Blacknor rocks at Portland
Oct. 14th, 2015 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylDay trip to Portland to try some of the sport routes on Blacknor North. Arriving around lunchtime, we stopped off at Portland Bill to stretch our legs, use the loos, and have lunch.
While we were eating, the coastguard treated us to a flypast:
Then it was back to Weston to park up and head out along the cliff path to find the route down to Blacknor:
Not too many photos of the actual climbing — no crappy, inattentive belaying on our watch! — but here's the aftermath of Slings Shot after we'd stripped it but before we took the rope down:
It was OK without any really hard moves but the polished flowstone didn't exactly make the the footwork easy. Here's a close-up of the start of the route — the first bolt visible in the dead center of the picture, with the first parts of Downtown Julie Brown and Talking Smack to the left and right.
Cake Walk goes straight up the crack in the middle, bears left at the top and then up into the (over exposed in the photo) flowstone section with some fantastic pockets in an organ-pipe tufa, with a tough and more than slightly terrifying finish over a ledge to the left of the roof:
E preparing to second Cake Walk up to the final bolt and take it over the ledge, where I wimped out — a combination of tiredness and outright fear.
Packing up after a fun afternoon, this is definitely my favourite shot of the day — it came straight out of the camera looking like this:
During the scramble back up we noticed what looked like a chunk of newly fallen rock and resumed brain buckets until we were safely back up on the cliff path. Once packed, we considered the food situation, summarily ruled out Weymouth, and got ourselves off the island and headed up the Jurasic Coast until we hit Burton Bradstock where we stopped for supper at The Three Horseshoes — E had roast pork and I had a very nice veggie pie — before resuming the journey back to Exeter after an extremely enjoyable and only occasionally petrifying day...
While we were eating, the coastguard treated us to a flypast:
Then it was back to Weston to park up and head out along the cliff path to find the route down to Blacknor:
Not too many photos of the actual climbing — no crappy, inattentive belaying on our watch! — but here's the aftermath of Slings Shot after we'd stripped it but before we took the rope down:
It was OK without any really hard moves but the polished flowstone didn't exactly make the the footwork easy. Here's a close-up of the start of the route — the first bolt visible in the dead center of the picture, with the first parts of Downtown Julie Brown and Talking Smack to the left and right.
Cake Walk goes straight up the crack in the middle, bears left at the top and then up into the (over exposed in the photo) flowstone section with some fantastic pockets in an organ-pipe tufa, with a tough and more than slightly terrifying finish over a ledge to the left of the roof:
E preparing to second Cake Walk up to the final bolt and take it over the ledge, where I wimped out — a combination of tiredness and outright fear.
Packing up after a fun afternoon, this is definitely my favourite shot of the day — it came straight out of the camera looking like this:
During the scramble back up we noticed what looked like a chunk of newly fallen rock and resumed brain buckets until we were safely back up on the cliff path. Once packed, we considered the food situation, summarily ruled out Weymouth, and got ourselves off the island and headed up the Jurasic Coast until we hit Burton Bradstock where we stopped for supper at The Three Horseshoes — E had roast pork and I had a very nice veggie pie — before resuming the journey back to Exeter after an extremely enjoyable and only occasionally petrifying day...
