On Slate

Pretty much my first experiences of climbing were on the slate. I went on a PYB course for my 18^th birthday, basically for no other reason than I thought I’d like it and had enjoyed monkeying around for a few indoor sessions. I remember being awestruck by the quarry when I first walked into it. It seemed like an abandoned city from an ancient civilisation. Tiers of slate rising for hundreds of feet, rusting orange lumps of metal everywhere, the relics of the quarry still there in the form of huts and even tools, coats and boots.

Its an absolutely surreal location to climb. No matter where you are in the quarries, you can always see choss, and often hear it as scree slips under the shoes of a climber or explorer. It’s an inherently unstable area and that feeling of danger is added to by the obligatory trespassing. Not that anyone seems to care, as long as you keep out of sight.

Ever since that first time, I’ve been back as often as I can. Upon going to uni and joining the ULMC I even tried to get them psyched for it, with mixed results. I got a bit of a reputation for having an unhealthy obsession, resulting in ‘Slate King’ being on my committee t-shirt. The fact theres so much at a reasonable grade played to my advantage, but more than one person was disgusted by the climbing style that the slate offers and dismissed me as a lunatic. Its so unique- different to any other rock I’ve ever encountered. On first acquaintance, you think ‘you must be joking, there's no way that’s (insert grade here)”. But then you step off the ground, normally on some sort of small edge, and the impossible becomes possible. Edges appear. You are miraculously able to stand on edges the thickness of your phone, and often significantly smaller. Your concept of a ‘jug’ changes completely. That feeling of how much rock surface is in contact with shoe rubber becomes the most important thing in your mind. You basically start to learn how to climb completely differently.

The guidebook basically has it spot on when it says slate is ‘a truly radical medium upon which to climb.’ Beyond the obvious fact that even easier routes look nigh-on impossible, I reckon its something to do with the angle it forms at. Now I’m no geologist, but I gather slate overhangs are rare and generally short lived; because its such a dense rock, it tends to fall down sooner rather than later. So its almost always less than vertical in angle, even it doesn’t look it at first sight. So even though the holds are often tiny, you can get away with it because the angle is amenable and you can stand around on these edges, often with both hands off, working out until you're ready to commit, and you never get pumped. Or, as everyone does to start with, you can limpet onto those crimps out of sheer terror while your feet skate around on the shiny, frictionless rock. Once you get the drop on it though, you can do moves on slate which look impossible and make you feel like a good climber, like a better climber than you really are.

Every time I go back I feel like I’ve come home, and its nice to see how I’ve progressed, or indeed regressed, each time. From sketching my way up 5’s with PYB and not knowing what trad gear was, I’ve done progressively harder things on gear on the slate, culminating in one of my best days, when I did Comes The Dervish. That said, the bolted stuff remains balls hard! That’s something else that makes slate so unique, the way bolts and leader-placed gear coexist quite happily, often right next to each other. The Rainbow Slab, a contender for the best looking bit of rock in Britain, is a prime example. A protectionless E1, a classic E2 crack, loads of scary E5’s-7’s and some desperate crimpfests in the 8’s are within 25m of each other. Where else does that exist?

Another thing which I love about the slate is the history. UK climbing history is great as a whole, but there's something special about the history of the slate. Its like a weird cult, where the accepted practices of climbing seem to have been forgotten. There are bolts on trad routes, chipping has been tolerated, often given classic status, sport routes are nothing of the sort, and there are random bits of rusted metal sticking out of the walls for gripped climbers to wrap slings around. There is also an absolute determination to embrace getting scared, dating from the ‘two bolts per pitch’ rule embraced by Redhead et al, which often meant in practice ‘two pieces of protection per pitch.’ Absolutely manufactured ‘designer danger’ and ridiculous to a lot of people, but I love it. Its another idiosyncratic corner of British climbing history which the rest of the world finds totally bonkers. Brilliantly, you can get this experience at basically any grade, but Looning the Tube is a great example at HVS. Two bolts, a rusty pipe and a Friend 2 protect; crazy British climbing at its best. The pipe on Pull my Daisy, the last bit of gear before a monster 15m runout is also good fun. The gigantic ‘Chippededodah’ hold on the Colossus Wall also has to be seen to be believed. Redhead’s desperate sport routes with grim misogynist names were all chipped but remain classics. The normal rules don’t apply here.

Despite having done plenty of climbing on the slate and feeling so at home in the quarries, some of it has also felt deeply unwelcoming. Californian Arete has been on my mind basically since I saw it in the guidebook. ‘A classic frightener,’ 40m, no gear= E1 4c. For some bizarre reason I was instantly drawn to it and have had it written on ticklists for the last 5 years. But I’ve never had the balls; it scared the shit out of me. I got a horrible knot in my stomach when I thought about doing it. I went to do it one day a few years ago, sat in the intimidating shade of California and decided I liked life too much to go for it then. Walking out the tunnel back into the sunlight felt amazing. At certain other times I’d resigned myself to never doing it; just too big, too scary, too many variables. Its not like soloing on grit; there are so many things to worry about on the inherently unstable ground of the quarries. I had horrible premonitions of something snapping up high and plummeting to a grim death on the waiting blocks at the bottom.

But after a year in Australia and significantly more soloing experience on the orange sandstone of Arapiles, something changed and I felt ready. Why Arapiles soloing helped I have no idea, since its different in every conceivable way; massive holds, slopey feet, orange, and most crucially- not loose in the slightest! But regardless, on Sunday afternoon I was stood at the base of ‘Cali Arete’ as I had jocularly referred to it. It really is massive, a knife edge arete which blasts up into the sky, even if it doesn’t climb like an arete. Deep breath, switch off the brain, go. Unsurprisingly, it was fine, or I wouldn’t be typing this. It’s a jugfest really, although not without its moments. But I was glad I waited. I don’t think I’d ever have fallen off it but I could have got extremely scared without the confidence I had that day. Topping it out into the sunshine was as good a feeling as I’ve had in the quarries. It felt like a box ticked, a loose end tidied up. I don’t know it meant so much but it did, and of course soloing something like that is totally unjustifiable by any normal definition. But something about that route has always pressed a button with me, and despite climbing a way harder classic route on the same day, its that one that meant the most.

Walking out with Emily after doing Clash of the Titans I saw an old boy levering himself over the gate that leaves the footpath to access Australia. It took some time: I thought I’d have to go and help him up. As I approached I said hello and Evan, as I think his name was, started talking. Turns out he used to work there. In the halting English of someone with Welsh as a first language he pointed to various landmarks and told us their unpronounceable Welsh names. Turns out what we know as Australia isn’t actually Australia; actually what we know as California was known as Australia by the quarrymen. As he talked he asked us where we’d been climbing, and told us he’d worked with Joe Brown on a hotel in the valley. He was the carpenter and Brown the plumber. He was clearly very attached to the place, despite the fact it had stopped operating in 1969. I hope he doesn’t mind that climbers like me use it and are strangely attached to it too.