Cheque Pictures

🍁 Grit Trad Week draws to a close for another year but the nice autumn weather continues so let’s all get out there.
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This final picture is Dan Leicester just below the crux of Billy Whizz At Lawrencefield. I took this while photographing someone on a route to the right but this turned out to be the best photo of the night 🤷‍♂️
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Lawrencefield really was the crag of the moment during the super dry 🦴 spring we had this year, with the bouldering becoming popular, new highballs done, old routes cleaned and lots of traffic on the popular ones too. I reckon that, with a very small number of exceptions that have been left to nature, every route at the crag saw an ascent in late April/ early May.
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Thanks for looking at my pictures this week. It always gets me psyched to take more! ❤️
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Up onto the moors we go with day 6️⃣ of Grit Trad week. 🍁 Here’s Jake Young climbing the brilliant Freddie’s Finale at Wimberry. Possibly my favourite shot of this year’s selection.
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If you’re not prepared to walk up to the moorland grit crags you’re missing out on excellent routes like this and the sort of big days out that many Pennine-based climbers think you have to drive to the mountains for. The dry spring and summer made this year a great one for an unpopular north-facing crag like Wimberry as it was in great condition.✨
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Another photo tomorrow! 🍂

Blue skies for the fifth day of Grit Trad Week ‘25 so here’s a nice sunny picture.
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It’s pro climbing instructor Gus Hudgins hard at work on the crux of Crack & Corner at The Roaches Upper Tier. There are two routes with this name in the Peak, both in the lower grades and both brilliant. If you haven’t done either of them what are you playing at?!
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This is the sort of picture that works a lot better on a bigger format than Instagram. I actually took it in 2022 when I had plans to do a grit trad calendar 📅 that, for various boring reasons didn’t see the light of day. Maybe that’s an idea I’ll revive at some point. 🤔
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Two more days left! Stay tuned.

Day four of Grit Trad Week 2025!
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Today’s photo is of a climber called Nadia on Retroversion at Stanage Popular.
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You may have climbed Retroversion but it’s unlikely you’ve seen a decent picture of it before (some might argue that you’re still waiting 😜) as, like all the routes on Robin Hood’s Right Hand Buttress, it’s very hard to shoot from a good angle, even on a rope. As time goes on the more I fixate on these sort of routes and dream up ways to capture them 🤔. I managed to get this shot completely unprepared but only by leaning out unroped and dangling my 70-200 equipped camera over the edge without being able to see the viewfinder or even the screen. I would not recommend that from either a safety or back health perspective.
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Still more pictures to come this week!

Time for some natural grit on the third day of Grit Trad Week 2025 🌅 Beautiful early autumn weather this week- I hope you’re all able to get out and enjoy it.
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This is Jake Lee on The Rasp at Higgar Tor, a route that needs no introduction!
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Jake and belayer Mel took very different approaches to clothing choice on this day 🌞🌚 As I was saying the other day I never pose climbers or set photos up at all as I like to capture what would have been happening whether I was taking a photo of it or not. Sometimes that means I miss shots or that the leader has drab colours on but I think the need for them to be dressed like a Pokémon is sometimes overvalued, particularly in shots where they’re already filling quite a lot of the frame.
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Anyway, stay tuned for more grit trad pics!

For day two of this autumn’s Grit Trad Week 🍁 here’s a picture of Graeme Hammond on the best-named route at Millstone: Pinstone Street.
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Graeme’s the sort of person who, whether you realise it or not, every climbing area needs- someone who’s prepared to roll up their sleeves and clean the dirt, plants 🌱 and sometimes loose rock from neglected climbs so everyone can enjoy climbing them again. Many of us will spruce up a route or two per year but Graeme brings a rare zeal to the activity, taking on entire sections of crag and employing advanced tools and tactics in multiple visits to bring routes that had been out of the question for years back to life permanently.
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Pinstone Street is a safe but exciting E2 on the right of the Twikker bay. If you don’t feel up to that there are good, newly-restored HVSs either side of it that you’re unlikely to have done either.
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More photos all this week! 🍂

It’s the first day of autumn 🍂 so here’s the first of 7️⃣ photos to celebrate the start of the best season for grit trad. After a very wet couple of weeks to close the summer this week’s forecast is cool and dry so it’s all coming together nicely.
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Here’s Andy Reeve, a man who doesn’t need autumn conditions to repeat an E4 first go as his warm up, on Calamity Crack at Running Hill Pits back in August. The Pits are a great venue which make up for not reaching the height of the more famous ex-quarries by having both slabs and overhanging faces in addition to the more common cracked vert faces.
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I feel like I’ve had a bit of a poor year for photos since last autumn. I never plan photoshoots or “pose” climbers but I’ll usually get more than enough decent shots when just out climbing or by heading out to the crags on spec. For various reasons this year things didn’t seem to come together as often as normal but when I spent a wet afternoon looking back at my shots 🖥️ I was surprised to find that it only needed one dig into the archives to fill this week with pictures 😅 so there are more to come! 🍁