Disobey Gravity

Mari Salvesen flashes the infamous offwidth route Belly Full Of Bad Berries:



Only one person has ever flashed the route before this (Mari's boyfriend Pete Whittaker, holding the camera and pointing out holds here).

Apparently 2012 loves me and wants me to be happy in my pathetic climbing fangirl heart.

So the Observer's video interview with Johnny Dawes includes generous extracts from his "crags Parkour" reel which, AFAIK, hasn't been seen outside his lectures and which includes his infamous one-handed solo of Downhill Racer.

Not to mention snippets of him going ground-up on the first ascent of Hardback Thesaurus at Gogarth (which is available on Birth of Extreme).

"You've got to mess about" -- Johnny Dawes video interview in The Observer

I admit it: this was one of the primary reasons I wanted to learn how to do a full body bridge.

Some kind person has put this on YouTube:

Johnny Dawes on the Quarryman Groove (E8 7a) (from Stone Monkey, 1986)

Tragically, they've stripped off the original soundtrack and replaced it, so unless you really like Creed, I suggest muting it and possibly playing something else instead. If you wanted to be obsessively authentic, you could go for the original Zappa. Or you can find a chunk of it with the Dawes DVD commentary in here.

I've linked this before, but to give some idea of exactly how difficult it is, and how terrifyingly frictionless the slate is, here's James MacHaffie (who's currently one of the UK's top trad and sport climbers) having quite a hard time on it earlier this year.

(I'm prepared to accept that we need a "mod is a pathetic dawes fangirl" tag, btw.)

Finding these on YouTube made my morning.

Ladies, gentlemen and gentlepersons of other genders -- the guy who established bouldering as a form of climbing in its own right, who was climbing V9 at a time when the cutting edge was 5.10, professor of mathematics, king of the one-finger pull-up, still very much with us: John Gill.

A tiny clip of Gill bouldering at age 45. You will note that levitation appears to be involved during that jump start.
Gill discusses his philosophy of climbing.

Toru Nakajima visited the Peak District for his summer holiday, and left with an amazing list of notable ascents -- including a brand new E9.

UKClimbing.com has the footage.

Oh, by the way? He's 15 years old.