January 15 Conditions

Thursday 29th January 2015

Climbing guiding in the North West Highlands

I've had a great few days climbing with Paul in the North West Highlands. We had a couple of wet warm days at rock climbing and dry tooling crags climbing and doing rope work.
However, the highlights were a wild day on Liathach climbing Sinister Prong, the better variation of George, climbing Right End Buttress on Fuar Tholl and having the mountain to ourselves and getting some views between the ferocious snow squalls, and finally today climbing Cobalt Buttress on Meall Gorm.

Friday 23rd January 2015

Intro to winter mountaineering

This week I have been working with The Light Dragoons from Norfolk. They are up on Adventure Training in the Cairngorms.
We've had a great wintery week with a couple of summit days and loads of great winter skills.

Sunday 18th January 2015

Winter climbing weekend in Glencoe and Lochaber

Two beautiful cold days with much blue sky and sun. Yesterday Rob and I headed to Glencoe and with the amount of snow around and the avalanche hazard we opted for the west face of Aonach Dubh where we climbed Cyclops on B Buttress.
Today we headed into the Ben hoping to do The Curtain as we heard it was 'in'. On the approach we met a team who had been swept 100m in an avalanche they triggered just below The Curtain. Looking at the snow we noticed that the northerly wind over night had put down a considerable amount of windslab on the left of Carn Dearg Buttress so plan B; we went to the right of Carn Dearg Buttress and climbed the first 50m of Waterfall Gully before abseiling off.

Sunday 11th January 2015

North West Highlands mountaineering

Over the weekend I was out with Simon, Paul and Matt. Yesterday we climbed Fuar Tholl via Access Gully after doing some winter skills in the Coire. There were plenty of squally showers passing through with lots of graupple coming down.
Today we went in to Liathach and climbed Way Up in the back of Coireag Dubh Mor. The weather deteriorated through the day but we made it to the top of Spidean a' Choire Leith although the windy picked up and the snow was beginning to fall.

Sunday 4th January 2015

Happy New Year

Today I was out with Gaz having a great wee boulder in Torridon. Although there was some precipitation to start the day it quickly turned dry. The rest of the day was cold and windy so really good conditions for pulling on the beautiful rough sandstone.