Not Your Basic Beta Video: Watch Aidan Roberts On V13 FAs in The Lake District
An aesthetic film about Aidan Roberts putting up new hard lines in the Lake District—and repeating some classics.
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
Wedge Climbing has released a film depicting what Aidan Roberts’s calls “two rather contrasting days filled with big walks, epic views, classic grading confusion, hiding from the rain, a lazy pug and a bit of hard climbing” in the UK’s Lake District. It features Roberts making the first ascents of Out of Shadows (v13), Back for Seconds (V13), and Slim Pickings (V13), plus repeats of a number of classics between V8 and V13.
But as Roberts himself notes on Instagram, the film is more than a simple record of hard moves. Instead, Sam Lawson, the filmmaker, “nicely capture[s] the human side of climbing” while “maintaining high standards of aesthetics.”
Indeed, he does. If problems like Impailed (V8) don’t make you want to pack your bags for the Lake District, the view from the top just might.
Roberts is no stranger to hard FA’s, having previously opened Superpowers (a V16 in the Ladstones), Outliers (a V15 in Trowbarrow), and Railway (a V16 in Wild Basin, Colorado). All of these climbs were featured in Lattice Training’s excellent film “World Class: The Story of Aiden Roberts’ Bouldering Breakthrough”:
This article is free. Sign up with a Climbing membership, now just $2 a month for a limited time, and you get unlimited access to thousands of stories and articles by world-class authors on climbing.com plus a print subscription to Climbing and our annual coffee-table edition of Ascent. Please join the Climbing team today.