old venue, new possibilities???

The view during the last endurance lap of the day. Better than the climbing wall...

Dumby - more of the same - am I psyched? Am I not psyched?

With the bandages off yesterday I had to get outside for a few hours so took advantage of the first break in the continuous 2 months of rain (evry day - no joke!) and headed round to pull on some very small holds at Dumbarton.

When I arrived I felt very much like I did 4 years ago after climbing everything there up to Font 8a; that the remaining projects were too hard for me even to work on. So I didn't climb there for 2 years and intended never to go back. But a couple of years later when I returned I found I could begin to pull on some previously impossible holds and from that eventually came some harder problems completed - lines I could never see myself climbing.

Today I felt the same sense of the remaining things being too hard to bother with. But it's funny how it only takes one move which felt desperate in August and felt easy today to reverse that feeling. The Watson was out too and beavering on another arete line I'd dismissed. After an hour of us both scrapping with it, I could do most of the moves. All of a sudden things are possible again.

Really I want to be living near some other pieces of rock now. I seem to be quite impatient for it recently. But the job market in the west highlands is not being forthcoming for Claire, so this will be my local crag for a while yet. So maybe I should just go ahead and get stuck into another scrap with a graffiti covered roof.