Diablo Canyon and White Rock – Light and Shadow
White Rock is the overspill dormer town for its much more famous neighbour, Los Alamos. This incongruous outpost of the US Department of Energy brings Silicon Valley shininess to the […]
Author Archives: Dominic
Jemez Mountains
The Jemez Mountains lie to the west of Los Alamos and offer a great range of accessible, high altitude cragging in some stunning locations. We started our exploration to the […]
El Rito – Cobbles!
El Rito is one of New Mexico’s premier sports venues, and unique in the State being composed of conglomerate. Regular Rockaroundtheworld readers will know we have a fondness for a […]
Taos Part Two – Red River, John Dunn Bridge and Tres Piedras
North of Taos you get into skiing country, though it’s hard to imagine with temperatures still nudging 30 at the end of September at almost 9,000ft. We headed to the […]
New Mexico Road Trip – First Stop Taos
With direct flights from UK to USA in short supply post-covid, we launched our tour of the SW States in Houston, Texas. On arrival it was tempting to say “… […]
Big Top – Aonach Dubh
Looking to continue our 4* tour around Craigallan (our 4* base in the Rucksack Club hut at Ballachulish) we settled on Big Top on the west face of Aonach Dubh. […]
The Bullroar – Buzzing and Basking on The Ben
With one of those rare Fort Bill bluebird days in prospect, the only logical destination was The Ben. Having exhausted the Hard Rock opportunities, we narrowed our focus to some […]
Swastika Ticked!
An otherwise highly successful trip last year, to tick off some of the remaining routes on my Hard Rock to-do list, ended on a frustrating note. Having done … and […]
Communication Breakdown in the Land of Steepness and Looseness
There’s a mythical sun-kissed world, way out west, where the land meets the sea in a twisted mess of verticality and fragility: The Land of Steepness and Looseness a.k.a. Gogarth’s […]
Naranjo de Bulnes or Picu Urriellu
Our (or rather “my” if I’m honest) rather ambitious agenda for this Paroi de Légende trip came in two parts: 1) aiming to bag three 1,000ft plus EDs on three […]
Petite Aiguille d’Ansabère, Vallée d’Aspe. South Spigolo
Our third Pyreneean objective from Parois de Légende took us back over the French border, and north west into Vallée d’Aspe, which is the next valley west of the Ossau […]
Tozal del Mallo, Ordesa: Las Brujas – Franco-Espagnol
An hour’s drive south east took us to the tiny town of Torla-Ordesa, and the launch point for exploration of the Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park – home to […]
Sud-Est Direct, Pic du Midi d’Ossau
Episode 12 of Bill and Dom’s Excellent Adventures touched down at Bilbao Airport (you might recall that our 2022 Utah adventure was inadvertently christened Episode 13, owing to a counting […]
A Trad Apprenticeship
Tash and Chris had got a week’s holiday and a first opportunity for ages to get some climbing done after the rigours of thesis writing. I was duly commissioned to […]
A Mixed Bag of Bolts
No, not a trip report from an expedition to ScrewFix (though perhaps that would be more exciting!), this is a roundup of the shower-dodging exploits from the last couple of […]
Cornwall Capers
“Flaming June” seemed like a distant memory as we contemplated the forecast ahead of a planned trip to the South West. “Unsettled” didn’t really do it justice, with torrential rain […]
Just Another Week in The Peak, plus a trip up The Matterhorn*
(*Spoiler alert – more accurately a Matterhorn rather than The Matterhorn) Just another week in The Peak started off with a visit to one of my regular haunts: New Mills […]
A Trip down Mid-Wales Memory Lane
I’ve said before how it was Helen and her Dad, Pete, who first introduced me to climbing, over 40 years ago (and without whose intervention you might be reading GolfingAroundTheWorld […]
Climbing with Dolphins at Ynys Lochtyn
A trawl of the UKC crags map, looking for a stopover on our way down to Pembroke, threw up an interesting option: the island of Ynys Lochtyn in Cardigan Bay […]
Pembroke – Way Out West!
Our Pembroke trip was one of those spontaneous “it’s too nice to be at home, where shall we go” efforts, so it was a happy surprise when I realised that […]
