Clubbing It

What is it about climbers and clubs? Recently I have noticed a certain antipathy expressed by some sectors of the web-based climbing community towards clubs. Now I know that many climbers are far too busy training obsessively, working hard and driving up and down the country every weekend to have time for spurious web chat, and therefore the forums may not represent prevailing opinion. I also know that climbers are fierce individualists and climbing offers an escape from the confines of humdrum suburbia, if only for the day. But you must have noticed that in order to sell us increasingly technical clothing fit only for a polar expedition, climbing has been re-packaged as a radical adventure sport. Climbing is suddenly ultra-cool, but clubs are not. To me the advantages of club membership and the rewards far outbalance the little bit of work required on my part. (I am ‘recruitment officer’ and so have the terrible job of chatting to strangers about climbing wherever we go). I thought I would describe what I get out of club membership and see if we could liven up the debate. If nobody cares because they are all so busy climbing the best ice for 10 years with random punters they met on the internet then great!
A good local club has the potential to completely transform your climbing career! When I first went to university, I had done some single pitch climbing on adventure holidays and was keen to do more. My mountain skills were non-existent and I knew nothing about lead climbing. The university club approach seemed to be that they would arrange the minibus to the campsite and that was the extent of their responsibility. I was welcome to tag along but if I wanted to learn I would have to find some nice young lad to teach me. As the local crags in question were Glen Shee and Glen Coe and I was experiencing my first Scottish winter, that didn’t seem like the best plan! The Sub-Aqua club were organised and I knew how to dive already, so I spent the next ten years diving the deepest wrecks and the fastest tidal flows that Scotland had to offer. One summer, I managed to get a job at Ridgway’s adventure school as an assistant instructor, before qualifications were mandatory, and finally learnt a bit of hill craft, taking groups scrambling and mountaineering in the wilds of Sutherland. I also learnt how to set up belays for single pitch climbs.
A few years later I thought I would give climbing another go. Me and a mate started going to the local wall and doing loads of scrambling, but it was on a course at Plas y Brenin that we finally learnt about gear placements and rope techniques. Armed with this knowledge we felt confident enough to go out climbing, possibly misguidedly, and started to get our arses kicked on routes. However, it was a chance invitation to the V.M.C. annual dinner that was the turning point in my vertical life: I realised that these were the people we had been shyly smiling at down the climbing wall. I joined, and straight away started climbing regularly outside, leading a fair bit and seconding all sorts, in short getting a good old-fashioned apprenticeship. The basic knowledge imparted on the PYB course had meant that I knew enough to be safe out with strangers, and that I could tell whether they were safe too, a real concern after watching diving clubs trying to kill their novices!
So for me, club membership gave me the friends and mentors required to make the transition from indoor wall geek to solid trad rock leader. Most clubs, ours included, do not have the resources to take on absolute beginners. However for the newbie who has learnt to tie in, belay and lead indoors, a supportive climbing club can provide the ideal environment to learn about gear and real rock. New friends can point you at the safe routes, the good crags, the routes you should be aspiring to (Left Wall, again, I know….) and of course they can sandbag you in order to test your mettle. Each club has their favourites; I have heard so many horror stories about Old Holborn and Barbarian that I want to be leading E3 before I go anywhere near them!
Contrary to popular belief, climbing clubs are not just composed of hearty men in tracksters. We have as many girls as boys climbing actively i.e. most weekends, and we climb with each other as well as with other halves. My best trip in the hills to date was a girlie ascent of the Chere Couloir followed by a dawn ski descent of the Vallee Blanche. We have a female member who has just repeated Nick Dixon’s Yuckan II (E7 6c), others regularly leading low E numbers and all are pretty solid ice climbers too. We must be the envy of other clubs: out of a cohort of 20 active members, a third of them are proper hard rock chicks! Joking aside, climbing clubs are safe havens for single girls aspiring to get out into the hills. You can get to know members at the crag and at the pub, and eventually go out climbing with people that you know are safe both in their rope work and their attitudes. I would feel uncomfortable meeting up with a stranger on my own to go out cragging, and have had some dodgy experiences alone at campsites but within the club I have a pool of people I would happily meet up with for the day, or the week, anywhere in the world, because I know who they are, where they live and what their background is. Romance does blossom; as quickly as we acquire single female members they also seem to acquire the man of their dreams!
Clubs trips are fun and incredibly cheap. We recently went to Fontainebleau, four in a car, camping, the five day getaway cost us about £70 each. Norway was ace too, car bulging, top box full of beer, cheap ferry. Or you can split the petrol to Scotland, rent cheap apartments in Le Grave, and share the cost of a luxury villa in Spain over winter. I know that you could do all this with groups of like-minded friends but as I hit my 30’s, folk are getting harder and harder to pin down. With club members, you know them, however vaguely, you have a point of reference and you can suss out how they climb and how seriously they take their holidays, all important issues as time off becomes more precious and every climbing day matters. We are planning a trip to Greenland: where else would I find committed people that I would trust enough to embark on two years of planning for a major expedition?
Clubs also have huts; although with these huts comes a certain amount of responsibility and most clubs will expect a commitment to look after the property for the benefit of current and future members. There is a wealth of beautiful property around Britain, owned by climbing clubs for the benefit of people like you, situated in the most idyllic mountain locations, empty most weekends while anti-club climbers paddle balefully around sodden campsites. Club membership may open up possibilities in other climbing areas through reciprocal hut rights or informal agreements. We have several members who are also in the CC, and so have places to stay in Scotland, Pembroke and Cornwall. The CIC hut, the Fell and Rock, various SMC huts, are all available to hire out for groups, and being a member of an established climbing club with a good reputation can act as a character reference, encouraging organisations to let you into the hut which is usually their pride and joy. We owe a huge vote of thanks to the Ceunant Club, our neighbours in Wales, who have offered us bed space while the roof has been off our cottage this year. Our (not so small anymore) cottage is a jewel, set in the heart of Snowdonia, five minutes walk away from the Llanberis Pass. We put a fair bit back into the local economy, mainly in beer tokens, but also by supporting local eateries and gear shops. For the currently ridiculous sum of £2.50 we have a roof (nearly), hot running water, electricity, a kitchen and a unique base from which to launch our not so epic endeavours. Some of the best and beastliest of British climbing have been past members of our club (Dickinson, Rouse, Molyneux), partied at the hut (Don Whillans apparently?), passed out on our sofas, and gone out climbing the next day. Wheelie bin races, firework wars, dawn ascents of Flying Buttress (with obligatory sofa), all have made our hut a home from home and a wonderful place from which to assault the surrounding hills. It is currently being refurbished, by us, for us and the first party in the new hut will be a momentous bash indeed.
One of the criticisms frequently levelled at clubs is their perceived elitist attitude and suspicion or dislike of prospective membership schemes. But you automatically vet every new person you meet in your lives, and only some will turn into friends. In our area there are two very different clubs, both of which operate prospective members’ schemes. One has about 200 members and encompasses diverse activities including climbing, skiing, and mountain biking. Requirements of PM’s allegedly include attendance at a certain number of meets, however many thousand feet of ascent, a certain number of climbs! A large club needs discipline to function and so can come across as quite bureaucratic. However, they run huge trips to excellent places with great success and have a vibrant membership with a healthy university connection. In contrast, we try to stick to climbing (mostly!), we have 60 members, of who only 20 climb regularly, and so we don’t need many rules and have no bureaucracy. Membership tends to be for life, resignation unheard of and never accepted. Club meets usually feature the same faces, the hut sitting room is crowded with 14 people in it and our bunk rooms are all very cosily communal. I don’t find it peculiar that we choose to get to know people before giving them the key to our hut, thereby allowing them to use it whenever they want to and also committing ourselves to spending a good proportion of the next ten or twenty years in that person’s company. Our admission criteria are minimal; we have to be able to put the name to the face after six months and be convinced of general enthusiasm. People tend to self select and in the five years since I joined, every PM has been voted in as a full member as a matter of course. The result is that when we get to the hut on Friday night it is always a nice surprise.
Clubs are a source of knowledge and inspiration! (Cheesey!) We train together, climb together, obsess together and the competition and enthusiasm is contagious and healthy. When I started out my climbing ambitions were limited to E1 on Welsh crags, maybe some sunny sports climbing. Since joining this club I have been to Norway, the Dolomites, the Alps, climbed both rock and ice. None of these objectives would have seemed possible without the hot house effect of a club full of keen people getting out and doing. Between us we have every guide, every book, every film and about 200 combined years of experience of climbing all over the world. We don’t really do formal teaching but we do get out and go climbing, with whoever happens to be around at the time, and we push or encourage each other on to improve, either to get stronger or just to be more adventurous in the hills. This is precisely the ingredient that I was lacking in the years I could have been climbing but was scuba diving instead!
Club membership may involve politics, but it can be minimal. We have two committee meetings a year, mainly to vote in new members and discuss the hut refurbishment programme. Meetings take all night, involve lots of beer, are tedious as well as fun and never change the world. That’s life.
There are financial advantages to being a member of a club. Reciprocal hut rights are a huge bonus: foreign hut associations may offer a discount to BMC members and the savings we made last year in the Dolomites cancelled our combined club subs in a one week trip. Cheap gear is another incentive; as a member of a local club you can negotiate substantial discounts. The saving that I made on new winter boots and crampons last year was twice my hut bill. Low cost life insurance, climbing insurance…save the pennies and you have more money to go climbing.
No matter how dissociated you think you are from climbing club politics, you benefit from work done by club worthies. BMC reps, volunteers mostly drawn from clubs, work hard on your behalf, negotiating access, liaising with climbing walls, and improving local crags: notable successes in our area include the radical pollarding of the trees at Pex Hill, which extended the life of both the trees and the classic problems by another hundred years and the delicate and often comical negotiations with the pensioners peregrine protection mafia around Helsby Hill.
The journals of British climbing clubs encapsulate the early history of climbing in this country. We all know the big names; theirs is the roll call of heroes and tigers throughout the years whose dancing steps we follow week after week. But other smaller clubs have also featured, including the VMC. We have connections to notable ascents in the Alps (Mo Antoine, Bryan Molyneux), an early ascent of the Bonatti Pillar (A.Green), the first solo ascent of The Bouldest (Al Rouse). Maybe clubs are a piece of history, left over from the days when folk needed lifts to Wales and shared tents and huts for economy, but as club members, that history is ours. The mix of older tales and recent stories act as a catalyst and most of all, make you realise that you don’t need to be a full-time professional climber to get out there and do something rock hard, you just need a good team, drive and enthusiasm.
So what do I get out of belonging to a climbing club? A second family, a (not quite) snug home from home, an eclectic mix of addicted enthusiasts to play and party with all over the world, on rock, snow, water and ice, friends with whom I have been through fun, frolics, stupid scrapes and some proper adventures. My life is much richer for the association. Every club isn’t for everyone, but some club somewhere might turn out to suit you. And once you have that all important team of people to train with, climb with, dream with and scheme with, the world will be your oyster too.

© Fran McNicol