Mountaineer Alan Hinkes

Mountaineer Alan Hinkes talks to Yorkshire Post photographer, James Hardisty about how he first got into rock climbing at Brimham Rocks.

Transcript

00:00 Hi, Alan Hinks here and I'm at Brimham Rocks and this is one of the first places I ever

00:08 came rock climbing when I was at Northallet and Grammar School. It's gritstone, it's a

00:11 fantastic place, it's like a super adventure playground as well, it's brilliant. It's in

00:16 Yorkshire and so it's fabulous to be back here and looking at some of the climbs I first

00:21 did and I'm going to make sure I come back and do them again. It's brilliant.

00:25 Well Brimham Rocks here, this is pure rock climbing. It's gritstone, there's a lot of

00:29 good friction on it. It's a great place to start rock climbing, it's also a great place

00:32 to do really difficult technical climbs, some of the hardest climbs you can find here. But

00:37 this is different to mountain climbing, this is pure rock climbing. But you need this rock

00:41 climbing skill on a mountain because there's bits of rocks, bits of snow, bits of ice,

00:46 encompasses all of it on a big mountain. Brimham Rocks is a great place to come to learn rock

00:52 climbing and practice rock climbing. This is one of the first rock climbs I ever did

00:56 at Brimham Rocks. This is Lover's Leap Chimney, it's not a particularly difficult climb but

01:01 to the left of it, over there, up the wall is a more difficult climb which is graded

01:07 very severe, VS. There's lots of harder climbs than that now. So these are two of the very

01:11 first rock climbs I ever did when I was at school.

01:14 [Climbing sounds]