Start...

Its October 2009. My girlfriend and I have just moved to Sheffield, and we are keen to climb a lot of routes in a lot of beautiful places. In my head a plan began to form.

In 2006 Chris Craggs and Alan James released a rewrite to Peak Gritstone East, a book titled Eastern Grit. Flicking through I noticed that there were many routes that seemed possible, at my current grade of around VS. As a way of climbing across the Peak I decided to set the challenge of climbing a route from each of the 263 pages with routes on. I will have to go to nearly every buttress on the 19 main crags, as well as 2 routes from the 7 esoteric crags.

With a closer look I found the crux of the whole project staring at me bold as the buttress it is on, alone and proud on page 216. There is only one page with a single route on it and it is on page 216. That route is on The Leaning Block at Higgar Tor, and is called The Sander (E4 6a)
This route will obviously have to wait a whilst and may well be my first headpoint route.

Other hard pages include 368, The Promontory at Black Rocks. There is a choice of 6 routes on this page, 5 of them are E2 and the other is the feared Meshuga. So I'll pick an E2 then....

the Third hardest page on paper (excuse the pun,) is page 303 at Curbar, Elder Crack area. With 4 routes to pick from it looks unremarkable. However one is an unrepeated former LGP in Steve McLure's The New Statesman, one is possibly the most dangerous E9's around, Knockin' on Heaven's Door one is an E4, which forces me to look at the VS which is described as "Another grovel ... that adds to Curbar's reputation." I'm not a massive fan of the grovel.

Highlights should included an ascent of the Rivlin Needle, forming a relationship with the wild moorland grit of Dovestone Tor and finding amazing routes that I wouldn't have climbed otherwise.

Before I started this blog I had climbed routes on just 24 pages. This blog will be a diary about every other page.

Let the Challenge begin!!