‘Tis not the season for climbing

Posted on 26 October 2010

So if you’ve been paying attention you’d have noticed that suddenly there’s new green on the trees, washed clothes actually dry in a day and it’s still light outside when you leave the office.

If you’re a normal, well adjusted person you’re generally excited at the prospect of bikini’s, beach holidays and reggae tracks that the summer months bring. If you’re a rock climber however, you grudgingly go about your day, trawling every weather forecasting website on the interweb you can find in the hopes of the forecast of some cold weather. The reason is simple: fingers just don’t stick to rock very well when it’s hot.
Us disgruntled but hardy, generally attractive and not opposed to reggae music band of climbers have been milking every drop of climbing out of what seems like the last few cool days left this year. But what to do when there are only two days in a weekend and it’s just waaaaay to long to wait from one weekend to the next? Night climbing! Over the past few weeks we’ve had some awesome night sessions – awesome if your headlamp is working properly, a bit less awesome and whole lot more death-scary if its not. The upside is that your whole world is only as big as the light cast by your headlamp on the rock in front of you and you tend to not worry as much about how high you are off the ground. The downside – for me – is that scraping my way onto the top of high dodgy boulders, shaking and huffing, with only the waning light of my rapidly dying headlamp seems to have become my “thing” since I keep accidently replacing the flat batteries in my headlamp with even flatter ones that I find around the house.

Anyway, me and the crew have survived thus far and we’ll probably be doing it throughout the summer to stay in shape. We also managed to squeeze in a pirate party in the climbing campsite in the Cederberg in honour of Hermann “The Captain” Rabe”¦ Here’s some pics from our excursions.






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