... what will no doubt be a very occasionally updated blog of this year's climbing activities ...
9th December
I came up on the sleeper and met the Thin Boy at Inverness; we elected to have a go at the westerly group of Fannaichs. It was a cold day, with low ragged cloud and occasional bursts of sunshine interspersed with sleet squalls. We went down to Loch a'Bhraoin, and then up the valley separating Sgurr Breac from Meall a'Chrasgaidh. There was snow from about 600 metres, sometimes in powdery drifts and sometimes, as in the rise to the summit ridge of Sgurr nan Clach Geala, rock hard neve; we'd left our crampons behind and R, not having my middle-aged bulk, found it hard to get a purchase. We climbed the final section of the ridge right into the teeth of a sleet squall, R leading the way heroically with his orange snow goggles keeping the weather out; I climbed head bowed, following his boots and hoping he was keeping a look out for the spectacular cornices on the lee side. Presently the squall passed, and we emerged on the top in golden sunshine, a great moment. There was still a very cold wind, but it was behind us now and the last of the three tops, Sgurr nan Each, leaking spindrift like a punctured flour bag, was a much lower hill.
A true winter's day then, when the struggle against the cold and wind are much more of a test than your own lack of fitness. When there was any visibility at all, the light on the clouds and on the snowy mountains and dead-coloured landscape was more than enough reward. The forecast for the next day was apocalyptically bad, so we retreated to Glasgow via supper at the Moulin Inn in Pitlochry and I got the early train home in the morning.
September/Oct
Two separate walks at the back end of the year, before the weather turned cold. The first was a miserable day in late September when I went up Moasdale into the top end of Eskdale, cloud louring over the mountains and rain threatening. I climbed Little Narrowcove in a downpour, up to the neck just N of Scafell Pike; of course you could see absolutely nothing. I hadn't been to the top of the Pike since my stag weekend in 1992 and thought it worth the diversion; having seen only one person thus far, the summit was alive with people and every stone in the extensive boulder field around the cairn now has a polish on it. Navigating your way off to the north isn't easy, and, having felt pretty smug when a couple stopped me to ask the way, I then nearly went wrong at Esk Hause - the path leads you inexorably downhill and if you're not careful you can miss the saddle in mist; later coming off Esk Pike back into the valley, the ground was broken and confusing and I was relieved to come out beneath the cloud in the right place; rare for the Lake District, there's no path at all. In the evening I met up with Ted and we went to see the Steely Dan tribute band, Nearly Dan, play in Ambleside. In the bar I told the singer that they'd got the chords to Doctor Wu wrong; he didn't take it well at all.
The second day, a month or so later, I went on a Friday up to Kentmere, somewhere I hadn't been since I was a small child. It was a glorious day, almost windless, the colours of the hills and sky wonderful. I walked up to the reservoir and then back up the NE ridge of Ill Bell, where a rodent of some description had made tunnels amongst the grass and stones - the only other time I've seen this was on a remote shoulder of the the Five Sisters of Kintail, and I have no idea what creature does it. From the top I went north over Froswick to High Street, the ridge busy with walkers, some of them very elderly. Approaching the summit I heard a familiar sounding voice and said to myself, "Blimey, that bloke sounds like Mark Sidaway, the Kidderminster Kid". Lo and behold the figure, looking round, said, "My God it's Nick Simpson", and indeed it was Sid, a bloke I used to play cricket with when I lived in London, up for a few days with a friend. We must have stood chatting for a good twenty minutes. His first wife died, and he's now remarried. When they'd gone I went south east over Mardale Ill Bell, some wild ponies grazing on the shoulder, and then up steeply onto Harter Fell. It was windy here, and cloud had come in from the west; all the same the long descent back into the Kent valley was beautiful and I wanted to prolong it - the grey haze on the tops, tawny slopes lower down, smoke rising from farmhouses. As close to the rural idyll as you can get.
15th August. I was dead lucky with the weather, waking on the one day available to find a perfect morning. We all got the 9.05 post bus from Sfazu to Alp Camp, and half an hour later I left the others there to go and find the Lago da Val Viola while I toiled up the Val Mera, Corno di Camp towering above on the right, past outcrops where marmots whistled, and, higher up, a jewel of a blue lake, so clear and still that when I filled my bottle it was difficult to see where air ended and the water began. At the pass I stood in the wind looking down the Italian side; three climbers came up and sat down nearby, not speaking to me. The way now lay east, up moraines at the side of a small glacier; I went up feeling very tired - age, unfitness, altitude: take your pick - and there didn't seem to be much chance of my reaching the summit of Piz Paradiso, a rocky pyramid which I could now see across the glacier. For one thing the NW ridge I'd intended to climb looked steep and broken; there was bound to be an obstacle on it somewhere. As I stood hesitating the three Italians came up, and I had a brief chat with one, a tall lad in shorts; but he didn't know much English and my Italian was limited to the usual musician's forte, piano and piu mosso, which weren't much help; and anyway it seemed that he didn't know if there was a route to the top from here either. We agreed though that the ridge between Paradiso and Corno di Camp looked a little easier, and I resolved to try that way. I went down onto the glacier and contoured round as far as possible to a point where you could scramble up the vast heaps of scoured rock and unstable rubble onto a shoulder that might lead up to the main ridge. On the shoulder I began to have hopes, for the ridge crest was only a few hundred feet up, and once there it would only be a hundred yards of scrambling to the final pyramid. There was snow here, lying softly between the stones, and in a few minutes I had reached the crest.
I'd hoped for an easy walkway, but instead this was intimidating - a leaning stack of giant flakes, each weighing a few hundredweight, some shifting uneasily to the touch and all sounding hollow when struck. It was an unpleasant place; but I had come a long way and there were crampon scratches on the rock so people had been here before. I climbed up the first thirty or forty feet going very carefully, testing out each hold, thinking that with each move upwards and along I'd come to easy ground. But it didn't happen, and presently I came to a place which required commitment. There was no contest. I wasn't so desperate to climb the hill that I was going to take stupid risks. Down I went, if anything more carefully than I'd come up. I was almost back on easy ground at the top of the shoulder when I noticed that there were some footprints in the snow below the rocks. Perhaps I could traverse beneath the crest - someone else had. Then I noticed a climber just coming to the same place from below. It was the Italian in shorts, on his own now. A few words and gestures later we had come to a decision - we would get up the hill together or not at all. "I am Daniello", he said. We shook hands.
Our troubles weren't over. The way lay over bulging slabs whose planes were divided by chutes of half-frozen grit. "Global warming", said Daniello. "Would have all been solid before". We had just reached a snow patch at the foot of the final looming pyramid when we saw a climber coming down. The ground wasn't easy, but even so he was making heavy weather of it. "You English?", he barked. "You lend me your axe, ja?" I climbed up the snow patch; the man seized my axe without a word and climbed down to Daniello, who took it from him and brought it up to me. We watched the climber on his way. "German or Swiss?", I asked Daniello. "German I think", he said. "No manners". In a couple of minutes we were on the crest. At last here was some decent rock. It was as if the mountain was doing its best to collapse on the Italian side, but on the Swiss the slope lay with the grain of the strata, and there was no more than a hundred feet of exposed scrambling to the summit. At the top Daniello and I hugged like brothers. We looked over the void to Corno di Camp, as sensational from this side as from the valley, and beyond to the true Bernina giants, now capped in the afternoon clouds. Mountains crowded the horizon. A thousand metres below the Lago da Val Viola lay inky blue; my family were lounging somewhere by its shore.
I parted from Daniello at 3.30 at the Pass da Val Mera; a good climber and a nice man. Shortly afterwards, coming down the Swiss side, my phone bleeped: S and the children were sitting outside the Alp Camp bar. By the time I got there an hour later they'd gone. I could have waited for the afternoon bus and had the luxury of overtaking them, but the hair-shirt tendency is alive and well and I went wearily down the track in the sun, returning to Pisciadel at 5.45 to find the smell of dinner cooking and cold beer waiting.
5th June.
C did his first Munro, fulfilling a long held ambition of mine, if not of his. I got the family up early, an achievement in itself, and we drove from Inverscaddle down to Lochaline and caught the 9.40 ferry across to Mull. Sal dropped us on the shore of Loch na Keal, and we went up the north shoulder of Ben More. "You can have a birds and bees talk with him while you're at it", she had said - C would be starting secondary school in the autumn, and a bit of sex education might not go amiss. By the time we'd got a thousand feet or so up the hill I had bitten the bullet and dealt with some of the more obvious points. We went on in silence for a while. "You know you were telling me about condoms, Dad", he said when we stopped for a rest, "Well, have you got one?" The answer, with all it implied, seemed to be pretty appalling.
The early mist had cleared by the time we got to the foot of the final slope, and we walked across carpets of thrift where butterflies flew erratically about and a pair of golden plovers called anxiously. The rocks here looked like gabbro to me. We came out on the small summit at about 1.25, with stupendous views over the S side of mountain and its volcanic outlying ridges, the ribbon of road three thousand feet below and further off a maze of firths and islands, the whole a luminous blue and cloud-dappled green-brown. The potential father-and-son moment was slightly spoiled by the presence of a German couple on top already; but also by the fact that in my dreams father-and-son were perfect, whereas C and I are less so. Still, he had done very well - not only his first Munro, but a proper one too, from sea level. I loved him very much. I offered to take a picture of the Germans. "Just one more," I said, "in case you look stupid in that one". I heard the girl mutter to her partner, "He said we looked stupid?"
We were down at the road early, and the girls were nowhere to be seen. It was now frankly a glorious afternoon, and we sat on the beach for over an hour; I tried to sleep in the sunshine, but every few minutes C, an inveterate beachcomber, would call out, "Dad, come and look at this", and I'd sit groggily up; the pile of cockles, mussels, oysters & other marine creatures piled up around me. At 4.15 the girls appeared. The early mist had made the beach unappealing, so they'd been shopping in Tobermory and watched eagles on the way back. Nothing is ever perfect, but I am a very lucky man.
21st / 22nd April. A great spell of cold weather in March came to an end pretty much exactly when the boy Mitchell and I were planning to meet up. We cancelled; in the old days I would have gone anyway, now we just put it off till the end of April. Hard not to feel gloomy though - another winter gone with no decent snow conditions.
I managed to get away from Manchester at lunchtime on Thursday 20th, and flogged up the motorway to Pitlochry. Seemed strange not to be staying at R's, but he was working on the Friday and this was a rare chance to get N of the Great Glen. On Friday morning I hared up the A9 to Inverness and thence inland to Glen Affric. It was a glorious day, and amazingly there was fresh snow on the hills, too much if anything because from about 12.30, plodding up into Tom a'Choinnich's E coire, till after 5, coming off the shoulder of Toll Creagach, I was anything up to thigh deep in it. The freezing level was way above the tops and it was one of those days when it almost wasn't worth the effort, despite the wonderful sights; the mountains looked glorious, and you could see from the Cuillin in the west down to the Ben in the south, but it was shattering work.
I wondered too about snow-blindness - I hadn't brought my sunglasses, and the glare was unbearable.
From these hills you could look N down to Loch Mullardoch, where twelve years ago S and I spent a week in the cabin at the end of the loch and where I dislocated my shoulder. Touching to think this was just before she became pregnant (NB not fell pregnant - how I hate that expression) with C. I drove back south failing utterly to spot the speed cameras R had been promising me, listening to the 1st Act of Valkyrie and wondering how on earth I was going to get up anything the following day with such ruinously tired legs. Incidentally I saw a badger on the walk in, my first time ever in broad daylight.
In the B&B (shagpile and gold-effect taps in the bathroom) R and I looked at maps for Saturday and watched the end of Green Wing. The episode featured a painting of a man with an enormous penis. The boy Mitchell had so ingratiated himself with the B&B woman that she agreed to make us a cooked breakfast at 8 a.m. Mine included a surprisingly large amount of baked beans. The weather was supposed to get worse from the west, so we went east to Glen Clova, and actually we were really lucky because it didn't come on to rain till we were nearly back at the car late in the afternoon. In my earlier Munroing fantasies (careful) I dreamed of becoming a good enough climber to wander up one of the routes on Creag an Dubh-loch, pipe clenched in teeth, before striding off across the plateau to tick off Broad Cairn and Cairn Bannoch. Now I'm old enough to know I'm not brave enough - or skilful or fit or stupid enough come to that - and moreover (this comes as a surprise) I'm mature enough not to mind very much.
Instead we went up the track from the car park. From the top of Broad Cairn you could see along to the Dubh-loch a mile away, where the slabs peel over into a greasy void, and it looked intimidating even at this distance. The wind was ferociously strong on top, and the weather kept looking as if it was about to close in. We wondered whether in the conditions it was a good idea to walk out to Cairn Bannoch, but the cloud kept high and, crucially, there was much less snow lying than the previous day, so things were much better underfoot. On the top of Bannoch R had great difficulty remaining on his feet; if only Icarus had been built with Bamboo Boy's pipe-cleaner physique - the history of aviation would have been somewhat different.
Coming down a shallow valley south from the top a typical Cairngorm scene: receding snow banks lining the swollen stream, revealing sodden plants and mosses. R conformed to type by refusing to cross at the only possible point for a quarter of a mile in either direction. "No you are not taking a picture", he said, striding off upstream in search of a snow-bridge. We were back at the car by 5, and I was home by 11. On the car radio I heard that after months of wrangling the Iraqi parliament had agreed on a new prime minister.
21st Feb. Took C to Langdale for his first day's winter climbing, my consolation for having failed yet again to get to Scotland in what were pretty much the first decent conditions of the winter. A cold day with an east wind, and thought of turning back when it started chucking it down on the motorway. But C, oblivious to the potential misery of conditions on the tops, thought we should carry on. Some kind of path repairs were being done above the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel and a helicopter buzzed to and fro all day, ferrying swaying baskets of boulders from an outcrop at the top of White Ghyll. The rain had stopped and as we got up towards Stickle Tarn the sun came out. A sprinkling of snow here, and more on the tops. Notwithstanding his aversion to rock climbing I took C up to the foot of Jack's Rake, and all went well for a couple of hundred feet. Then he got stuck in a greasy groove and lost his composure. There was an easier if more exposed way a few feet to the left, but he'd had enough so we went laboriously back down to the bottom. C was apologetic, but I told him that he would surpass me in many other things, just as I'd surpassed my own father, and this seemed to register. We went round the easier southern side of Pavey and up to the top in genuine hard snow. C seemed delighted. "What a great feeling", he announced when we got to the top. You can't see much of the Scafells from here, but Helvellyn and Fairfield away to the East were white-backed bears, crouching with the sun on them. We wandered round to Harrison Stickle - C amused himself by calling it Branston Pickle - and looked for a while down to Windermere and the sea.
Across the valley there is little notch in the hill above Blea Tarn where we once went when he was very small; I remember looking across Langdale and thinking "Why are we living in London?" The fact that we aren't any more and I can go to these places with my children is one respect in which life has got measurably better in the last ten years.
On the way down a pair of jets came screaming round the corner from Rossett Pike. I personally don't resent this much - if you want to have an Air Force they've got to train somewhere - but not more than a couple of minutes later the helicopter came trundling past in the opposite direction and landed in a field near Stool End. I wondered whether the RAF had known it was there or the helicopter pilot had known the jets were coming. If not they narrowly avoided catastrophe.
7th Jan. Stayed with NJ in Glasgow on the Friday night. It was the old boy's birthday and we sat up late with Z drinking whisky. The only hill that neither of us had climbed and both wanted to do - an increasing problem the nearer you get to the end of the Munros - was Meall Buidhe, a dull lump south of Rannoch. We left Glasgow before 8 and drove up through Callander and Killin over into Glen Lyon (a question - who designed that bloody awful Ben Lawers visitor centre? An abomination of a building). It was a beautiful cold clear morning with some frost, but absolutely no snow on the hills. As it was going to be an embarassingly short day we did a diversion out to the NW where from an outlying mound we could look out over Rannoch Moor to the Black Mount and the Buchaille. There was no snow there either, apart from the odd streak in the gullies; though funnily enough Rob J told me that the same day he was out on the Glenfinnan hills miles away to the west, and there were two inches of fresh snowfall on the tops. All the same it was a fabulous view over Scotland's denuded centre, once home of a massive glacier, the shallow valley taken by the Fort William railway line as it passes Corrour particularly clear from here. Walking along the broad ridge up to Meall Buidhe there was frost still in the shadows - which NJ tried to claim was snow - and ice in the ruts. On the top it was very cold and here there actually was some snow, just a few crumbs drifted into pockets between the stones.
We were down by 2.30 and in Callander to pick up my car by 4. NJ went off to Stirling to help paint Z's flat, which she's selling. My first few miles homeward were fraught with anxiety because the rear brakes were making a funny noise; but on the motorway you hardly ever need to brake and it came as a real surprise four hours later turning off the M60 to hear them grating again. Another trip to the garage and more expense.
2nd Jan. Went to the Lakes with the Ms. From Patterdale there looked to be just enough snow on Striding Edge to make it worthwhile, so H and I flogged up to the start while the others carried on towards Grisedale Tarn. At first the view up to Dollywaggon was a promise of the afterlife, but the weather soon closed in. On the Edge itself there was a mixture of fairly old stuff, some icy, and a covering of new snow that was already rotting; it was all pretty slippery. I'd hoped the headwall would be good, but actually there wasn't really enough coverage and even on the top we were still well below the freezing level. We thought the others wouldn't have got to the top yet so we walked along towards Dollywaggon before a text from Rosie convinced us that we'd missed them in the murk; thus we went back again towards the summit and came upon them just N of Nethermost Pike. They didn't have ice-axes so though we looked down at the top of Swirral it would have been stupid to try and descend it, not that others weren't trying, and went instead down Keppel Cove via a snowy drainage channel and back to the road via Glenridding, a valley I last walked down with my Dad one wintry day in the 70s when people were skiing there.
A couple of things - I must have been up Striding Edge three or four times in winter now, and it confirms the wonderful variety of snow and ice climbing - truly no two days are the same. The other was that while mobile phones are as useful on mountains as elsewhere, you can't really say they actually add to the experience of mountains being places apart; not that that's my experience of the Lake District generally these days.
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