You'll never hear anyone say 'oh I remember that comfortable day out when it was neither too hot nor too cold, no squirrels ate our lunch, all the routes felt easy, and I timed my morning poo perfectly before getting picked up at home'.

We all enjoy those days, but the comfortable days aren't usually the days we remember. They say the strongest human emotion is fear, so thinking about my favorite route brings up memories of challenges. In fact, the first route that comes to mind is an E1 at Craig Doris that felt like pure survival. However, we don't need to go to Craig Doris, we have sandbags at home; the Peak District gritstone offers challenges aplenty, at any grade you wish.

My climbing partner's eyebrows have a lot of skin between them, and at any minor inconvenience they fold up like a frowning blood hound. I find it very charming, and in an evolutionary sense also very practical for being able to read my partner's emotions. They were doing that now.

We stood below a gaping, green crack. I had suggested we solo it. Gritstone cliffs often reminds me of the little hill we used to climb on behind the playground where I grew up, this one did too. Me, Pete, and another Pete (with a camera) were out filming an in-a-day challenge called 'The Cracker's Dozen' from the Roaches guidebook. The challenge being the path to crack mastery, so as a lover of cracks of course I was all over it.

This route seemed like just another VS on the list for me, so I made the grave mistake of transferring my previous limited knowledge of routes at similar grades onto the next, expecting to find it easy. But my partner, born and raised between grit pebbles in the Peak District, seemed to not fancy the idea of me soloing this particular one, hence the frown. That was my first clue for what to expect on Green Crack (VS 5a) at Ramshaw Rocks.

The line is simple, climb towards the green wide exit, there's no other way to go, so off I went. After three moves my foot unexpectedly slips off a very big, green foothold and I'm on the ground again.

'Are you ok?', my friend with the camera asks, leaning off the top of the route above me, and genuinely waits for my response. I make sure to laugh it off as rapidly as possible. 

So off I went again, managing to get up to the crack and shove a big green cam into the wide crack above me. I'm stood on a big ledge and the exit is right in front of my face at this point, the top out within an arms reach, literally, although the body does not fit through the gap, only the arm.

The crack forces me to step off the ledge to progress, and leave the trusty footholds behind. The crack, somehow, is both too big and too small at the same time. There's a chockstone conveniently within arms reach, and it seduces me with opportunities for sling protection and something to cling onto. The path of chockstone temptation only leads me further into the shadows, though, because the more I pull on the chockstone, the more my torso rotates and the more stuck I get.

Luckily, this VS at Ramshaw wasn't my first offwidth rodeo. Only a few months earlier I had climbed a few of the most daunting offwidths in the Utah desert, and now I had to resurrect the hidden beast within me - on this gritstone VS.

I recognized that staying sideways was the only way to success. It felt like trying to slap someone, but not being allowed to bend your elbows. I had already burnt the onsight with a ground falI, now my palms were pulling on the featureless grit as if my perception of myself as a proficient VS climber depended on it.

Eventually, I risked it all and went for the final pull. Bare shoulder blades scraping against the wall behind me, I successfully birthed myself onto the slab, stomach first, all points of contact, cameraman still rolling. Unfazed by my struggles, he asks me to provide a joke for the camera.

Green Crack VS 5a provided enough challenge for me to write an article about it, and yet we were still on the warm up of the days 'Cracker's Dozen' challenge.

That was the first sandbag of the day. The second sandbag was realizing that a Cracker's Dozen is in fact thirteen climbs, not twelve. As a Norwegian it doesn't make sense to me, but neither does measuring beer in pints, or the pronunciation of Leicestershire, so I don't spend too much energy questioning this.

As if to uphold the general theme of the day, I climbed Brown's Crack (E2 5c) twice when the cameraman forgot to press record. So make that the 'Cracker's Fourteen Challenge', if you like. When we eventually got to the end of the challenge, a boulder problem called Melvyn Bragg (f7B), we had completely given up on providing jokes for cameraman-Pete.

These 'lists' of routes I think are a great way of creating hard challenges with what you have available. Cracks are a ton of fun, so why not stack them on top of each other to progress the challenge.

You can watch the video of Mari and Pete completing the challenge below:

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Western Grit

The 2009 edition of the award-winning guidebook to Staffordshire, Kinder, Bleaklow, Chew, Lancashire and Cheshire areas covered with photo-topos and descriptions.

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