Types of Rock

I ‘ve just come back from a weekend with my local climbing club in the Peak District, climbing on  millstone grit. The picture below was taken at the weekend.

 

 

 

To most people rock is just rock, in the same way that snow is just snow unless you end up spending a lot of time dealing with it. But to people who climb, rock tends to be thought about by the type of faults it has in it, how abrasive it is and all kinds of other things which affect how easy it is to hang on. Millstone grit is not my favourite rock, because its mostly made up of big rounded lumps, with large flared cracks running between them. Gritstone climbing favours tall people with excellent balance skills who are happy hand jamming and smearing.

 

This is not a description of me, I come from a long line of stumpy Welsh trolls, for whom, anatomically it is far more difficult to achieve the long reaches and tai chi style balance moves needed on grit.  I like limestone, a rock where there are plenty of lovely pockets dotted about, small edges at varying angles, narrow chimneys to wedge your back against and overhangs with sharp angles to grab hold of. Here is a picture of a limestone climb – with lots of lovely sticky out and in bits.

 

 

 

Oiling the wheels

Someone has lost a filing cabinet key at work – not me I should add –  but as ‘Information Officer’ I pitch in to learn all about filing cabinet locks and how to order new keys. So if you ever want to know all about what the digits and numbers here is a very handy piece about it.

 

http://195.89.170.90/AMMEXTRANET/Public/guideKeysWhole.asp

I’m in anorak heaven today, since I’m now listing our website on an excel worksheet. As the site grows I need to log what tasks need attending to on each of the different pages. Excel has turned out to be a really useful tool for doing this, because you can use individual rows for progress with specific pages, with hyperlinks to the specific pageson the web and  columns for dates and  work that still needs to be done. to be done

Look at that, I’ve now discovered other people living in anorak heaven too!

 

http://www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=147