Popular bouldering areas repaired and made safer by BMC volunteers

Access and Conservation Officer for England, Jon Fullwood, reports:

"Last week a small team from the Peak Area carried out some landing work on two of the most popular, classic boulder problems, Crescent Arête and Green Traverse, at the Plantation area of Stanage. The landings of these problems had become very eroded from use and from run-off after rain. Boulders and tree roots had become exposed and, due to the angle of the landing on Cresent Arête, it was becoming difficult to safely pad out.

"After raising the idea at a Stanage Forum meeting it was agreed that the BMC and Peak District National Park Authority (PDNPA) would jointly submit a proposal to Natural England for small scale sympathetic repair work using locally sourced stone and gravel. Permission was granted and a work day arranged with PDNPA."

Jon continues, "The National Park warden Tom provided tools and materials, assisted with transporting the crushed stone part way to the boulder using a powered barrow and sourced and transported a stone pillar to act as a retainer on the Crescent Arête landing.

"The BMC volunteers did the remainder of the material transport and carried out the work on the landings. Since then we’ve had some glorious gritstone conditions and the new landings have been well-tested over the weekend. It’s hoped that further work can be arranged on other landings at the Plantation in coming months with Deliverance and the Business boulders looking like the next likely candidates."

BMC member, climber professional photographer and author, Dave Parry, was there to help out and has written a fantastic blog post on the day which you can read here.

Here is a short extract to whet your appetite:

You're all going soft

"When bouldering mats became commonplace in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the oft-cited benefits offered up as an excuse for lugging a huge square of foam around (largely to placate the “you’re all going soft, we used to do these problems with just a bar towel stolen from the pub” crowd) was that by using bouldering pads we were protecting the ground from further wear, stopping the grass being battered by repeated falls etc etc. Win win - what selfless legends were were!

"However, far from being a ‘win’ for erosion, pads clearly just served to enable the whole activity, making it an enjoyable mainstream prospect for all climbers year-round, not just the preserve of fringe nutcases with cast-iron ankles, lowball traverse fans, and cutting edge players needing a training option in the summer - the only time the landings were dry enough to stand on. Hence the massive boom in bouldering participation over the last two decades, with a commensurate strain on the land. Bigger numbers now means at certain places we’re seeing massively accelerated erosion, and it won’t just sort itself out, it’s going to need some legwork from all of us.

Moral superiority

"With this in mind a few haggard-looking, middle-aged blokes - with Jim Pope flying the flag for Gen Z - gathered at Stanage last week to do a bit of work as part of what will hopefully be the first phase of landing restoration work. One thing I will say, as someone who’s never done a job of manual labour in his life, is that you would not believe how hard is it to push a wheelbarrow full of wet gravel up the Stanage Plantation path, and how much DOMS in your arms and back it’ll give you for the subsequent week.

"I now fully understand why builders live off a diet of Monster and full-English-in-a-breadcake (insert name of regional bread-roll equivalent here). With this in mind it would be great if some younger, stronger and fitter people get involved with future work, even if it’s just ferrying aggregate up the hill. It’s not all backbreaking graft though, there’s good banter to be had and you get to swan around smugly knowing that you enjoy indefinite moral superiority over everyone else at the crag by virtue of having lifted a finger to do something positive."