It’s been a bit of a mixed week for the weather up here in Scotland. Very strong Easterly winds have been whipping across the Cairngorm Plateau making climbing pretty much impossible.
The day after climbing on Hells Lum we headed back up to the Cairngorm car park with the intention of beating the weather that was due to arrive later that day and sneak a route in. Unfortunately the wind was already howling when we parked the car, so we faffed until daylight and fought our way into Sneachda into a horrific headwind hoping to find shelter when we got close to the crag.
It took us two hours to get there, (it should be about half that) and the wind was swirling around the corrie. We turned tail and got pushed back homeward.
Yesterday’s weather was much the same, and after driving around, and through, some floods we had ourselves a dry tooling session at Dunkeld. The crag is so overhanging that even though it was chucking it down, we were quite dry and we spent quite a while there, climbing into the dark working the classic route of the crag.
Which brings me finally onto today, and our last chance to get a route done this year…
It was still windy as we got to the CIC hut, but having planned to climb on the west side of the Douglas Boulder we were rewarded by some calm conditions and some great climbing. The arms were suffering massively from the dry tooling, and the cracks were choked with snow making progress slow and it turned into a long day.
We climbed the popular “Cutless”, a good grade VI, 7 which joins the SW ridge route at the top of the boulder.
It was great to get some good climbing done, on what we thought might be a one route trip, which is pretty bad when you’ve driven from Devon for some winter climbing…
Home tomorrow, the long drive beckons.. Have a great Christmas, more Scottish blogs in the new year.
