Friend of the brand, aspirant guide and professional photographer Thomas Vialletet gives us a round up from his, ME Pro partner Slyvain Millet, Yannick and Thibault's recent trip the Peak District.
"We were curious to go to the Peak Districk in order to make our own opinions of climbing Gritstone. We had heard lot of rumors : too hard, too exposed to climb, bad weather, etc....
So we took the car set off on a 1500kms roadtrip to climb "the most dangerous climbing in the world"!
Base camp was North Lees camp site. First impression, good rock, easy to put safety protection, not so dangerous, very beautiful faces, overcrowded and warm! We quickly got our rhythm, every day visiting a new area - Stanage, Burbage South, Higgar Tor, Black Crows and Millstone, climbing easy routes for warm ups and going into harder lines for the trill!
Sylvain climbed lines such as "Camel Hot" E6 6b, "Pulsar direct" E6 6b, "Block and Tackle" E6 6c, "London Wall" E5 6a, "Edge Lane" E5 5c, and "Flight of ideas" E6 7a. many of these he attempt on-sight, sometimes with success sometimes after a few goes
Thibault realized lines such as "Pulsar Direct"or "Camel Hot",
Yannick did "London Wall", "Bat out of Hell" E5 6a or "Goosey Goosey Gauder" E5 6a.
and I did some route such as "Pebble Mill" E5 6a, "Nosferatus", E6 6B and "London Wall".
We also climbed many other easy routes during the ten days of the trip, the list of all would take too long to write!
In Conclusion - we really like the climbing in the Peak on the Grit, we had a beautiful weather (without rain !), and we love the English spirit : no bolt, no top rope, only cams and nuts ! that's very fun.... the trad climbing!
For sure we will be back! but in a colder conditions in order to try the harder routes that we couldn't climb because the weather was too warm!"
You can check out more photography over at Thomas's site here
