On the evening of the 19th October a rather unusual event took place at Parthian Manchester…. Read Centre Manager Marek’s event blog to find out what!
The Scottish Dry Tooling Club descended on the centre to turn us into a dry tooling playground for the evening.
This was the first event they had run outside of Scotland, so naturally we were all very excited to see what the evening would have in store for us.
Setup began on the Friday morning with the Scots arriving bright and early with 2 vans full of boxes, bits of pipe, ice tools, sheets of plywood and weird little metal holds. What had we let ourselves in for.
Turns out – a lot of fun!
Throughout the day the guys set 22 routes around the building along with a variety of hanging boxes, chains and traverses in the bouldering area. The fact they managed to set all of this in one day with minimal disruption to the centre was quite impressive!
Come Saturday afternoon when the final bits of setup had been completed the centre had been transformed – just in time for the intro sessions to begin.
The Scottish Dry-Tooling club ran a series of intro sessions aimed at giving those who had never held ice tools before a chance to practice and get some pro tips before the main event started.
It helped that the majority of the Scottish Dry-Tooling club are either GB athletes or coaches!
Once we hit 18:00, the main event started. After a pre climbing safety briefing had been given, everyone was let loose on a wide variety of routes.
From hanging boxes requiring continuous use of figure 4’s in the bouldering area, to technical slab climbing with extremely insecure holds and even a huge technical route using the full height of our main wall (22m!)
The highlight of the evening was the ply clad autobelay line, which allowed everyone to have a go at climbing in fruitboots (Essentially an insulated climbing shoe with attached crampons).
This was the closest to real ice climbing we could get in the church and the queue to get on the route really speaks to how popular this activity was.
The entire evening was soundtracked by Parthian favourite’s Third Ground Sound (https://www.instagram.com/thirdgroundsound/) who have provided music for us at several events so far and they always seem to set the atmosphere just right – so a big thankyou goes out to them again.
Overall this was such a fun event and we are already in discussions about organising the next one….
If you are unsure whether dry tooling is for you or not, I would definitely recommend giving it a try. It’s not as hard or scary as it looks and it takes all the climbing techniques you already know and adds an entirely new element in the form of ice tools. You have to move a bit differently, think a bit differently and overall, its another interesting avenue through which to enjoy climbing.
A huge thanks to everyone who took part and helped make the event a success – But most of all to the Scottish Dry Tooling Club For running such a smooth evening and teaching us all about Dry-Tooling.
