Over the past few months I have found myself down at LPT quite a few times, as I have become more and more motivated to find myself a real project. Redpointing or projecting obviously isn’t new to me, but I have never invested a large amount of time on any particular route or boulder. It has always impressed and also shocked me the extent to which climbers can become wrapped up in a project, so I guess I wanted to try it for myself.

After climbing Walking Mussel in a few sessions I decided that definitely wasn’t what I was looking for. At first I toyed with the idea of further building the grade pyramid, but part of me felt I wouldn’t be doing myself justice doing this. Names and numbers hold climbers back, but with at least 3 years in North Wales I decided that I may as well get involved with the most iconic sport route in North Wales; Liquid Ambar.

Before we go any further I would just like to say that unsurprisingly I have not climbed Liquid Ambar, and you aren’t about to read about my success.

First session on and as suspected it was both hard and incredibly good. Straight away I decided I could definitely spare a few days for this route, and did so. To begin there was at least five moves I couldn’t do, but soon these began to disappear and by the 4^th day I was down to just two moves. A snatch to a sloping pocket, and a stab to the split pocket that sits next to it. Since then and to the shock of my attention span I have spent 3 sessions working these moves alone. Definitely a new for me, but thankfully on session 3 I managed to find the correct combination of which hold to use for my heel and then what angle to put my foot at. Boring stuff. Frustratingly and tiringly there are many different combinations, but I think I’ve got the right one now.

Other than these two moves I’ve managed to get everything else pretty wired, with links from the floor to these moves and then from these moves to the top. With shit tides over my last week in North Wales before I go away I probably won’t get back on it this side of 2014, but I’m definitely psyched to get back on it in September, hopefully fitter and stronger.

It’s already been a bit of a learning curve. From seeing how fast moves can go from being desperate to fine and linkable (nothing more than fine and linkable) to realising just how tiring the whole process is on the body and then to the joys one can find in just small bits of progress.

I still have two years left here. I will do it, won’t I?

Moffatt on LA