Well I have woken up to find myself with the pox, a tickly throat has lead to a chesty rattle and I am determined to try and fend off the lurgy, so have resorted to lemon and honey drinks to up my vitamin C levels, stay hydrated and hopefully head it off at the pass.
Any homemade remedies that won’t make be puke are more than gratefully received.
I was working the other day, I am not going to say when or who with, as I really don’t want to cause offence but I did find it very amusing in hindsight. I was out with some would be mountaineering instructors and one of them had a bit of a turn at the top of a hill. I ask about underlying conditions and they replied that they had suffered from aniphilactic shock, thinking we’d just had dinner so that might be an option it turned out that it had only occurred after a steep up hill section.
So I figured that he was the only person I have ever met to have a Hill Allergy, and want to become an Instructor, although I did once teach someone on a Single Pitch Award course who was afraid of heights!
My Previous attempt at the Nose! I was a great deal younger, however I am not sure if I was fitter?
Well I have been more excited than ever since I got my tickets to the US sorted. I guess I really should unveil the plan for my Holiday, and that all it is really. We intend to fly into Denver, Colorado and climb a route in Eldardo Canyon, then the black canyon of Gunnison. In total we hope to take in around ten classic venues including a dessert towers and some splitter cracks, Epinephrine at red rocks, a Moonlight Buttress in Zion and if the Toyga Pass is open then Fairview dome and finally The Nose of El Capitan.
The very thought of all that rock is just too exciting, and with any luck we’ll be tearing it down on a daily basis. With a few rest days here and there to help the tips heal. Back in time for tea and medals.
I am heading out with Llion Morris as my partner in crime, and between the pair of us we seem to have more psyche than a bunch of pumped up jock’s on roids. As we decide the ‘tick list’ I’ll get back to you.
Well after about four years or more of not going on holiday I have just booked my first real adventure for several years. I am flying out to Denver and out of LA with a good friend and we are going on a road trip to try and collect as many classic US rock routes as possible.
Anyway its late I am excited and got too much planning to do. This trip has been the focus of all my training, it only seemed right to tell you now I have booked the flights. Ye-Haaa! I’ll fill you in with the details as we work them out.
If you read this and your from the State’s and you have some ideas for classic routes that we should visit, to prepare us for the Nose of El Cap then I’d love to hear from you.
I have seen some adverts for this new VISA card technology, where to save time and hassle you can simply wave your card in front of the card machine. Unfortunately the point seems to be lost on me, how on earth can the placing of a card into a card machine and typing your pin number into it actually time consuming?
Just how lazy and impatient has the average member of our population become to need a technology that would allow you to buy anything up to £10 without using a pin number or putting the card into a card reader! Will they need someone to wipe there own arse. They’ll also be the first people at the front of the queue when someone has sent many £10 chunks of there cash, I mean you might as well hand someone a massive wad of ten pound notes if you ever lost your card!
I thought the point of chip and pin was to increase security, however even that has been overcome by card cloning. With the evolution of slide or some other ridiculous name, now all the average criminal will only need you card to fund a day their anything for under £10 life!
I just wonder at the stupidity of Bank’s in basically reducing card security to help increase fraud, not to mention their totally destruction of the western economy through the selfish greed.
Well I spent the weekend delivering a Single Pitch Climbing course for Plas Y Brenin, alongside a course director i hadn’t worked with for a long time Dan McKinlay. I in fact hadn’t seen Dan for about 3 years or more. The last time we had worked together was even longer ago when I did a expedition for Well Challenged. Dan is usually based in Leeds, and runs his own small business delivering all manner of outdoor education solutions. So if your looking for a training or assessment over in Yorkshire/Peak district then look him up. I could find a website for him but there is a link to an email on the MLTE website
Anyway the weekend was fairly reasonable given the weather, and the team were fairly amusing bunch of individual.
I am hoping that I’ll have something a little more interesting to blog on about in the coming hours!!!!
Although I wasn’t there, the the powers that be in the British Mountaineering Council have committed to appointing a Access and Conservation with special responsibility for Wales. This is a landmark appointment, as Wales was the only on of the home nations not to have an officer with a specific welsh focus within the National Mountaineering councils. In fact all other home nations have there own ‘national’ governing council.
The post will be advertised in the coming weeks, which given the current economic climate is good news.
Some footballers wear lucky pants throughout a FA cup season, whilst American Ice Hockey player grow their ‘play-off beards’. For some this psuedo-supisitious act is part of a routine that they deem to be ‘lucky’, whilst this is unlikely to be true, and at the very least unhygienic. In is part of a routine that a player may use to help there performance.
In climbing our pre-performance routine is important for several reasons, first we how to get our equipment on like rock shoes, harness, helmet and rack as part of learning the safety aspects of our sport. To remain safe we need to ensure that these good practices aren’t broken, but instead become part of routine aimed at preparing us mentally. In its simplest form it might be:
Prepare – Vanquish – Focus – Succeed
Prepare for the route – Put harness on, rack up, put shoes on and clean the soles and chalk up ready to go.
Vanquish any demons – Remember you have gone through the steps above, you’ve warmed up, trained for and are ready for this lead.
Focus on the Route – and start to shut out any background noise, the peripheral vision fades into the background. All you see is the line of the route.
Suceed – As you start up the route known you have done everything in you ability to lead to your success.
I have to say that I haven’t really read Andy’s blog since we had our head to head at the beginning of the year, which despite some people thinking otherwise, I found quite fun. However as a serial lurker on UKC i was lead back to his blog today, from a thread about a thread. I eventually found the thread that the thread referred to, so managed to find thread of the topic on his post! Anyway Andy had a bee in his bonnet about UKC, which is interesting, as the UKC collective, has probably been sending him on holiday by buying his book and coming to his stand up shows for the last year or more.
However I can’t disagree with him that you need thick skin if you are to be attacked by the collective ‘intelligence’ that is the typical UKC poster. In particular this gem of an observation from Andy, “UKC has a tendency to dredge up the types of people who can only vent bile and negativity, peddling their opinion to anyone who’ll listen, generally no hopers with axes to grind” – Absolute genius, I couldn’t have found better words.
Things said online do hurt, and people do sit up mulling over them. I have said my fair share of acid tongue comments on this blog and UKC over the years, and Andy has been at the receiving end of them, however I believe that there is a major difference between UKC and a Blog. A blog like Andy’s or mine are very much our opinions and at times opinions will rub people up the wrong way, but unlike a forum we aren’t hiding behind a fake user name.
I find myself very much like Andy caught often between a juxtaposition between being nice and nasty, and like my granny used to say if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say something nasty instead! A short scroll through Andy’s blog quickly finds him slagging off Arctic Explorer for selling out. Then three post later has a go at someone who thought his writing was worse than his climbing ability, which is doubtful! 😉 The good thing about a blog though is the ability to contradict yourself at will.
Anyway Andy I have to agree he was a cock, however at the same time I remember being told something about a glass house and a stone and throwing it (the stone, not the glass house, although?). What I would say is take the knowledge that you have the Boardman-Tasker Award, and he has appeared to have wasted £15 of his money by giving you £5, which really makes him a TC.
I would love to be able to comment on Andy’s literary ability , however I have yet to make it through his book. Which is no indication of its quality more of my reading age, i have never manage to read Lord of the ring or Harry Potter (If HP survived the last book {is that a spolier?} would he eventually look like Andy K?). I did once read The Hobbit, and I am a big fan of the mifi collection, especially mifi goes to the Zoo. I am hoping that it will come out on video soon!
Oh and I am glad to hear Andy’s training, its the future. If he’d like some tips I have a coaching blog!
Anyway I would say read Andy’s blog as it good, but my guess is that anybody reading this blog must read Andy K’s blog first!
I close my eyes to shed a tear,
I close my eyes to fall asleep,
I close my eyes to dream, but…
I close my eyes and see a mountain,
I close my eyes and see a corpse,
I close my eyes and see what I saw that day,
I close my eyes and see a policeman staring at me in the snow,
I close my eyes and see a stretcher disappearing into the distance, a rope as a tail,
I close my eyes and see a woman laid out by a wall,
I close my eyes and see a beautiful snowy cwm on a moonlit night,
I close my eyes and see a helicopter light up that cwm like a UFO,
I close my eyes and wish that I never saw this.
I close my eyes and shed a tear.
I close my eyes and fall asleep.
I close my eyes and dream.
Last night at the climbing wall I was handed a letter from a relative of one of the fatal incidents I have attended as part of the llanberis mountain rescue team. This short poem is a reflection of how I reacted to it.