Ikaria and the Summit Center

Ikaria

This is just a little update really, nothing major news-wise. Looking back through my past posts I found a comment from Angelos a member of Ikaria's newly formed mountain and hiking club wanting to know a bit more about the climbing I did in Ikaria, a tiny Greek island, during the summer 2008. Unfortunately I didn't really do that much, with only a bit of bouldering on one of the remoter beaches, so sadly wasn't of much help to them. It is weird to think that such a tiny island could its own hiking and mountaineering club; when I went it didn't even have a regular bus service! I thought it might be useful to put my routes up on UKClimbing, mainly to show the Ikaria club where these remote problems actually were. I hope they go there and develop the area as there were some beautiful super highball problems just waiting to be sent! 

Summit Centre

I had a really fun climbing session last night at the Summit Centre. Eager to pump our arms to the max, Mat and I jumped on the routes; they are so ridiculously high! One route had something like 12 quickdraws to place, I had forgotten how tall the place was! Overall I did about 8 or 9 leads never sinking below 6b. I think my two greatest achievements of the night was onsight top-roping a 6c+ on the far left overhang wall and then leading with one fall the 6b+ next to it. Considering I could barely do 5cs on the overhang walls a few months ago this represents a major jump in my ability on overhanging walls, hurray! Mat (or Bungle as he has now been affectionately named) had a less fun time, this was mainly due to his extreme colour blindness meaning apparently every colour on earth looks exactly the same and therefore justified a rainbow of every wall he tried! :) Funny guy, Funny guy. Harry and the freshers seemed to have a fun time too, leading a variety of different routes before going onto some silly arm-wrenching add-a-move game in the bouldering wall. All in all a good nights climbing lads!

Oh a Rob Barnett jammed the Union minibus onto a wall on the way there, silly boy!