Where is the sun?

The weeks of miserable weather are starting to depress me. June was officially the wettest month on record and July hasn't started any better. Yesterday evening there was going to be a climbing meeting at Brimham Rocks, but inevitably it was rained off. On the plus side, I did get to go to the Ingleton Climbing Wall and get a bit of indoor practice. The wall is surprisingly large and was fairly quiet, so I was able to get on a few routes and do a bit of work on my stamina.

Hopefully the sun will shine again soon so I can get back out on some real rock.

Copper Dragon

It's a bit of a tradition in the Craven Mountaineering Club to go for a well-earned pint after climbing on a Tuesday evening. I've had pints in a couple of pubs over the last few weeks and have noticed that they are selling a cask ale that is brewed in Skipton.

Copper Dragon Brewery is a small local brewery and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their Best Bitter, which I can definitely recommend if you've spent an evening pulling yourself up rock faces! I've done a little research and the brewery produces 5 different types of cask ale, so I'll be looking out for them on my weekly visits to the pub.

Climbing at Pot Scar

Yesterday evening, I had a very enjoyable evening of climbing at a small limestone outcrop called Pot Scar. I'd spent most of the day painting my kitchen and had lost track of time, so it was a pleasant surprise to get a phone call asking if I wanted to go out. The weather was pretty nice, cool but sunny - not too bad considering the large amounts of rain we have had to suffer the last few days.

The climbing at Pot Scar was very good, with plenty of routes around the grade I'm happy climbing. I led a couple of routes (a Severe and a VS) and seconded three other routes (a MVS and two VS), so all in all not a bad evening. It was just after 10pm when we finished up and headed to the pub, a lot later than I realised - the long evenings are quite noticeable when the sky is clouded by thunderclouds.

Photo Albums

I have a few photo albums on my kodakgallery site - I've added them to the photo album links at the side.

Local Climbing

I had a walk up to one of my local crags yesterday evening - Deer Gallows, a small gritstone outcrop on the moor above Embsay. The club was meeting there to do a little climbing, so I decided to walk up the hill to join them. It's about an hours walk to the crag, all uphill and I somehow missed the main path to the crag an ended up having to fight my way through bracken to get there - quite tiring!

The crag is small but very pleasant and surprisingly sheltered given its position on the top of the moor. I arrived quite late, so didn't climb any routes, but I did do a couple of the boulder problems and tried a couple of others. Having to rely on the friction takes a little getting used to and the damp grass didn't help very much. But I had fun anyway and then joined the group for a pint in one of my local pubs - the Elm Tree at the top of Embsay village. A nice way to spend an evening!

Walking in the Southern Lake District

I went out on Saturday with the Craven MC to the Kentmere area of the Lake District. It's very beautiful scenery around that area and we had a long-ish (16 mile) but easy-going walk from Staveley village. Not many people came out, probably because the weather had been so awful in the days leading up to the walk, but we were pretty fortunate with the weather, only having a couple of short, light showers the whole day.

I need to get myself a digital camera for all my walking and climbing trips - my old one broke and so I have no record of my last few excursions...

I think I must have tweaked a muscle during the day though, as Sunday morning I could hardly move my left hip. Must be getting old...

Big Kitty

I was just thinking about the names for the Mac OS X operating systems...

OS 10.0 Cheetah
OS 10.1 Puma
OS 10.2 Jaguar
OS 10.3 Panther
OS 10.4 Tiger
OS 10.5 Leopard

Seems to me they are running out of big cat names for any future upgrades...

A bit of investigation has found that Apple have trademarked Lynx and Cougar, so I guess that there'll be at least 2 more OS 10.x to come. I guess they also have Lion left too, but after that what? OS 10.9 Garfield ?!?

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