One Step At a Time

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I was quietly watching a gentle climbing video this evening of a couple climbing a classic Lakeland slab route, going at about HVS 5a [look it up if you don't know UK trad grades], which was about my sweet spot grade back in the mists of time when I still climbed. I could do more technical stuff on the climbing wall or on boulders, but on actual crag climbs, that was the grade where I was most comfortable. I first came to North Wales at the age of about thirteen with two of my uncles to climb on Tryfan in the Ogwen valley here. My journey to discovering my roots in North Wales hadn't yet started by a long chalk, and it was to be another twenty-three years before we would up sticks and move here. Subsequently I took up climbing again as I turned thirty, and spent a few - in retrospect short - years going through the grades from VS to low-level Extremes, towed by my mate Bryan at the sharp end of the rope.

I led a few of the easier things, but not much, being happier in seconding someone with better skills, who also happened to be built like a brick shit-house, and secure in the knowledge that he could probably arrest any fall of mine with one arm tied behind his back. We had fun and games on the crags and mad drives and pints and fags afterwards. Bryan is now back in his native and beloved Derbyshire, where the climbing is on God's own rock: gritstone [no arguments there], whilst I have remained here, where I truly feel I belong, in Eryri. I haven't climbed a [real] mountain or any crag in decades, but the memories remain and are mine own until I cease  [pictured "One Step in the Clouds" on Tremadoc, one of our favourite routes]. Bendigedig iawn, indeed...

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