Climbless

Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been 4 months and 16 days since my last rock climb.



Monday morning brought joy in the form of a fresh and functional body, the shoulder of doom was feeling less melted and the weather was looking fine for the coming week. With pysche levels rising rapidly I felt an ascent of an ice covered mountain with spiky things was required to get the head working after my fruit scone and butter style walk up Ben Chonzie on Saturday.

I must say, Comrie is a lovely little town, although the sign in the Baker shop window was a bit 'local'.

it read:-
Todays Special--
Bread.



Genius.

Andy and I decided to head for the hills on Thursday, the plan being a winter route of some sort, but then, all the way from the carribean or somewhere, some highly unethical tepid fronts rolled in and all the routes fell down.
So we decided to go cragging to Craigmore.
On arrival we thought it looked like a good bet but the closer we drew up to the crag the more the moss began to blind us with its mossy greeness and the more the cracks appeared to be actually spitting at us.As always, Andy was keen to get on a route whatever the conditions but after a quick discussion about moss, coldness, rainwater, mud and other such stuff we eventually decided to head to Dunkeld.Its definitely one to go back to though, some good looking VS', E1s and a lovely green HVS corner thing, theres also some bouldering for the lassies.
On the way to the 'Keld the rain battered the windscreen and we knew that cragging was going to be off the cards
so we done the only thing and steered the wagon into Newtyle quarry for some dry tooling. It was my first time trying out this dark art of the topless fairymen, but after a shaky start and a few takes I began to enjoy the moves and the metal grinding.
I think even Tim might enjoy the axe work on these technical climbs.
Andy sailed up a couple of the M4s then we headed home, with talks of Fontainebleau, cleaning up Ratho and of future mountain routes....