UKC

Last time I was out climbing was at  Park Nab. This is a lovely little crag perched high on a hill. I have been coming here and doing the same routes for nearly 50 years. On one of my first visits, I remember getting to the top of Chairman's Climb (HVS 4c) and thinking that the pinnacle the climb is on looked like it was about to collapse. What was keeping it up? 50 years later it is still here and still makes me feel that my additional weight out there on the arete will be enough to tip the balance. 

 Conversely I used to do a climb here called Styx. On a great buttress which had some of the best harder routes. It always felt like a solid piece of rock to me with no indication that it would all come crashing down back in the 1990's. Does anyone else suffer from this inability to discern whether rock which appears solid will unaccountably end up in a pile at the bottom of the crag, while teetering piles of balanced blocks will seem to go on for ever?

Joe Simpson on the Dru

I'm amazed that Red Pencil on Pen Y Ghent is still there. I've been saying this for years but it can't be long now.

The cracked wall at Trowbarrow is still standing up even though they thought it might go back in the 80's. One day!

I did a route called the Gouffle Connection in Warton Main on my 18th birthday. Went back a year later and it wasn't there

I see it's still getting logs - wonder what it looks like now?

I had a near miss a few years back. My local crag was a tottering pile ever in slow motion collapse at every scale, holds snap, blocks fall off, pinnacles fall over and headlands drop into the sea. After a while it becomes normal, you just hop over the gaping cracks.

One of the bigger buttresses resembling stack of giant stone pencils had for a couple of years clearly been inching toward the sea, periodically dropping pencils and smaller blocks into the widening descent gully. Again, you stop seeing it after a while, you just learn the new route over/around them.

Anyway, Christmas morning, c2008 I was playing on a little project in a house sized hole beneath that buttress (we'd wondered about tackling the tottering overhang of the main buttress but thankfully opted for the logistically easier side wall), behind another house sized block further along its journey to the sea. With hindsight I remember familiar crack routes looked a little odd, the end-grain of the pencil stack maybe more obvious than usual and there was a little more fresh debris in the gully than usual but I'd stopped really seeing it.

By dawn the next day the buttress and the hole containing our project beneath was gone filled to overflowing with thousands of tons of pencils. The spilled debris had scoured the climbing face from the next crag down and had stripped the vegetated slope below bare. Quite sobering.

As the saying goes 'geological time is now'.

jk

Obviously much of Swanage, and many other sea cliffs, are liable to collapse eventually, but I wouldn't like to predict which bit would or wouldn't go next. I took my non-climbing wife up a safe and comfortably enclosed VD chimney at Guillemot years ago. Its now E4 due to departure of one side (there was a suggestion that hammering an ab stake at the top may have been a factor).

I remember a fearful first time in the Ruckle and hurrying to the easiest route out nearby, Larus, now long gone. The top of the easy Ruckle classic Bottomless Buttress looked dodgy to me about 50 years ago, but its still there.

I've done plenty of routes that have since fallen down - Deer Bield Buttress, Yankee Doodle, Mithril (sp), etc etc, but the real frightener was Fandango. This consisted of a block about the size of a couple of cars end to end that you laybacked beneath and then up the size; even at the time I had visions of it starting to peel off while the leader was laybacking up, leaving me to hold him and 20+ tonnes of rock. Would I be able to untie in time?!

A few weeks after we did it it DID peel off, and our chalk marks were still clearly visible. 

Two decent-sized buttresses have gone on Portland recently, one in very recent days (left side of Memories Zawn at White Hole), one a couple of months back (Once Were Warriors roof). 

A new route I climbed at Dancing Ledge lower tier in the 90s only lasted one more storm afterwards...

All crags are temporary, some more than others.

Nearly all the climbs mentioned here as having fallen down were getting logged ascents after they were no more. What's that all about?

Most of the bouldering I developed about 15 years back on a beach has now gone. I suspect I was a little unlucky there that the sea took it quite so quickly.

jk

https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/flodigarry-1275/spantastic-43587#p... 

Always amazes me that Spantastic has survived another winter.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/crags/castle_rock_of_triermain-443/north...

North Crag Eliminate is the first major classic that I have done that has collapsed. 

In the late 70's there was a classic route at Swanage - Crack of Dawn.  we looked diligently for it one spring, but all we could find was an arete with one side blacked up by rock shoe rubber.  It might be the chimney route referred to above, but I believe this thing was a crack that took feet nicely.  I never saw it intact...

I remember walking up to Pant Ifan, seeing those chalky handprints and wondering......

Memory failing , late 70s/early 80s?

79 I think. I was climbing with Jonny Woodward, that would have been an untimely and premature end for a career that was just about to take off.

Did original Crack of Dawn(S)  in early 70s, it was to west of the main Cattle Troughs area. Nice route...not the chimney mentioned previously. I think Crack of Dawn II (?) remained but not a good route.

Another classic severe, now VS?, was Zig Zag at Fishermans but with a finish involving loose blocks, I think the finish has been really bad for some time but one can traverse L just before it.

Rob, thanks for ending a 40 year mystery 😊

Jeez, that flake was ******* massive!

I'm pretty sure it's still there!

In reply to 

Fandango?

Oh, someone got there before me. Must have done it mid-seventies and don't remember being that concerned about it. Now Daddyhole Main, that has fresh scars appear after every winter!

Think it was later than 79 as the last time I did was in April 1980. Interestingly a few folk have logged the route in 2020, 2018, 2016 & 1983........... I think it fell down in 80 or 81?

Wraith at Mother Carey’s Kitchen was a crack climb when I did it in 1985 and it’s now an arête!

Wraith (E2 5c)

And soon it will be a groove.

I climbed it in October 1980, think it went at some point the following winter.

Oxwich Bay Quarry

I remember climbing Hounds Head Buttress at Tremadog on 2 separate occasions a few years apart. The first time it was a great jamming crack, the second time it had become a chimney which you could get right into and back and feet it!

Not long afterwards, because it was directly above the road the council dynamited it.

The amount of times I've heard this! Also: "When I did Jean Jeanie in 1975 it was a finger-jamming crack..."

I don't believe a word. Conversely, I believe every word of this: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/bowies_wall_or_how_jean_jeanie...

C

I was there the day it happened.  I'll dig out my diary and try to find the exact date.

If it happened within a decade of when we climbed it that's still too close for comfort!

Excellent, I hadn't read that before.

I'm sure there is a photo of big Ron, hand jamming his way on Aladdinsane back in the day, you can nearly fit inside in now!

Yes, it's brilliant! I've retold it many times to climbing partners and it always gets a good response - even on the second telling.

Yes, you have to jam your foot lengthways, it's so wide! But, I struggle to believe it was once a handjamming crack... Does anyone on here remember climbing it in the 1970s? I can't find any older photos online, unfortunately.

I don't know. 

I definitely did Rachel (E2 5c) before she became a fallen woman.

She was pretty loose though, as I recall.

Easier than what it says .

Personally had my fair share of accidents and very near misses with loose blocks. I think you get better at judging these things with time but despite a hell of a lot of experience, I still feel chronically underqualified to judge and I'd much rather just avoid lines of crumbling choss unless I'm new-routing...

When new-routing (rock type and crag depending), I take a claw hammer and divest the line of any hangers-on on abseil first. Generally speaking anything larger than a cubic metre can be left alone as your weight won't make any difference.

A lot of the solidity comes from the rock-type. So Gneiss and granite is pretty trustworthy with only little crozzly bits on the surface coming off whereas sandstone is a lot more variable. It's also worth thinking about frost shattering. If you are on a place that could have winter climbs then it's almost certainly going to be a lot looser than somewhere low down and/or coastal.

Is this the really obvious big block you pass on the scree that looks like it’s got a sinker cam slot in the side of it?! That things a monster I can’t understand how it stayed in one piece 

I don’t climb at the moment and one of the reasons is that I still shudder when I think about the time I climbed a variation of Robud and Yellow wall at Guillermot...

it seemed to me that every third hold moved or was going to move very soon.