Wednesday 10 August 2011

E8 Onsight for MacHaffie


Yesterday Matt headed over to Raven Crag in Langdale to film James MacHaffie's attempt at onsighting Dawes Rides a Shovelhead. The route, originally climbed by Dave Birkett, comes in at E8 6c and has not seen an onsight attempt before. Caff made the most of the glorious sunshine and warmed up on a couple of the easier routes before deciding to give Dawes a go.

The route follows the thin crack line up the centre of the main face and is protected by a couple of relatively unreliable nuts and some old bolts. Caff mentioned that if the route had wires in the place of those bolts it would probably be E6. He is fresh off of his impressive 9a ascent of The Big Bang (which he climbed twice), and is feeling 'sport fit' at the minute. He said that the moves felt pretty easy, although there is a distinct lack of good foot holds in the crux section.


Caff is back in the Lakes for a few days, and is planning on heading down to Malham to spend a few days climbing some hard sport.

Thanks to Dan McCann for some of the images.

3 comments:

Andrew Clark said...

"The route follows the thin crack line up the centre of the main face and is protected by a couple of relatively unreliable nuts and some old bolts. Caff mentioned that if the route had wires in the place of those bolts it would probably be E6."

He thinks it would be easier if the bolts were wires? How bad are the bolts?

Anonymous said...

Are they not pegs? I don't remember any bolts up there, just a sling round spike secured by a wire and then 5-6 pegs to the top.

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