Roughly translated that means "We came, we saw, we ran away." Which is a pretty good summary of our last few days in Scotland.
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| Ed belays Charlie on a cheeky little 6a lead - I watched quietly |
On Saturday (After I put up the last blog) we decided to take a jaunt over to Kinlochleven and check
indoor ice climbing but we hadn't used the wall. Ed had also used the indoor ice wall before and we all fancied trying a bit of dry climbing after getting drenched looking for some Dry Tooling in Fort William. We decided that the only way to properly recover the day would be to try out the indoor climbing wall at the Ice Factor. Myself and Charlie had been there before last year on a day off to try the indoor ice climbing and Ed had been there with work, but none of us had tried the traditional climbing wall.
Myself and Charlie had climbing shoes - we'd somewhat anticipated this happening. Ed, on the other hand, didn't, and therefore had to climb routes (including, embaressingly enough for myself and Charlie a 6a+ lead that neither of us could manage) in approach shoes - glorified outdoor trainers really. Just as well he managed to get us in for free or we may have lynched him out of jealousy.
Sunday was going to be our last day in Scotland, and the weather report did not look favourable so we decided to head for the highest point in the hope of finding vaguely decent ice and snow condition - to the Ben it was.
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| Suffering at the CIC hut |
We parked up and if I'm honest I was in low spirits - I had what was not quite a bad feeling, but as Charlie later put it 'neggy vibes' about the day. I didn't think we'd ever even make it to the bottom of
Italian Climb as we were aiming - let alone climb it, back out and get down safely. So I set out from the North Face car park with what felt like an extremely heavy weight on my back that was a bit pointless. Nonetheless we pushed up and found that the bottom of the walk was rather warm, warm to the extent that I had my jacket undone to reveal just a baselayer with all the vents open and still I was sweating buckets, though I was keeping up with Charlie for the most part so I was at least putting in the effort.
As we came up the path to see Ben Nevis we could see that conditions weren't hot - it was covered in cloud and there were driving winds coming from the South. By the time we'd got to the snow line we were being battered by driven hail and 40mph+ winds. We did eventually make it to the CIC hut, after passing many annoyed European climbers (no doubt commenting to eachother "Zis is not at all like ze alps!") coming down the ascent path laden with gear.
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| Whiteout on the walk down from the CIC hut |
We paused to take on liquid and food, and as we did we assessed the conditions. What we saw didn't impress us in the slightest. I voiced my concerns to the other two, who both readily agreed now that they were stationary and had mouths/eyes/necks rapidly filling with snow. So we backed off, again. And this time we got out of there fast - the weather was rapidly closing in on us and at one point we were in total whiteout with hail being driven into our faces - thank god for the sense of mind to bring goggles along.
One point of humor - we saw the SAIS guys coming up to the CIC hut to have a look at the
condition,and as they came up to us they took a snapshot of what I can only describe as the three most depressed and bedraggled looking people south of the Arctic circle. What's even more galling is the fact that the day we left it was a beautiful, picture-perfect Scottish winter's day. How terrible. I'm now back in my Girlfriend's flat back in Surrey, warm and dry. But I miss the mountains. It was a decent trip for the most part, but the backing off days were no fun.
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| We even got featured on the SAIS blog. We're basically famous now. |
There's always next year.
