Richie Patterson: Currently a spritely 51 years young, I’m a ‘lifer’ climber with just about 40 years under my belt.
Starting at my local outdoor activity centre (thanks Mum) I graduated from abseiling off bridges to enjoying all kinds of climbing: bouldering, traditional routes and sports climbing as well as a bit of mountaineering and alpinism. Living first in Leeds then Sheffield, from 1991 to 1997 I worked at the famous ‘Outside’ store in Hathersage and then from 1997 to 2015 as the Marketing Manager at Wild Country. As part of this I was very proud to have thought up and got into production quite a lot of new bits of climbing gear including both Superlight Rocks and Superlight Offset Rocks – key, small and light protection which got great reviews and are used by top climbers all over the world!
While in the UK I established new routes up to E8 / 8A+ in the UK, on gritstone and limestone and (with a bit of difficulty) finally got an 8A boulder done. I also made sure I travelled as much as I could, climbing in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and the USA. However, after two shoulder operation in the early 00’s my climbing seemed to be over so I made a radical step and started surfing and decided to moved to Spain. I’ve been living in Asturias since 2006 and am lucky enough to live in the heart of Teverga and in the midst of bolting and trying a number of projects on the fantastic cliffs!! I keep busy writing my guidebooks and running our guesthouse www.casaquiros.co.uk
I started climbing again about seven years ago and over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to ‘recapture’ or exceed ‘past glories’ and made a series with Epic TV trying to do my first 8b+ at the age of 50!! Still trying…
You can see the first part of my 8b+ Challenge movie here:
You can see more about our guesthouse here: