Open Season at Gogarth

In case it has escaped your notice, the summer bird ban for climbing on the Red Walls at Gogarth is over. The Red Walls are an acquired taste but for those who are smitten they provide real adventure in an other-worldy location. Pride of place goes to Mousetrap as a British sea cliff classic. The crux pitch is actually well protected where it matters, with a wire at your feet and cam by your waist as you stretch rightwards to reach a series of corrugated chimneys. The rock is weird and disconcerting, but basically the red walls consist of underlying "cheese" with  baked coatings of relatively hard sandstone. The problem comes in the areas where the coating is missing. The chimneys are one such area, but they are studded with fins and spikes of a largely quartzite nature. You can drape slings over spikes and place nuts and wires between flutings, but its hard to be sure whether this would hold a fall, so the whole experience is heart in mouth from beginning to end. Like all good horror movies there's someething particularly uplifting about topping out from these committing adventures.

Saturday 28th August was reasonably dry so Sion and I set off up Mousetrap then for some reason that I no longer understand we continued rightwards on the relatively obscure line of "Bedlam". This was descibed in the guidebook as bold, which it probably was before the pitons snapped. Now its better described as "character-building". The photo shows Sion aproaching the belay of Bedlam; you can see the easy slab of Mousetrap behind him. Next time I'm going up the slab.