Powerband

Ω Unreported from yesterday we have yet more hot bouldering action from the mighty Flock Hill. Hot being the word. Winter is well and truly gone and the sight of cars with skis on their rooves is truly ridiculous, my suspicion is that the white ’snow’ you can see on parts of the skifields is in fact accumulations of little polystyrene balls spilled out of the packaging of the new snow-making machines the skifields must be frantically purchasing. In the boulders, good conditions have evapotranspirated, though shady problems are still in good nick.

People are always a bit slow to figure this out, yesterday we saw Andy and Etienne attempt to warm-up on Lost For Words at about eleven-thirty and in the blazing hot sun! Rach the Muss continued her siege of Grooverider in equally spicy conditions but to no avail. Gomez, despite his immense intelligence, was also found trying Julian’s Arete in the sun. At least he was smart enough to select a problem a few grades easier! His conservative approach was rewarded with a successful ascent of this tall and intricate problem which, according to his 8a scorecard, he thinks is one of the best V6s in the whole Basin. What would he know? Clearly he is making some kind of pretence that he has climbed enough V6’s in the Basin to make such broad sweeping statements, which is a very dubious proposition.

Meanwhile, in the shade, things were really happening. James got on a rope and cleaned the line to the right of Acapulco, which is scary and impressive enough to have been given the scary and impressive title of The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse Project. Yikes! It sports hard climbing well above the finishing height of the already-too-scary-for-most Acapulco and then eases off but continues to a height of about twenty metres. I’m not sure about conquest, as even if war and famine don’t stop you, trying this problem without a rope could well lead to a long ride on the pale horse known as Death. My suggestion is to blue-tack hangers to the rock and clip them.

They moved on to a shady hand-speed campus project semi-contemporaneously unearthed by Gomez. Nobody was quite twitchy enough for this problem, though I suspect Derek would have done it first go if he were around. ZacAtak™, Tricker that he is, flashed the first ascent of a variant to this problem via some slopey campusing and some Pete the Fractured Radness Kocksmere™ technique. James and Andy flashed the second and third ascents. Gomez required a bit more patience, eventually realising that campusing all the way to the good hold rather than doing a mini-campus to a bad hold was the optimal S.M.R.T.™ strategy*.

ZacAtak™ and James then went looking for some geckos, in order to steal their skin and perhaps succeed on the hand speed campus project. While looking for geckos, they got distracted by a dyno project that they couldn’t resist brushing, despite it being in the blazing sun. The fingery launch led suggestively to a generous angled edge way up and right. James ‘The Future’ Morris was the man for the task and it all looked on until James realised that his hand blowing off the hold in the midst of the wild and fully horizontal grab swing would cause him to sail clean over his spotter’s heads, off the ledge and about four metres down the subsequent hole. Hmmmm…. Undeterred, James sent anyway, making the first and only ascent of Kamikaze (V8). Staunch effort. I suggested he call it Real Men Don’t Eat Salad.

In other shady areas Buff ‘Dan’ Mackay continued his strong form with an ascent of Captain Sassypants, which he described as ‘the best V8 at Flock’. This understated praise deserves expanding upon, the subtext being that everything at Flock is basically either hard or soft V8, making Captain Sassypants pretty much the best problem. Apparently Andy and Etienne both got close too. Nice work Dan!

The day ended with Dan and ZacAtak™ dancing their way up the tremendous Three Hueco problem while Rach made the first ascent of some lovely face via a nasty match, cross-through, and then match-some-other-nonsense sequence. In the meantime Gomez rapped down Acapulco to apply sunscreen to the final hold of this problem, stopping it from getting sunburned and thus making sure it is in top condition for JP’s next attempt. Ω

*S.M.R.T.™ is the trademarked climbing ‘technique’ invented by Gomez Garcia Gonzalez for the purpose of helping heffalumps go ‘up’. The acronym stands for Super-Meat-axe Retard Technique. Tuition is available for a premium fee. Don’t just climb, climb S.M.R.T.™!