No success like Failure

A not very good picture of Iain (he can just be made out in Blue) on the first pitch.

Last Thursday (27th) myself and Iain Small had a wee wander up the Ben. Iain fancied trying a new route on the buttress left of Italian climb. Given the good forecast we were quite surprised when it started snowing on the walk in. After a cup of tea or two (an essential part of the day when climbing with Iain) and a blether with people staying there and some friends who turned up, the weather had cleared up a bit.  Wandering up into the Ciste there was not too much fresh snow about, and after gearing up by a big boulder we got to the base of the route without too much trouble.

Iain leading the second pitch, during a brief clear period.

As Iain seemed to know where he wanted to go, I let him lead the first pitch. However, progress was not rapid, and I could tell from the way he was climbing it was hard. Then the snow started again. The wind was from the South-East, blowing the snow over the top of Tower Ridge down onto us. At first it felt like a little light spindrift blowing about, but as Iain slowly inched his was up the intricate and technical first pitch, the snow got heavier and heavier.

 I was belayed roughly below Italian climb, and at first I enjoyed watching the way the spindrift danced up and down the gully, the patterns cause the the opposing forces and gravity and the up draft. At first the fresh snow quantities were quite small, and it did not feel too threatening. However, as time went on and the snow got heavier, the spindrift avalanches got bigger, and I started to get a bad feeling. It all started to get a bit too reminiscent of events of almost 12 years ago when, young and foolish, I had stood at the bottom of a gully watching the spindrift dancing down wards. I was just about to walk away when the whole slope above the gully released naturally. I had time to take a couple of steps before hundred of tonnes of snow hit me at high speed, and I rag dolled downwards in the midst of the avalanche. I had been lucky that day, and limped away, a badly sprained ankle being my only injury.

What it was like most of the time.

Since then I have spent a lot of time studying snow, both formally and informally.  As anyone who spends a lot of time in an environment does, I have developed a better feeling for it, and at that time the base of Italian route felt like a bad place to be, especially given some events that I knew of there long before I was born. I shifted myself into as sheltered position as soon as possible. By this time Iain was close to the belay. He made himself safe, and it was my turn to climb. I am not sure how the pitch would have felt in better conditions, but that day it felt utterly desperate. I struggled to second what must have been bold and committing as well as technical to lead. Eventually I reached his semi hanging belay in a corner. Above the ground looked difficult, and with it still snowing heavily, I had lost the psych to climbing hard. I offered Iain the lead, suggesting that he would be quicker and more likely to get up the pitch. At first he made good process up into the blizzard. However, under the overlap he soon slowed down, and then stopped for a while. There as a bit of hammering going on. The light was beginning to fade, and it was still  dumping with snow, was he going to bail off. A whoosh made me turn round, a substantial airborne avalanche came down Chute Route, clouds of snow billowing through space. It was all beginning to feel a bit full on.

Iain stepped back down, and launched across the right wall of the corner and soon was on some ledges.  The original plan had been to regain the corner above the overlap, but that looked even harder and bolder than what had gone before. Therefore he stepped right to gain Rogues Rib, a route that he had climbed last winter, and quickly scampered up that for about 20 meters to a big ledge. By this time the snow had eased, and I managed to second about half the pitch before I needed to get the head torch out. Above that Rogues Rib continued up onto the crest of Tower Ridge. However, given the darkness, and the requirment to get down safely to our bags which were near the base of the route we decided to abseil off. Abseiling off after the hard climbing always seems slightly disapointing to me, but given the conditions it was the best thing to do.  One long abseil took us into Italian route, and then another to the base of the route. We wallowed around in deep powder, staying on the rope as long as possible until a quick traverse took us back to flat ground, our bags and what felt like safety.

Setting up the abseil at the top of the route. 

From there it was an easy walk back down to the hut, and then on down to the carpark. As we got down the path a bit the clouds cleared and a full moon lit up the snowy landscape to the point that head torches were not needed.  We discussed what sort of a day we had had. Iain had not climbed the line that he had originally envisaged, I had not climbed well, and we had abseiled off.  On the other hand did do a fair bit of new climbing, had not been avalanched and had had a proper full on winter experience.  It made me think of some lyrics by Bob Dylan; "There ain't no success like failure, and failure ain't no success at all." I am not quite sure what the lyric means (is anybody), but then again I am not quite sure about the days climbing we had just had.

New route on the Ben

I realise that it has been a while since I wrote anything on my blog. Since my last post I had three weeks sports climbing in Spain which was pleasant, but perhaps did not make particularly inspiring subject to write about. Since Spain I have been busy finishing off my summer job (modelling oil and gas flow), and starting with my winter job (avalanche forecasting). I have however, managed a few routes, but have either not had the time or not been inspired to write about them.

Myself on the first pitch our our new route. 

The most interesting thing that I did during that period is a winter (first ?) ascent of Blue Nosed Baboon, a V-Diff on Gardh buttress. This went at about grade V,5. While belaying I had looked over to Trident buttress, and seen an obvious ramp on the lower tier. I had assumed that was the line of The Minge, a summer VS, which was the only route in that area in the guide book.

Helen on the second pitch. From where she is the route stepped leftwards and pulled onto a series of hanging slabs. 

Yesterday (Tuesday 18th)  myself and Helen Rennard wandered up the Ben. The night before when having a flick through the guide I realised that The Minge took a steep crack, and so it seems likely that the line I had spotted had not been climbed. Helen and I had originally planned to do a route high up in the Ciste. However when passing below Trident Buttress the route that I had thought about looked to be in good nick. I suggested that we went and had a wee peek.

Myself on the steep crack that formed the crux of the route. There was some good ice which helped a bit here.

I led the first pitch, a bold but relatively straightforward icy ramp line. Helen then led the second pitch, which climbed a short groove and traversed diagonally big rightwards over some slabs . She belayed below an obvious icy crack. This proved to the crux of the route, steep with poor feet, but some positive hooks and  good ice. Above the crack the climbing remained quite technical for another 10 or 15 metres before easier ground was reached. A couple of easier pitches then led to the top of Trident Buttress. A long traverse then got us back down to Number 4 Gully.

As yet the route is un-named and went about grade VI,7 or maybe VII,7.

Vanishing Glories

The easier first pitch

Last weekend (3rd and 4th of November) it was definately winter in the hills on the West. There seemed to have been a fair bit more snow here than over in the Cairngorms. On Saturday myself and Nona headed up the Ben with no fixed plan. The North Face was surprisingly quiet, with just one other pair of climbers who headed up Ledge Route I think. Everyone else must have headed to for the Northern Coires.

It was pretty hard going getting up in Coire na Ciste with lots of deep soft snow about. Given the conditions, we decided on a short route on Garadh Buttress. I had often looked at this little buttress, but had not climbed on it. I remember last winter reading that the central ramp line had been climbed, as had a route vaguely based round a summer V diff  called  Cryotherapy.  We decided to have a look at doing a winter ascent of another V-diff further left called Vanishing Glories. I could not make out where the summer route went in it's lower half, the groove it climbs in the upper section was quite obvious. We took a natural left trending line into and up that groove.  This give a nice little route of about grade V,6.

 The second pitch. If Dafydd or Matt read this I would be interested to know if this is where you had climbed.

However, getting down that evening I had a look at Simon Richardson's website  http://www.scottishwinter.com/?p=2668  to see what had been climbed last year. There seemed to be a fair bit of confusion about where Cryotherapy actually went, and what actually had been climbed last year. The route Crying Out Loud that Dafydd Morris and Matt Buchanan had climbed certainly seemed to be in the same area as where we had climbed. Had we climbed the same route. They graded their route IV,5. Had I been climbing that badly? or was it that deep powder made it feel harder that it would have done in better conditions? Going back to the guide book, I saw that the line we climbed could fit the description for either Vanishing Glories or Cryotherapy. Had we climbed the route that Dafydd and Matt climbed, are Cryotherapy and Vanishing Glories the same route, know knows. However, it was a nice day pottering about on the Ben. 

Autumn weekend.

Autumn is in the air in the Highlands. This has the advantage that the midges are dead, but the disadvantage that the nights are drawing in, and the weather is getting wetter. However, sometimes, as was the case a couple of weekends ago, you can get the best of both worlds with dry midge free crags.

Dave at Steall Hut Crag, not a bad place to climb. Unfortunately a bit midgey in the summer and a bit damp in the winter.

 

On the Friday afternoon I went up to Steall Hut crag to try Leopole 8a. The crux moves of this route had always felt absolutely desperate to me. However, a a bit of extra strength since I had previously tried it, and the discovery of a cunning toe hook,  meant it suddenly felt like a feasible project for the autumn. After a couple of sessions playing on the crux, it was time to jump in the car and head North to meet up with Iain Small.

On the Saturday we went up to Super Crag near Lochinver. Since being announced to the world back in May, the crag has become quite popular, and now probabley contains highest concentrations high quality hard routes on a mainland Scottish sea cliff. Iain typically had, over the course of a few weekends during the summer, pretty much ticked the crag. I warmed up on Ramp It Up, a nice E3, one of the few routes that Iain had not done. It was then Iain's turn, and after an abseil inspection he did a new E7, 6b, his second route of that grade at the crag. I managed to second it cleanly, but only just. With some hard bold climbing, and specific gear knowledge, it certainly felt worth the grade. I think he was planning to call it The Assynt of Man.

Iain routes took a while, and after that I had time for one of the shorter E4's on the side wall in the gathering gloom, before we had to head back to the Elphin hut.

Iain on this new route The Assynt of Man, which goes up the wall above him trending slightly left.

On the Sunday we headed South to Dome Crag in Gruinard Bay. It was Iains turn to do the warm up route, and he did Call of the Wild with the left hand start (E4). Seconding this after previous couple of days climbing, felt a bit more than a warm up. Iain then persuaded me to give Major Domo a go. This is the classic E6 of the crag, a well protected but pumpy crag line. I had heard of the route for a long time, but given the number of much better climbers than me who had fallen off it, I assumed that I would not be able to flash it  However, I somehow managed to keep on battling upwards to the top.

Lots of gear but the holds are just about to all go a bit rounded and slopy, and it's steeper that it looks. Myself flashing Major Domo.

However, my effort was yhen somewhat overshadowed by Iain, who after an abseil inspection, flashed Ali Coull's route Welcome to the TerrorDome, E8. I am not sure what Iain thought to the grade, but he did say the the quality of the climbing was very good. This route goes up the wall to the left of Major Domo, and looks like hard physical climbing, with good but spaced gear. I didn't second it as it was getting pretty late, but it is a route that I am inspired to return to.

Iain flashing Welcome to the Terror Dome, which goes pretty much straight up the wall above.  A nae bad effort.

The following week I was keen to get back on Leopole. However, I was quite busy at work, and only managed one mid week session which went well until darkness stopped play. I returned last Sunday. Unfortunately the West Coast autumn monsoon had kicked in by then and I found the crag to be pretty wet, with a waterfall pouring off the top of the route. Although the holds on the crux were dry, other holds were wet and I was getting dripped on in the knee bar just before the crux. Although I got some climbing, it all felt a bit like hard work.

With only one more weekend before I head off on a Spanish sports climbing trip, it feels like it is just about the Scottish rock season is just about over for me this year.

Reading lists

Some good books, essential packing for a trip away.

Firstly this post is not about climbing. However, it is about something that I associate with climbing trips.I decent book is a great way to pass time in airports, in the evenings or when it is raining. I hardly watch any televsion or films (I don't think I have watched a film this year), but I do read alot. As the nights are drawing in, I thought I would make some notes on my top five novels. The list is entirely personal, based on the novels which have made the biggest impact on me at the time that I read them. So if you are heading off on a trip, or want an to spent your evenings doing something more constructive than rotting your brain by watching the X-Factor,  try one of these. Some are quite short and easy to read, while others are a bit more invovled

Blair's top five novels in no particular order.

Crime and Punishment  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who murders an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Although it can be quite heavy especially at first, and I actually gave up on my first attempt to read it, it is worth persevering with. The building torment felt by Raskolnikov is very powerful.


Birdsong by Sebastain Faulks
Set before and during the first world war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in France in 1910. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented horrors of the great war itself.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
A dark and very original novel about Frank, a sixteen-year-old boy who lives with his father near a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional with Frank turning to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from a psychiatric hospital, Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin. As the name suggests the book is about particular day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner a soviet work camp (the gulag) in the 1940's. In some ways it is quite an upbeat book, it is a relatively good day for Ivan. However it illustrates a world of incarceration, brutality, hard manual labour and freezing cold where men struggle to survive both the terrible rigours of nature and the inhumanity of the system that defines their conditions of life.

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written.  A page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.

Overpopulated land.

I enjoy being based in the Highlands of Scotland.  I love the space and the solitude that you can find here, but you can't (or I certainly never have) found elsewhere in Britain. To me the rest of the country feels overpopulated, with people, towns, roads and cars all squeezed in like sardines. Even mountainous areas like North Wales, seems crammed in and crowded. (When talking about the landscape, The John Muir Trust are trying to raise some money to repair the Steal Gorge path, a path used by many a climber, see http://www.jmt.org/appeal.asp for more details).

However, August in the Scottish Highlands does seem to have some disadvantages, it is often warm, damp and midgey, and getting any climbing done feels like hard work. Therefore it seemed a good time escape South to see what overpopulated land had to offer. The plan was for a week of swimming, climbing and perhaps a bit of deep water soloing in sunny Pembroke.

Some big seas, to get an idea of scale people can just be made out on skyline

However, things didn't exactly turn out like that.  After a day and a half of nice weather at the start of the week, when I managed to Barabella, a meaty E5 crack line (not quite a flash as I had seconded back in about 2006), the weather turned. After that it was either very wet, very windy or both, and we only managed one (rather damp) E2 in the final four days of the trip. However, such is the way of things sometimes, and as shown in the pictures, there were some impressive seas to watch.

Not ideal for swimming, climbing or deep water soloing.

 

The scene inland a bit. Good for kayaker freaks, not good for climbers.

The sun finally came out for us to get stuck in a traffic jam around Birmingham when on the way back up the road. However, it did remind me why I don't live down there.

Skye weekend

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?

And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.

Pink Floyd, Wish you were here.

 Heading out to the arete on Helen. From where I am the route moves left to the arete and climbs this, or the wall just to the right, in a great position.

Last weekend I had a good couple of days in Skye with Nona. On Saturday we headed up the the Vulcan Wall area in Coire Laggan. I was keen to do a route Enigma, mainly due to some good pictures I had seen of it. There were a few wet patches about, and other than forcing me to dodge about on the rather rambling second pitch,  didn't seem to affect the climbing. After that it was down the hill a little bit to the lovely arete of Helen. I remember first seeing this arete from the Cioch in May 1998, and had always fancied climbing it. There is some very nice climbing on it, with a smeary but well protected crux.

The new route at Neist. It climbs to the roof above Nona's head, then undercuts left into the groove. It climbs this for a few moves, then makes a tricky move left to pull through the roof at the notch to follow the flake crack above. 

Sunday dawned damp and cloudy in the Cullin, so we headed up to Neist where, a few weeks ago, I had spotted a new line a bit to the right of the classic E2/3 crack line Wish you were Here. 
Conditions were quite cold and damp, and having abbed down the line to clean it on a previous occasion knew it was going to be quite tricky. I decided to have a wee play on a top rope to get warmed up and see if I could do the moves. The way I had envisioned doing the crux moves leftwards across the groove when I had abseiled down and cleaned the line didn't work at all.
 However, I soon worked out a alternative method, stepping left lower down and laybacking up a rib.

On the first ascent of Cold Comfort for Change, E5 6b at the crux move left.

With the bit of knowledge the lead went pretty smoothly. Maybe not the most ethical of ascents, but I certainly didn't top rope it to death first, and with various other trips away planned, and not being sure when I will next make it back to Skye, I was glad to get it done.

We then went looking for a cam that I had lost at Poverty Point on our last trip to Neist, but didn't find it. Oh well, you can't win them all.