Wednesday 25th May 2011 |
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Feeling like winter on Skye
This week I was on Skye with Bruce. It was incredibly wintery with severe gales, snow, hail, sleet and not much sunshine. A complete traverse of the Cuillin was out of the question but we did do some good climbing and scrambling.
Flodigarry sea cliffs was our first destination on the East coast of the Trotternish peninsula where we climbed, abseiled and did some prussiking too.
Tuesday was the best day of weather for us and we headed to the Cuillin outliers. Here we climbed the North Buttress of Sgurr Nan Each followed by an East to West traverse of this Clach Glas neighbour. Although we had strong westerly winds and heavy hail showers we also had some great sunny spells. Today we headed into the main Cuillin and climbed the NW spur of Sgurr an Fheadain which gives an enjoyable scramble of grade 2. |
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Wednesday 11th May 2011 |
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Sunshine and showers at Cummingston
Today I was out climbing at Cummingston with my dad. The sandstone cliffs are very similar to the southern sandstone crags in Sussex which I learnt to climb on with my Dad many moons ago.
We had a fun day out and although there were a couple of showers the wind and sunshine in between dried things out pretty fast. |
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Monday 9th May 2011 |
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Lochaber climbing and scrambling
Over the weekend Mike and I were out with Richard, James, Tim and Simon. It was Richard's 40th birthday weekend and he wanted to climb Tower Ridge. Even though the forecast was very mixed with strong SE winds and heavy showers we were very lucky to have mostly dry conditions on Ben Nevis on Saturday. We climbed Tower Ridge and didn't see any other climbers until the busy walk down the tourist path.
On sunday we headed down to Glencoe where we climbed Curved Ridge, again without another soul for almost the whole day. Although there were heavy showers on the walk out we managed to climb the route in the dry and even with a lunch time stop in the sunshine with the great views across Rannoch Moor. |
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Thursday 5th May 2011 |
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One day full traverse of the Skye Ridge
Yesterday I took Dean along the full length of the Skye Ridge. Dean has had this as an objective for some time and yesterday we enjoyed the end of this spell of good weather on the Black Cuillin. We completed the full traverse of the 10 km ridge which includes 11 munros and over 3000m of ascent in a relatively fast 10 hr 50m.
The cool air and easterly breeze helped us not get dehydrated. Dean was up for the full mountaineering challenge which included starting at Gars Bheinn and climbing all the tricky bits like the TD gap, King Chimney, Inaccessible Pinnacle and Naismiths Route. We had a thoroughly enjoyable day. |
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Monday 2nd May 2011 |
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Fire and Rock in Torridon
For the last 2 days a fire has been raging on the south west corner of Laithach. Rich and I were out cragging on Seana Mheallan yesterday. The cool breeze was good for climbing but unfortunately it was also fuelling the fire.
The Fire seemed to have reached from the West end of the summit ridge all the way down to the road just east of the village. Both firemen and a helicopter were out throwing water onto the flames. They seemed to be keeping the fire from local residences but it looked like the Ship and other excellent Torridon boulders have had a toasting. |
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