Here's a climbing tale with a romantic happy ending rather the usual grim ones.
Last weekend 24-year-old Tim Hamlet and 26-year-old Laura McKenna, climbers from Stirling, Scotland, climbed The Original Route (5.10-), a four-pitch climb up the 449-foot-high Old Man of Hoy. The Old Man, composed of red sandstone, is one of Britain's most famous sea stacks or towers next to the coastline.
Atop the tower's airy summit, Tim, as reported in the Daily Record, dropped to a knee and proposed to Laura, his girlfriend of 10 months.
She was, of course, surprised but accepted. Laura says, "I said 'yes' straight away. I think you just know when it is the right person." Good luck to the pair. Here's to more happy climbs together!
The Old Man of Hoy, of course, is a different matter. While it is sort of popular with climbers, the tower is a remote, hard-to-reach stack perched out on the west coast of the island of Hoy in the Orkney Islands in far northern Scotland.
With lots of rainy weather, most climbers allot a week to climb the Old Man, waiting for a break in the grayness to dash up. It's also well known for hordes of ferocious biting midges or gnats, as well as for its fulmars. Fulmars, a name which literally means "foul gull" in old Norse, are seabirds which perch on every upper ledge. As a defense against predators like passing climbers, fulmars regurgitate a nasty stomach oil and projectile vomit it onto you just as you pull onto a ledge.
Dennis Jump, a friend and British climber who's been up the Old Man a couple times, adds: "An interesting feature of the climb is that being sandstone, and rotten at that, it is constantly crumbling. This means that every ledge and smear hold is coated in sand. Unusually for sand, under a microscope the grains are very rounded, which makes the effect of standing on a hold akin to standing on ball bearings! Kinda grabs your attention!"
The Old Man was first climbed in 1966 by Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie, and Tom Patey. The following year Bonington and Patey repeated the famous climb on July 8 and 9 on a live BBC broadcast that had 15 million viewers. At the same time two new routes were climbed by Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis and by Pete Crew and Dougal Haston.
Photograph above: The Old Man of Hoy is Britain's most famous sea stack. Photograph courtesy Wikipedia Commons.
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