10 Year In It - The Early Days 2001-2002

This week (give or take a few days) marks 10 years since I first started climbing. Since then barely a week has passed where I haven’t climbed. Getting into climbing has been the best decision I’ve ever made, it has taken me to some amazing places all over the world, and I have made a lot of great friends through climbing. I’ve decided to recount the past 10 years of my climbing here with some old stories and photos to accompany them. Sure it’s a little self centered, but it feels great to look back on it all.

I started climbing back in my hometown of Aberdeen, Scotland in early 2001, I had already been into outdoor activities, and I’d done a good amount of hillwalking, in fact my dad and I had just gotten back from climbing Mt Kilimanjaro. My good friend Anthony asked if I wanted to check out the climbing wall at the local leisure center, he had checked it out for the first time a few days earlier. I was 16 and didn’t have much to do, so it sounded like fun. The wall there is typical of the early 90’s style climbing walls, it’s completely molded (no bolt on holds) with real pieces of rock glued in to the wall. My first time out there I was in my sneakers and somehow managed to climb to the top of the 20ft wall, Anthony was impressed since he hadn’t managed that yet, but when I got up there I was so gripped that I couldn’t come back down, I spent about 10 minutes hanging on before my arms eventually gave up and I jumped/fell back down. Despite this I was hooked, and went straight to the climbing shop in town (where I was to work a year later) and bought my first pair of climbing shoes for £25. They were the cheapest I could find, pretty old school with a high ankle, but at that point any climbing shoe would have made a huge difference. Anthony and I went down to the wall every chance we had, it cost £3.25 to get in, but we became pretty good at sneaking our way in. A month after I started out climbing for my 17th birthday my dad bought me a harness, I had no idea what to do with it though. So for a while I would just wear it while bouldering at the wall.

Then at the beginning of the summer my dad thought it would be a good idea if we got some formal instruction. We hired an instructor for a few days, to show my dad and I how to belay and climb on rocks. We climbed a bit on the sea cliffs and at the Pass of Ballater where we mostly just toproped easy routes. After that intro I had a much better idea of what climbing outside was really like. We bought a rope and a few pieces of gear that we used to set up topropes. Me and Ant would get out and explore the local cliffs with another friend Craig who had just started climbing as well. Looking back on it now some of the stuff we did was really sketchy, we would swing about on a toprope that was set up with only a single nut. But we had a great time exploring new areas and being outside on rock. One of our first times out, we were climbing on some seacliffs just outside of the city and a pod of dolphins swam right into our little inlet and watched us climb, it was a perfect moment. Over that summer I added a few nuts and slings to my rack and started leading some really easy routes, my gear placements were pretty bad though, and we were climbing slabby routes where a fall would be messy. I’m lucky I didn’t have an accident back then, as it probably would have scared me off climbing, and I wouldn’t be where I am today. I didn’t really push myself, so I progressed pretty slowly, a year after I started climbing my hardest leads were V.Diffs and Severes (5.6 and 5.7 trad).

I would read everything about climbing I could get my hands on, mostly climbing magazines and websites. I found out that there were climbing competitions down in Edinburgh, three hours drive away, so over the winter Anthony and I would make the drive down. It was a reality check, I realized how much of a beginner I really was. At one of my first comps, a professional climber, Ben Moon, was there to hand out prizes and sign posters. I remember being in awe seeing how effortlessly he climbed, it made a big impact on me. To this day I still have his signed poster hanging on my bedroom wall. I really wanted to try bouldering outside, I saw photos in magazines that made it look really fun. But back then bouldering wasn’t nearly as popular as it is now (especially in Scotland). There were no established bouldering areas nearby, and barely any sport climbing so I just had to make do with what I had. In the summer of 02 I found out about a new bouldering spot that was being developed just 10 miles from my home, so I checked it out with Anthony. It was a cool place, the boulders weren’t too big and there were nice grassy landings, which was good since we didn’t have any mats. We managed a few problems up to 5b (V1), and a 5c (V2) that was probably soft. We even put up a FA of our own, its in the guidebook as 4b (V0-), but its still pretty tricky. The summer of 2002 we spent lots of time there as well as doing more easy trad, we also checked out a place called Cambus O’May which had the only sport climbs in the area, but most of the routes were too hard for us to try. That summer I worked in a climbing shop, which was great since I could get a good deal on more climbing gear, but ironically it also took away from my climbing time. I was to be exposed to a whole lot more climbing soon though, at the end of summer I moved down to Stirling about 3 hours from home to go to University. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos on my computer of my earliest climbing adventures, but maybe I can get my dad to scan in some old photos of me soon. Here are a couple from a bit later that’ll give you a taste of the next installment coming tomorrow, The College Years 2002-2006.

My first project 'The Crack' a V1 at Wolfcrag, November 2002



Working an awesome V2 at Wolfcrag, February 2003