Route Feedback: Oliverson's Variation and Lyon's Crawl
Posted by: Cath Sanders, 01.09.2022 After doing this route 3 times now, I’ve come to the conclusion that the topo and route description for P2 in the FRCC guide (and recent Rockfax guidebook – no doubt plagiarised) is not correct.
It doesn’t seem possible to take a direct horizontal traverse all the way round to the 40 foot corner at anything like V Diff. The description of P2 in Judith Brown’s ‘Scrambles and Easy Climbs in the Lake District’ makes more sense (and gets you up the pitch without difficulty):
2. (17 m) Traverse right from the ledge for about 6m then make a couple of steep moves up a slight groove and out right to a small ledge. Just to the right is an obvious corner (40 foot corner). Climb this to sloping ledges and nut belays’.
Agree entirely.
I’ve not tried following Judith’s description but when I tried to do this using the FRCC description I couldn’t work pitch 2 out to save my life so gave up. It felt to me also that there was no way of traversing horizontally right at vdiff.
This criticism is correct. Original descriptions say traverse horizontally right for 15ft/5m, then directly up to a small stance half way up the left edge of the Forty-foot Corner (30ft/9m overall). This pitch was extended in the 1989 guide to include the next pitch up the corner (16m overall), but reference to the up bit to gain the corner was left out! The description of pitch 2 and diagram should be amended along the lines of: “16m Traverse horizontally right on good holds for 5m then more directly up to gain ‘A’ Route half way up left edge of the Forty-foot Corner. Continue up ‘A’ Route’ for 7m to where an obvious crack going rightwards marks the start of Lyons Crawl.”