What about the term “headpointing”?
I invented the word headpointing, I think. But I don’t like it  —  it’s a terrible expression, it’s really… I used to like the term “Eye for a Line.” You’d walk look along the crag and your eye would pick something out, and then you’d steadily solve the problems of how to hang on. Rock climbing really can be brought down to hanging on – hanging on and somehow shuffling your way up between these positions. That’s kind of what seems to be interesting to me. 

And your masterpiece, the Indian Face?
I was on it for about 50 minutes. I first saw it being tried — Jerry Moffat did Master’s Wall, which was named a bit prematurely really. The Master would go up the whole thing onsight. And it’s not me either. And really, the Master would have done it in EBs as well. That’s how it was conceived. When it was written about in awe, the thing was impregnable. Nobody had bolted it. It was just this sheet of tiny, impenetrable link-ups between poor holds. It looked really futuristic. It absolutely made your heart race, and was beautiful. It was only just color photography, it felt like. There are some photographs, but they’re kept in a cage and they’re protected by lions. It was like that sort of thing – do you go left or right? If you go left you might die, if you go right, there’s a small fingerhold 40-foot out from the runner. 

People had tried it onsight, but they’d always traversed off or climbed back down. There’s been a lot of sort of semi-truths, that if anything ahs added to the mystique of it. Also, there’s been some chipping and the rock has changed. [Had pulled nuts through to make placements better in the cracks], but I never took a hammer and chisel to it or made a hold or knocked a peg in too far. It’s a sliding scale, but I’d say I’ve come up to 2 out of 10, and other people have come up to 9 out of 10 making stuff up there. And the suspicions fall on particular people. So, there’s been all that about it. But the bottom line is, that piece of rock people have really taken to task in a rather grand way. 

Anyway, Cloggy is a north-facing crag and it’s really cold. Or it gets the sun, and it gets hot. So how you lace our boots up is a major issue. It weaves a lot, and it’s very complicated – the movements – you might move your feet four or five times in sequence to get a hold, and then move four or five times back to get a hold the other way. So your boots really don’t stay sticky. You have sticky boots, but they go unsticky, or they get covered in lichen. It’s a high-mountain crag, so the humidity varies a lot. You can’t get rescued very easily. And there’s very little protection.

There’s a piece of protection at 80 foot, which is an RP 2, and it’s in rhyolite. And rhyolite is like kind of porcelain, it’s a bit like glass, it sort of shatters. There’s a other pieces of protection, some, like A5 aid gear – it would slow you down a bit or make sure that when your body hits the ground, it’s in a horrible attitude. That it smacks the side or something. And it’s probably 5.12c. If you do it wrong a bit and you stray off it, it’s probably 5.13b. If you climb it well and you’re relaxed, cuz it’s all sidepulls and smears. If you start to pull in, your feet start skating and you get super-pumped, and it’s long: 150 foot high, and it weaves a lot. Probably 120 foot of proper hard climbing in that. The top 20 foot’s easy, the bottom 20 foot’s easy, the in between is a weaving maelstrom of smears, pinch grips, thumb sprags, and blind sidepulls and stuff. 

For me, Indian Face was a drawn-out thing. I did it in October, right after the season should have been over. And it had been a crap season, and we’d been climbing on Gogarth and the slate, purely because the weather was crap, and Tremadog received quite a few additions. All those tings sort of turbo charged… so by the time I came to do it, although I was overweight, I’d climbed really well during the year and then I was suddenly up there on this thing, and that was after a party as well. Cuz we didn’t think it’d be dry the next day, and it was dry the next day and we had to go up there.

I was hungover when I did Indian Face. It’s a long walk up there, so you sort of recover. You puke it out. When I finished the thing we all went to the Dolbardarn Disco – everybody would meet there. There were all sorts of inappropriate liaisons and things. It was in a hotel and the music was kind of like quite daggy disco, kind of redneck disco, really. And everybody used to meet there, and it was Thursday. And we all met down at the disco, it was a sort of triumph for Welsh climbing, it was like our reply to all this sport climbing. We hadn’t chipped it, we hadn’t bolted it, and it was quite hard. This was our way of doing it in Wales. 

It’s just fantastic climbing, so it just puts you into a trance of how beautiful it is. It’s one of the best climbs I’ve ever done. It’s named after the whole buttress of which it is the body of the Indian. When it’s covered in snow, you see it as an Indian brave. It doesn’t look an Indian when it’s climbable. So for me it remained a Welsh crag – it was a proper Welsh climb. And that was the metaphor of the Indian, was, it remains and English climb or a British climb. 

It’s a cosmic climb. It was the last of the cosmic climbs, is how I was trying to mean it.