Extreme Rock
This table is a list of the routes in the coffee table book Extreme Rock by Bernard Newman and Ken Wilson along with details of my ascents of them. It is grouped into the sections shown - click on one to open the listing for that area.
Whereas Hard Rock and Classic Rock had 60 or so climbs each, the first edition of Extreme Rock had a massive 177! To date just one person, James McHaffie, has done them all. The showstopper (tickstopper?) is of course Johnny Dawes’ Indian Face on Cloggy. That’s not to say that the others are “easy”.
The second edition (2025) took a sword to many of the routes, particularly those that we’d now call “sports routes” as well as the more esoteric ones. They were replaced by “more current” ones. Of course many of the new inclusions hadn’t been climbed when the first edition was published so it’s probably better to consider each edition as a reflection of its time. Rockfall has also had an effect, in some cases whole buttresses succumbing to time and gravity.
Quite a few of the routes excluded from the second edition were genuinely very good and significant in that they were harbingers of what was to come, the three from Raven Crag, Langdale come to mind. There’s some newer routes though, especially in Scotland, that deserve to have been included - routes like Angel Face in Coire Mhic Fhearchair for example.
I have chosen to list all the climbs from both editions: the “Edition” column indicates which they appear in: “First”, “Second” or “Both”
The graphs below show summaries of the climbs I’ve done by area and by year.