In reply to legonaut:
Background info
From 18 Aug 2009
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Dave MacLeod has been making good progress recently on the 500m super climb, the Longhope Route at St Johns Head, Hoy, despite atrocious rainy weather and also being vomited on by angry seabirds.
Dave reported on his blog that, in spite of the rain, he had managed to complete his recent objective of linking on a shunt “the big pitch”, a series of headwall cracks speculated to be around 8c/8c+.
John Arran and Dave Turnbull made the first free ascent of the Longhope Route in 1997 but avoided this headwall by a four-pitch deviation up grooves to the left. Dave now plans to free the entirety of the route, which, even without the hardest section, still amounts to 23 pitches of serious, loose and physically demanding climbing with a top pitch of F8a.
Dave has recounted his progress on the route so far on his blog:
“I can’t say I’m too confident it’ll go. But I’m confident It’ll be quite an experience trying. In many ways it still feels like early days for trying this project, and it’s probably good for me to view it that way anyway. I’m on the rollercoaster of hard new routes; One minute it feels like E10 and possible soon, the next it seems way out of my grasp. It's really too big to get a handle on yet.”
