One more from November's trip to Tafraout, these sunny scenes seem a long way away at the moment in a cold and icy UK January!
Crack climbing has been a weakness of mine for a long time, and I'd been putting off remedying it, but on the Wednesday of our week in Morocco, we had a rainy morning sat in the hotel, and when the clouds lifted in the afternoon we decided to head out on the local granite. One of our party is a proper crack addict, so he was happy to lead the way. Anyway, long story short, I quite enjoyed it, and we spent the rest of the week on the granite tackling one of the crack day itineraries from the Tafraout Granite book.
First up, Black Wall Crack, a soaring 30m line that varies in width all the way, with several steep sections and black faces that require you to fully embrace the crack. There is a direct finish, up a vegetated, flared offwidth section, but the topo line takes a detour left onto a line of bolts up the adjacent sport line. Coming from Peak Grit, it seemed a bit of a shame to clip bolts, as the face climbing is brilliant, on perfectly spaced positive holds, probably UK 4b/4c moves.
Next is the beautiful corner splitter of El Hachame. Sadly I made a total mess of it, there's a short section you need to layback, which I did, but then I got stressed and didn't look around for the good footholds that appear after, which would have enable me to start bridging and have a much easier time of the upper section......lesson learned!