Today Isi, Rich and myself headed out for a days climbing on the Ben. Things have been a little milder lately so we weren't sure what we'd find but we set off anyway with a vague plan to have a look at Castle Ridge. On the walk in it quickly became clear that Castle wasn't really in condition at the moment so we set our sights on Tower Ridge instead. Rich has done Tower many times now but for Isi and myself it was a first.
The snow on approach was pretty firm and things looked promising. I lead up the 1st chimney pitch to gain the ridge its self and from there we soloed upto the end of the eastern traverse. Here Rich lead the steep section that gains the top of the great tower and we moved across to tower gap.
I lead across the gap and out the other side before we quickly soloed the remaining section of the ridge and topped out into the sun!
Condition are excellent for this early in the season! The lower snows are consolidating nicely and while things higher up are still rather soft the rock is well rimed and ice can be seen forming. Looks like we could be in for another bumper winter!
Oh why did you change the weird red and green colors here..I liked them soooo much!
ReplyDeleteI tried to use a picture as a background but couldn't get it quite right so went back to the default settings.
ReplyDeleteI obviously need to be more like you and spend more time in front of the computer and less time out on the hill to get my blogging skills up to your professional standards ;)