new problems

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…

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…

aftermath

My last post was about a project…well it took a few sessions, but I’m very pleased with this problem. It pushed me a a bit, struggled initially to climb past my seven move limit/block. In the end it went easily though. I’ve spent a year in the Ariege looking for new problems but it was…

project

I looked in the woods and I found a very promising unclimbed boulder. I came back with brushes and a ladder and cleaned the moss and dirt from the boulder. Revealed beneath was a prow of granite, hidden in the trees, a thing of interest a thing of desire. On my second visit I began…

burnt toast

I went for a long drive to go bouldering; in the end I didn’t climb much at all. After crossing the Pyrenees I drove across vast tracts of empty arid Spanish landscapes, boggling in its scale and occasionally marvelling at its detail. I had plenty of time to think on this long journey. Bouldering has…

cornwall, rain and reading

I’ve had a FB exchange with a climber, who has been visiting Cornwall and has been in touch for details and directions for the problems in the ‘Treen’ video. It felt strange, for it’s the first time since moving to France in March that I can honestly say I missed Cornwall. At the time I…