Making sense of Font gratton problems.

UKBouldering.com

Help Support UKBouldering.com:

I've seen fingernails being used on grattons where the nails are wedged into the little gap at the back of a gratton. The distal bone is pointing down. I went to find some slopers.
This is how I climb grattons on a slab. It turns them into jug ladders and it uses up zero skin.

It's no use when they get steeper and you have to pull harder. At that point, I go and find something more pleasant to use my finite skin supply on.
 
Yeah watching the fingernail down technique on Duel on Dave Graham's Four From Font video left a lasting impression on my mind despite drinking various household chemicals to try to burn the whole horrific concept out of my brain. My fingernails are as soft as my skin so I'm assuming they would break or fold which is marginally better than ripping the whole nail off I guess??

I mean you know there's something badly wrong with the whole gratton scenario when you're using vertical fingernails and just praying it all stays intact....

Also....
weird super hard low grade problems that you think are borderline impossible until some bleausard swans up it in his ancient boots and towel for a pad, before disappearing back into amongst the trees like an weird french nymph.

Pretty sure this nymph fits all 6 characteristics listed even if the boots are old and perfectly edgy rather than £130 ones....
 
Pretty sure this nymph fits all 6 characteristics listed even if the boots are old and perfectly edgy rather than £130 ones....
Don't know about edgy; all the hard slabs in Font were first climbed by Philippe Le Denmat in a pair of clapped-out Ninjas, miles above his beer-towel.

He at least had a trusty pof-rag in his favour (...add this to the list of why some old school problems feel hard for the grade).
 
So the real question is what's worse, when you dry fire off a gratton and scrape your knuckles into it and take a chunk out of them, or when you hit a sloper and slide all the way down it and realise you no longer have any fingertip left.
 
So the real question is what's worse, when you dry fire off a gratton and scrape your knuckles into it and take a chunk out of them, or when you hit a sloper and slide all the way down it and realise you no longer have any fingertip left.

After trying a 6C+ gratton slab in Font for 3 hours, as well as having multiple micro-splits, I dry fired off at least once so viciously that I had deep bruising in my pads for well over a week.

grattons (5).jpggrattons (6).jpggrattons (7).jpg

Sliding off a coarse grit sloper is pretty fucking miserable too. Sliding off a Font sloper on the other hand is basically a massage for the skin. Until you realise after 20 such massages that skin is fairly absent...
 
TdG going strong with the science on this thread!

Despite some.....what did Wellsy falsely accuse me of? Whinging? Moaning? Anyway despite that it is a semi-serious topic, as proven by a few responses from people acknowledging that grattons are a very specialist style, whilst one that is very prominent in the best bouldering venue on earth.

So I'm still interested in semi-serious explanations. Teestub I know you're trolling with the "it's all just technique" quip, but, say, hypothetically it was - what would be the sort of technique required??
 
to be clear I didn't accuse you of whinging, that incorrectly suggests it is an unproven charge, I observed that you are "always whinging," which is a statement of fact
 

Latest posts

Back
Top