After another thaw on Sunday night we thought the best venue for some climbing was going to be high up on Ben Nevis rather than the Cairngorms, so the alarm went off a little earlier than usual and we piled in Matts van for the drive down to Lochaber from Newtonmore.
It was looking pretty uninspiring and fairly unlikely that we’d get anything climbed during the walk up, it was still really warm and the water was running down the rock buttress and waterfalls were evident under some of the gully lines. Not ideal. Even the river near the CIC hut was in raging flow and we had to do some soggy boulder hopping to get across.
We headed up into Coire na Ciste to have a “look” and traversed left to the foot of the classic grade four “Comb Gully.” Matt led Emma and I up this in about four pitches and apart from some water dripping on us on the first pitch it was surprisingly good and a pleasure to be climbing Scottish Gullies again.
It was starting to freeze as the day wore on and it was wonderfully still on the plateau, a nice change from the raging winds across the Gorms last week.
After topping out we had enough time to squeeze in another quick route so after abseiling into no. 3 gully we went to the bottom of Thompsons route which I led Matt and Emma up in four pitches back to the Plateau. It was a little thin in the initial chimney but what a great little route.
There were a few other teams on the mountain but we couldn’t really see what they were on, Tower ridge possibly.
There’s a big thaw happening over the next couple of days so fingers crossed some snow sticks around and we can get climbing again later in the week.
