Ice and Mixed Indoor Action

The last few days of my work tour took me back north to the Ice Factor to set the routes for the UK Ice and Mixed champs with Dave Brown, Jo George and Tom Lee. I had to commute there from Birmingham that morning which was quite an adventure of planes, cars and buses. But a 1pm I was screwing holds on…

At 1.30am I was still screwing holds on and testing the Men’s final route. At first I think it was about M10+ (Way too hard for a UK comp). But rather than have to reset the whole thing we just stuck the key in the adjustable leading wall and cranked the angle back 10 degrees to M9. The Comp was superb fun to watch. Tooling is always exciting stuff because the falls are so wild and the rescued near falls are even more wild! It’s going to be on the box (for BBC Scotland viewers anyway) on the Adventure Show at the end of Feb so keep an eye out for it (I’ll post up the time here once I know it). Tony Stone’s biceps looked a fair bit larger than last year and they took him to the belay on the final route, winning the comp. I don’t know about Dave, but I was certainly nerve wracked watching each ice and tooling route, praying that only one climber would reach the top. Amazingly that’s how it worked out. God knows how I managed to judge it, but I felt pretty happy afterwards that most people had a good day either watching or being part of the action.

some pics on the Hot Aches Blog