Ruth's Blog: It's a wrap.

Classic route Valkyrie - no excuse with cameras everywhere!

Phew, well that's been a busy week! After the miracle of sunshine in North Wales we all headed over to the Peak and the Don Whillans Memorial Hut at the Roaches became our base for the second half of the shoot. The Whillans Hut is a curious place, built into a huge boulder/rock face, the kitchen area is rather damp with the rock making the walls, in fact there was an indoor water feature for most of the first evening! The rest of the house is more conventional and we all had a comfortable stay - although we would like to suggest to the BMC (who lease and look after the hut) that some comfy sofas would be a massive improvement - the wooden pew type benches in the lounge area are very difficult to lounge on!!

Trev and I had permission for a morning off on Wednesday, so I did a quick lap of the Llanberis Pass - Gwynant circuit (well, Ok not that quick!) before we headed over. We arrived at the Roaches and the rain had already begun, it continued to turn into a complete downpour which meant we weren't able to get any filming of climbing nice routes done. The rest of the crew arrived that evening and we suffered a few midges and a BOILING night of not much sleep before waking to the sunshine and wind - what a result! Midges were kept down and the rock dried out.
With loads of different things to film we were razzing around and filming things in a somewhat random sequence - luckily Ben and Rich know what order things are supposed to be edited in, and Jon and Dave kept a good track on what we needed to do.

Cameras everywhere!

Trev powering up through the roof on The Sloth

Managed to get quite a bit of actual climbing done over the course of the day, Valkyrie, Sloth, some bouldering, and all with a bit of sun. How good is the Sloth - unbelievable territory, and luckily HUGE holds. I've never done it before so that's another route off my ticklist T-Rex and The Sloth in one week - pretty good going, suppose I ought to lead Sloth next time.....

So, this is how you place a cam!

I'm slightly concerned about how this film is going to turn out, especially as Rich and Ben were filming some of the more random things I was doing, they were gleefully saying that they'd got great footage of my trying to warm up at the bottom of T-Rex - Rich said he couldn't believe how long I was jumping up and down and dancing around! It was really cold!!