Neil Dyer is a climbers' climber. He has done many hard repeats and routes throughout the World and plays many of them down. Everything seems to be V8 to him whether it is V12 or not. He is currently doing some labouring in V12 Outdoors, Llanberis, close by to where he grew up near the Ormes. The local strong man is extremely understated and has climbed Font 8b, probably harder, but downgraded them all to V8.

Whilst many people will try their arse off to get some form of sponsorship, Neil despite his talents never has, despite being more than twice the climber of many a tagged hound dog. I once witnessed him cruise I'm A Bad Bad Boy on the Ormes with a tatty alpine harness and rock boots that had been resoled a million times. He has repeated many hard routes but never mentioned them, he is climbings enigma or Mr X.

This week on his lunch break he soloed The Untouchables F8a on the Rainbow Walls, 6 metres of laybacking and smearing on frictionless rock up an overhanging arete that Johnny Dawes first climbed in 1988 with 3 bolts for protection.

Neil had walked from V12 Llanberis to the quarries and top roped the line in his lunch break, a four mile round trip. He got it dialled and soloed it before matter of factly return to Llanberis to continue the working day. A true 'working lunch'. Which for a very technical route given F8a can't be a bad effort, seeing that he found his own sequence!