An inward adventure - Achemine E9 7a - page 1 I had been climbing at Dumbarton Rock since the start, nine years ago now. I had come a long way in that time and learnt a lot. The general theme was to focus on one thing at a time, beavering away for days or weeks on a problem just above my current level, learning what my body could do and how to get the most out of the rock to help me find a way through. Between repeated bouts of probing around a few feet off the ground only to be deposited coldly at my starting place, I would often glance up at my ultimate aim on the main face above, the great crack of ‘Requiem’. From my very first visit to the rock, the extreme nature of this climb was the direction I wanted to take, and all the learning taking place on the boulders below was stored up in preparation for one day climbing at this level. I fought and won my battle with Requiem in 2000, and thus arrived at an uncomfortable position in my progression as a climber. Having climbed the hardest thing around, where could I go now? I needed another battle to fight. The next challenge was not hard to find. All the routes on the face so far took crack or groove lines, essentially lines of weakness, despite their grandeur. The obvious step forward was to leave behind the safety of one of these cracklines and take on one of the great sheets of smooth wall in between. The ‘Iron Road’ of Chemin de Fer provides access to the most attractive of these orange and brown streaked walls, leading from the kink in the crack all the way to the top. It was a long section of wall and it wasn’t hard to see, even from 120 feet below, that it was going to take a lot of work on the friendly end of a rope to unlock its secrets. With an open mind and excitement at venturing into new territory, I made the first of many trips to the top of the rock to set up a toprope. The first big session was one of the best. It was free from reality. The line of the route was nothing more than a nice idea that existed firmly in my imagination. To bring reality in at this stage would have been the immediate end of it. I barely made a whole move in three hours. I shuttled up and down countless times on the rope, back and forth on a particular ten foot section. Work on each move was done in stages. Firstly, I spent fifteen minutes feeling around, fascinated, like a baby discovering a new texture for the very first time. Then fifteen minutes of pulling hard, introducing braun where brain failed to turn a smooth undulation into a handhold. Finally, I spent the rest of the time just sitting in my harness, 120 feet up on the headwall, staring at the rock in front of me, computing all the information I had just soaked up and trying to take it from the imaginary towards a sequence of movements which might one day be a route. With appointments beckoning back in Glasgow and legs on the point of paralysis from hours suspending myself in a stringy sport climbing harness, I abseiled down into the shadows to catch the “ten to”. I was left with some homework which would fill my mind until my return: How to work my left foot up onto a handrail without the luxury of taking my weight off it and, higher up, a problem with a sidepull which was only a sidepull if I could get to the other side of it. The hard thinking was done on the walk in to university over the coming weeks. This was the perfect place to learn the moves. For this route, optimism was needed to even believe those little holds could become a route. After eight hours dreaming in bed, the morning walk through Partick often felt strangely more enjoyable than it should. My mind had just been having climbing adventures all night and was in just the right mood for believing I could work out a way forward.
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