds are ideal for training boards – the smoother texture is more skin friendly than conventional resin holds but also requires greater tension which contributes to more productive training. They are also significantly better for training…
The recalcitrant
With some spare time on my hands, well a little bit of time, a new baby tends to suck most of the time away. I decided to make an attempt to think about my climbing, with as much of an objective perspective as possible. I have two very similar tendencies or preferences if you wish….
down by the river
Down by the river. A large mouse crawls out of the undergrowth oblivious to my presence as I sit motionless. Over the summer spiders have colonised the cracks and holes in the rock, brambles and ferns hang over the lip of the boulder. Out of the half dozen or so moves that I tried I couldn’t…
distracted
I’ve mainly been avoiding projects, distracted by snowboarding the last two months. I did however get out to clean and climb this nice little boulder, another addition to sector 28 at Laramade.
sector 28 Laramade
Sector 28, for want of a better name. There is a bit of a sector not far from the main area at Laramade. It does seem that there is quite a bit of potential in this valley, last year I found https://andywhall.com/2017/04/22/aftermath/ and in another sector, after a bit of a clean, this very…
andywhall.com 