When cities die

Years ago, I was reading the ice climber Will Gadd's blog. Will had a post linking to photos of Detroit where nature was reclaiming parts of the city where people had basically left. I was so impressed by the photos I wrote a brief post myself linking to the same material. That was in 2007; since then I think the emptiness and devastation of parts of Detroit has become quite well known. I've even seen it used as a back story on some cop show where one of the "urban explorer" got bumped off for reasons I no longer recall. I remember hearing that some in Detroit are really quite annoyed now about the stream of journos and photographers who arrive from around the world to see the 'ruins' of a city where I suppose many hundreds of thousands do still live.

Anyway, today's Slate Culture Gabfest discussed a recent piece in the NYT Magazine called "Jungleland" on what's left of the 'Lower Ninth' in New Orleans. Slate hadn't got all their links up when I first checked out their show page, so I just went to Google Earth to get some idea of where the Lower Ninth is and looks like (I've never been to New Orleans). On the satellite imagery things look quite normal from some way above: lots of houses are visible, some parks etc. It just looks like many other spacious spread out American suburbs. But going to Google Maps and using Streetview, the desolation of the area is starkly apparent. Many of those roofs visible from above are on abandoned and derelict houses. Some people have rebuilt and are living there, but most of the houses were simply washed away, some of the inhabitants with them, and there's just scrub and rubbish left behind.
View Larger Map This is 2403 Flood Street, I've chosen it completely by random after clicking up and down various roads in the district. Spin around using streetview and you'll see the one little white house there, shiny and new with what looks like a wheelchair ramp outside, and then its surrounded by something that is going back towards wilderness, but as the Slate discussion revealed - its not even 'natural' wilderness, as the area is becoming dominated by mono-cultures of invasive species.

It is one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Ice climbing links of interest and some housekeeping

A little housekeeping, and then some "links of interest" (obviously if you aren't interested in the same things that I'm interested in, they will be links of un-interest - so sorry in advance about that).  Firstly, I was told by a certain lightweight backpacking evangelist and all round tech dude, that I would look much cooler if I installed Disqus as my blog's commenting tool. Always wanting to burnish my hipster credentials, but otherwise non the wiser as to why it is a good idea, this I have now done. Disqus also claims that it is importing all previous comments into the new system but this will take some time. So far it hasn't and I am in state of nervous apprehension as to where all my comments have gone from the last six years. I haven't gone through the trauma of dozens of flame wars and being called a terrorist-lover, Islamophobe, anti-Semite, Zionist, shit climber and bore just to lose all the hard-earned abuse in technical glitch I hope! And that certain UL evangelist better realise that his toilet paper teepee (132.4 grams) and home-made clingfilm rain trousers (52.1 grams) will do nothing to protect him from the wrath of an infuriated mediocre ice climber/international politics blogger should Disqus lose all my comments! :-) Anyway, if you're bored, do leave a comment with some fresh abuse, or just to say hi, and lets see how this clever ole' disqus business works.

It's raining now outside but despite this, we plan to go climbing tomorrow. Yes this is probably a silly, or at least soggy plan, but we shall see. On an ice climbing front, I was dead chuffed to have an article published on Finnish ice climbing in Climb magazine in the UK. Ian and Dave at Climb made my article look great and I hope folk enjoy reading it.

Screen shot of my Climb article

I was very aware in the article that I didn't really discuss the best place for ice climbing in Finland, Korouoma, mainly because I have only been there once and it is a long, long way away. But having seen the following video of climbing there (thanks to Max on Facebook for highlighting the video), I really have to get back up there.

Congrats to all involved for making such a great little film of the place.

Finally, Nick and Jim, who we stayed with for a few days whilst ice climbing in Northern Norway this time last year, are back up there. This year Nick as well as Jim is blogging. It looks like they haven't had fantastic luck with the weather this year, but still have been doing some really impressive climbing. Neither Nick nor Jim are your sponsored super-hero types, they are just weekend warriors like the rest of us, but I have huge respect for them for just getting organised and turning up. Ice climbing somewhere like Arctic Norway need some faith, a sense of adventure, solid mountain sense and, to borrow a good Finnish word for this, sisu. It's people like Nick and Jim that make the climbing community great. It's easy to get cynical when you follow the commercial interests, competition for recognition, back-biting and petty tribalism that are also part of the climbing community, but all around the world there are people out there on cliffs and mountains just like Nick and Jim, just doing it for fun (even when it is anything but). So enjoy the rest of your holiday chaps! May the skies be blue, the ice solid and plastic, the winds still and snowpack stable. Take care and have fun.

Winter 2012, the story so far.

A cold walk home in January.

Last week we had the first thaw since the cold set in at the start of January. Suddenly the world is full of the sounds of drip, drip, dripping, the birds sing and there are intermittent crashes as roofs shed their loads of snow; full depth avalanches in miniature, lubricated by the newly released water below the pack. Soon the temperatures dipped back below freezing, and fresh snow covered the slightly grubby piles of heavy ploughed snow, but the thaw is a reminder that the calender slips quietly by and somewhere ahead spring awaits.

Nuuksionpää - early Jan. So desperate we will climb in the rain.

This pause from the frost seems as good a place as any to round up some photos of winter climbing so far this year. Life has meant that I've mainly been restricted to local venues on the whole, but at least I'm lucky enough to be an ice climber with local venues, and it means after a bad start to the season I have been able to get a few things done.

The first Kenyan ascent of the mighty North Face of Kauhala? Kenedy's first go ice climbing.

After the last couple of good, long, snowy, cold winters we were maybe getting a bit blasé; expecting to start winter climbing in early December and going on until late March. The start of this winter swiftly disabused Finnish ice climbers of this expectation. Indeed winter never seemed to start; the cold, wet, grey, soggy days of autumn just got shorter and shorter, the nights longer, but temperatures simply refused to dip below freezing. I had the great fortune to leave Finland for all of the Christmas and New Year period for that 'Great South Land' where it was midsummer and the only sensible option for Xmas lunch is a picnic at the beach. When I got home in early January there was still virtually no snow but almost in time with our arrival back, the mercury plummeted, some snow fell and things started to look up.

Jody, trying not to do himself an injury à cheval on the horrible 'bridge' to Muurla.

 My first trip out was to a local cliff where there is a mixed line I have been failing to get up down the years. No one else could make it that day, so I shunted the line on a toprope. It went surprisingly easily and cleanly, completely lulling me into a false sense of security for later attempts.

Steep conditons at Muurla, early season.

Other trips followed, ice climbing in the rain at Nuuksionpää, ice at Muurla, mixed climbing at a new crag called Rajakallio, back to Crag X to fall off my project with hands frozen from trying to fiddle with rock gear in thin gloves at -17. Against my better judgement, Eärendel persuaded me out for an afternoon at Nuuksio when the temperatures were the wrong side of -20. Somehow it went suprisingly well and I got an excellent reviewing opportunity in that cold for a belay jacket I'm testing for UKC.

A brutal mixed struggle at Muurla

It has been a cold period, and cold toes and fingers seem to have been something of a theme over the last month and a half.

Narrow but better angled ice at Muurla.

I've had the pleasure of climbing with some new people, and some new places which is always good. Climbing with Joel, Henkka and Miko at Rajakallio was both of those, and turned out to be a fantastic if chilly day. For me the day was capped off by Miko and Henkka pointing me towards an unclimbed chimney line, not a hugely common thing on Finnish crags and telling me and Joel to give it go.

It was a good fight, as these things should be, but I managed to lead it, so Joel and I get the probable first ascent of this really cool line.

A cold night at Airport Crag.

A week or so after than I finally got up my Crag X project. I found it a real struggle on the day, but it was actually rewarding that the route that day was in almost 'Scottish condition', frozen veg, plenty of snow, even some fine, rare frost on it. Much more fun than just drytooling. I ached for ages afterwards, but it's worth the ibuprofen bill.

The promise of sunrise - first visit to Rajakallio

So, over all, not too bad a start to winter, and hopefully the spring thaw won't arrive just yet. Enjoy the rest of the photos.

Joel topping out

Me on the probable FA of "Apollo's Angels" (M4-ish?), Rajakallio.

'Modeling' for the UKC review of the Marmot Zion jacket ;-)

Henkka suggests "the three stooges" for this one. His two fellow stooges may beg to differ.

Joel on a fat "Where the Wild Things Are", Crag X, Nurmijärvi.

Lots of easy ice at the left end of Jaanankallio.

Sun through a haze of ice.

Cold Snow.

Vasen Suora at Nuuksio in excellent conditions.

Eärendel leads Oikea Suora in tricky conditions and 22 degrees of frost.

On the way back to Crag X for another go at the 'proj'.

The project finally goes with no falls or rests - hurrah!

Reading Orwell in (north)eastern Europe.

I don’t know why but I decided to read George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier. Besides a few of his shorter essays, I guess I haven’t read any of his books since school. Anyway the following paragraph jumped out.

I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

He clearly holds the miners in awe but is also perhaps being somewhat modest. An odd thought struck me about how lucky Orwell was to be born British considering when he was born. Perhaps because I have read some excellent books this year that deal with the terror of Stalin’s rule (most notably “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder and, in fiction, Sofi Okasanen’s “Purge”) it crossed my mind that had Orwell been born in what became the Soviet Union, or indeed in many other places between Berlin and Moscow, he may well have had an opportunity to find out how correct his premonition was.

"No, not him": the new Tiitinen list.

Of course throughout the Cold War, Finland could never admit that there was a Cold War. That was something the nasty superpowers did; studiously ignored or denied up in the north where neutrality supposedly meant good relations with all. Those who were involved in the Finnish end of that conflict (or who looked on from the sidelines) are still very much with us. They fill the upper echelons of political, economic, media and cultural life in the country, and whilst things stay that way, stories around the Tiitinen list aren't going away.  Until the list is made public, or another generation or two retire and die, the story will hang around Helsinki political circles like a bad smell.

But this week saw the publication of Alpo Rusi's book about the list - the book being the result of his legal battle to refute the story that his name was on the list. Rusi announced that a former Finnish prime minister (now deceased), Kalevi Sorsa, was on the list. This was one of the first bits of political gossip I heard when I started working as a researcher, on the outer fringes of the Helsinki political life, a decade ago. I had always presumed that if a fresh-off-the-boat foreigner had heard such a thing it was one of those open secrets that most had heard but no media would publish. Now Tiitinen (previously the head of the Security Police, now Secretary General of the Parliament) has denied that the former-PM was on the list. This must be a great thing for Sorsa's friends and family - in effect exonerating him, but an odd way to go about things.

Can we expect journalists now to suggest names to the secretary general every time they corner him in the corridors of the Eduskunta (parliament) in order to collect his denials? Perhaps they should start with the President, every current government minister over the age 40, the heads of the ministries of state and perhaps the editors-in-chief of the biggest papers and TV channels. If Sec. Gen. Tiitinen denies that those people are on the list, the next journo can try the ministers and prime ministers of the last few governments.

Alternatively, they could just publish the list, end the rumours and let people make peace with the past.

Road biking in the Helsinki hinterland

Old bike

Shortly after washing up on Finnish shores about a decade back I decided I wanted a road bike. I'm not sure why, watching Greg Lemond beat Laurent Fignon on the Champs-Élysées in 1989 probably. I went to Velosport, at the time probably the only serious shop for road biking in the capital. The guy there who served me looked suspiciously like 'Il Pirata', an impression that I'm sure he was only too happy to cultivate. Nevertheless he was great, talking me through everything with no hard-sell, despite my budget was the bottom of their range. I was sat on the jig and measured up before all that info was faxed off to the Olmo factory in Italy where (I would like to think) a little man called Giovanni built by hand the frame of my bike. My red, all Italian beauty did a decade a grand service, working impeccably over many thousands of kilometres and seeing me comfortably through my first long sportive rides last year (see here and here). But this summer revealed that really its whole drive train needed replacing - along with the wheels - and the cost and hassle of doing so actually made getting a new bike a consideration.

Bikes have moved on, road riding has increased hugely in popularity with rise of the MAMIL of which, I guess, I am sadly now one. My Olmo was probably at the end of the era where hand-built steel frames were more common. Now aluminium and carbon frames are the norm, with most of them I've been told coming from the same few massive factories in Taiwan. Unless you have a lot of money to spend, bikes are off the peg, so buying off the internet is a bit of a worry with educated guess over what size to order. But on the other hand, huge competition between so many brands and shops in different countries means that you are getting a lot of bike for your money - mine was a more than a third off in an end of season sale, letting me get something much nicer than I would have been able to afford at full price.

New bike

Road biking has definitely gained in popularity here in Finland as well; the Tour de Helsinki had another record breaking year for numbers doing it earlier this month. Out here on the edge of the city its quite normal to see groups gathering to head out into the countryside for evening rides, and through the summer it was normal to see a few other riders out when I went out to ride. Ten years back it was quite different, other riders would come for a chat if they saw you because road bikers were pretty rare - I remember at least a couple of guys, despite my lack of Finnish, invite me to club rides and the like as they were just pleased to meet other roadies. It's a very similar situation to climbing that I've watched rise massively in popularity here over the last decade and a half.

Typical rush hour in the Helsinki hinterland

Nevertheless, I think road biking could/should be more popular here. The Helsinki hinterland is just such a great place to ride. Firstly, unlike further inland, there are lots of roads. Secondly, most of these roads are paved - no need for cyclocross or hybrids. Thirdly, and most importantly, there is virtually no traffic on them. The five motorways radiating out from Helsinki take a huge percentage of the traffic leaving or entering the capital region, leaving a big network of well paved country roads with next to no one driving on them - and making them just wonderful for cycling on. You get to notice all the 'old Finland' of human history that is still there; sagging barns, elevated cow sheds, the plentiful volunteer local fire stations and small schools - stuff you never notice zipping up and down the motorway - alongside the natural environment. Expect all the birds, from tiny songbirds up to storks and hawks high above, or currently - fields full of geese getting read to migrate. You'll see squirrels and hares, and might see badgers and deer - I have. Best of all, I almost ran into a moose once, free wheeling nearly silently around a forest road corner. It's all out there, and for the vast majority of the time you'll be completely on your own to enjoy it.

Anyway, from a few pics and some video - all taken from my phone so please excuse the low quality - I've made a little film. It's my bit to help out Helsinki's tourist board to promote the quiet lanes of Helsinki's hinterland to the world road biking community. Enjoy.

Scotland: one wedding and two hill walks

The Firth of Clyde

The last couple of years of school in a small English town weren't really bad, but for loads of us sixth form was just a waiting room. Pass your exams and get the fuck out of there; young men and women with better places to be. It's nothing personal against small towns, it's just what being young is about. I chose Glasgow, or maybe Glasgow chose me. I wanted bright lights and the big city, but with snow dusted mountains on the horizon. I got it all and more. Perhaps I should have never left, but life moves on and other cities yet further north beckoned. How a decade slipped passed since my last proper visit I don't know. Looking out of the plane last weekend, the crumpled green of Northumberland and the Southern Uplands evened out as the Central Belt stretched below. Sun glinted on the bridges of the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh to the east before we banked left running north of Glasgow along the Campsie with Loch Lomond and its Ben above marking the edge of the Glaswegian sprawl. The plane swung south as we approached GLA and looking down the Firth of Clyde nostalgia washed through me like an adrenalin jolt. Dumby in the sun - how many afternoons were spent amongst the boulders summoning up the balls to try any of the routes? The cycle track along the river to Balloch and then out onto the moors before dropping back down to Milngavie - really the first mountain biking I ever did. Sitting in the wind-shelters on Helenburgh seafront, eating chips and laughing with the most beautiful girl I had met at that point in my life.

Glasgow

The happy occasion: a mate's wedding, dragging the old posse back together from all corners of the UK (and indeed world), made Glasgow all the more glorious. Things change, but many don't. The underground is still laughably small. Saturday night: the gallus townies still pack the wine bars and restaurants, all togged up, showing someone, anyone, themselves, that this is Glasvegas now rather than no mean city.

Things of great beauty can still be injurious to your health

Up in the west the students are as students do, just younger looking than I remember being. We drink too much and lose our voices yelling happily over the din of a heaving bar. I have a 2.30 am doner kebab on Great Western Road, it just seemed the right thing to do, although in the morning I would be disagreeing.

Sunday was the wedding day, and it was everything a Glasgow wedding should be; kilts and a piper, plenty of Stellas at the reception and a wedding band that did ceilidh numbers and Auld Lang Syne next to the Glee theme and Deacon Blue's Dignity. By the end, men in kilts were doing one armed push-ups on the dance floor. I don't know why but it all made sense as these things do at the time. It was cracking wedding for a cracking couple. Have fun together guys.

Matt, former MRT member, is disapproving of Ed's alternative approach to hill walking gear

Monday, Ed, Matt and me headed out to Arrochar. It rained. Of course. Somebody has fixed the path up the Cobbler, the first 300 mtr slog isn't quite the hellish mud squish I remember, but by the time we got to the dam, it was officially pissing it down so we beat a retreat back down to the tea shop. I notice "the Moorings" in Arrochar village has gone - now somewhere else must hold the title of the worst pub in the UK. Perhaps its formica and hostile grimness has gone forever.

Arrochar, now minus the worst pub in the world

I dropped the guys for the train back into Glasgow, and head northwards solo. There is a touch of sun around the top of Loch Lomond, by Tyndrum the drizzle is back, and it's hammering it down by Rannoch Moor. Glencoe passes in rain lashed greyness, but the westerly gale running up Loch Linnhe blasts a few gaps in the rain. Fort William deserves its name - a tough hold out against never ending inclement weather. I remembered why Northern Norway feels so familiar, Tromsø is just Fort William with more ambition and a richer, better dressed population. Nevisport Bar is no longer called Nevisport Bar yet remains a pub that still plays its old role of the site of much prevarication and hiding from the weather. But a man with no accommodation can only prevaricate for so long, so eventually I head out into the night and drive up to the top of Glen Nevis.

Blustery showers and utter darkness meet me on getting out of the car. My tiny headtorch doesn't light much beyond the sign at the trail head saying something about fatalities having occurred in the canyon ahead, but I shoulder my pack and head up into the dark and dank forest. I've only been on this path once before, as I remember it, going the other way with skis strapped to my pack after Matt and I had done a telemark traverse of the Aonachs then skied down into Glen Nevis in stormy weather. It's warmer this evening but otherwise the weather isn't much better. After a km or two the path comes out of trees. Pitch black wet forests provide plenty of fodder for the irrational mind to play on, but coming out of the shelter of the trees it is the rational mind that starts to worry as driving rain soaks you. I needed to find somewhere to camp pretty sharpish but with the wind barrelling down the glen and not being able to see more than a few metres with my little torch, this isn't the easiest of operations.

Eventually some flatish non-soaked ground with a small rock buttress giving some protection appears, beyond that I'll worry about it in the morning. I get my little tent up in record time, pull its scant guylines as tight as I can, double peg the corners and then dive in, zipping myself away from maelstrom outside. I don't get the best nights sleep, wind and rain wakes me once and I remember the story of an old UKC mate with the same tent as mine. He said he had to break camp in the middle of night once when the weather threatened to destroy the tent. Mine was working impeccably, but still every time it flexed in a gust, Douglas' story came back to me.
 

The next time I woke up it I was sure the roar of the river nearby was louder. A relatively scary experience in the Indian Himalayas taught me long ago how fast rivers can rise, it didn't make any sense as it hadn't been raining that much in days before, but the noise was definitely there. I got out of my bag pulled on my headtorch and went out to look. The wind was blasting around, but the river looked relatively placid and low, so were was the roaring sound of water coming from? I went back to bed and tried not to think about it. In the morning, on unzipping my tent to some sunshine, I was greeted by the majestic sight of Steall Waterfall cascading down the hill side just a few hundred metres away across the river. I had been completely oblivious to both that and the nearby cable bridge that I simply hadn't seen in the dark of night.

I quickly packed up and jogged back down to the car to dump my tent and sleeping bag, wolfed down an excuse for breakfast, then headed back up through the gorge, across the cable bridge to start the "Ring of Steall", a classic hill walk around a series of Munros that ring that side of the head of Glen Nevis. Getting to the start of the ascent included a boots-off fording of one burn (haven't done that in a long time) and then a few hundred metres of boot sucking bog before the ground dries out as you start to climb.

Raw Egg Buttress on Aonach Beag

The views were spectacular - Aonach Beag was free from cloud at some points, although the brooding bulk of Ben Nevis never cleared completely. White streaks of fast running streams, strengthened by the rain of the day before, painted the sides of the hills all around. I realise I don't hate walking uphill as much as when I was younger. Stronger legs from cycling? Or a better attitude to being in the hills? A bit of both most likely.

Steall meadows

At about 700 metres the next rain came in and the views went. I pulled on full waterproofs and kept on trudging upwards.

Summit grimness

Reaching the summit of An Gearanach, 985 mtrs, the weather was officially foul. Winds were hammering me, rain blasting, and I needed to swap out some wet underlayers to combat the first shivering. My fingers got cold despite two pairs of gloves that weren't water resistant enough for the conditions. Nevertheless, I scrambled on along the fine ridge to the next top, An Garbhanach, but the weather hadn't improved by that point, and all the summits along the ridge that I could see were in the cloud and the gust were enough to blow you off balance - not ideal on a narrow rock ridge. The full traverse will wait for another day - it does look mighty fine - but I turn around and head back down.

Plans rarely survive first contact with weather in the Scottish mountains. Needing to play on their terms is what perhaps make them so rewarding. My feet didn't dry out on the walk down, nor whilst having a coffee and cake in Morrison's cafe, nor whilst driving back down to Glasgow.

Loch Linnhe

My newly married friends wouldn't hear of me sleeping in my hire car that night, as had been my original plan, and with great grace insisted I bring my slightly smelly and muddy self to their spare room for the night.

Towards Ardgour

The road back into Glasgow next to Loch Lomond used to be one of mixed emotions; Sunday nights - leaving the privation but purity of the mountain behind and heading back down into the busy, complex world of people and relationships under the orange glow of sodium street lamps. But that evening there were none - happy faces of friends, a shower, hot food, a pint in the pub and then clean sheets and no dreams of tent poles snapping and rivers rising. Still Glasgow's miles better.

Sunlight breaks through over Blackmount

Marmot Plasma 15: revisited.

Some one left a comment on my original first look post at the Marmot Plasma 15 sleeping bag asking about the stuff bag size. Hence the photo above shows the sleeping bag in its stuff sack against a 1 ltr nalgene bottle and an average sized paperback for comparison. It's easy to put the sleeping bag into the stuff sack, and it is not very compressed in there - it will squash down quite a lot smaller than the size it is in the stuff sack if you need it to.

My full review of the Plasma 15 can be read on UKclimbing.com