Old Video

I was looking through my laptop and came across this old video of me climbing from back in 05. I thought it would be cool to put it up here. It’s a video of me soloing a route called Nijinski at Auchinstarry Quarry, Scotland. The route is graded E5 6a, which for those of you who don’t know translates to about 6c+ climbing or 11c X, which was pretty much my limit at the time. The E grade takes into account the difficulty and seriousness of the climbing, 6c+ climbing is at the low end of difficulty for an E5 climb, but it is very hard to protect, so it’s a very dangerous climb. It is possible to get some marginal pieces of gear in, my friend George did it a year later and managed to fiddle in some weighed down RP’s and a skyhook, but these are more for psychological aid since they probably wouldn’t hold a fall. I decided to solo it because I didn’t think the gear would hold, and more importantly I didn’t want to hang around up there and get scared trying to fiddle in some gear. In this sense it was probably safer for me just to go for the solo.

I had first toproped this climb much earlier, before I was capable of climbing it cleanly, but it had stuck in my mind as something I always wanted to go back to and lead/solo. Once I had managed to toprope it cleanly, I knew it was only a matter of managing the mental aspect of the climb. I did this in May 2005 at a time when I was really trying to push my trad grades. In the space of just a few months I had gone from being an E1 (5.10a) trad climber to onsighting E3 (5.10+) and redpointing E4 (5.11+), so the next logical step was to go for an E5. On the day of the climb I had toproped the climb a couple of times before to make sure I was absolutely solid on it, the crux of the route is at about ¾ height where it is very precarious balancy climbing. A fall from that height would be very serious. The footage is not amazing, but I think you can still feel the tension of the day.

Watching the video even now makes my hands sweat. This was definitely the peak of my dangerous climbing phase, I went on to climb other hard routes up to E5, but they were a lot safer. I think I realized when I topped out that I couldn’t do something like this again. I felt some of best and worst feelings I had ever experienced climbing this route, I’ve never felt so involved in a route as I did with this one. I don’t regret climbing this route, but this type of climbing is definitely in my past now, I won’t be trying anything as dangerous as this again.