My Blog
My Blog
Panic
With only a couple of hours of daylight after work October evenings are a bit of a rush.
I wanted to check some lines at Calgary so went up one evening. I wouldn’t usually bother to go there with so little time, and after a day of rain, but there was another topo to check.
The atmosphere at the crag was brilliant with waves smashing into the arch. It was windy and dry but there was rain pelting into the sea out towards Coll. The sky was showing sunset colour towards Tiree.
The tide was well in so the base of my usual descent was under two feet of water, I tried to see the routes from the top but that was useless. There was no point in dithering so I got the rope out and quickly abseiled in. As soon as I got down it started raining heavily so I sheltered behind a boulder for a bit, but there wasn’t much light left so I looked at route lines in the rain. I reminded myself where the climbs went and found a line that I had led about eight years ago and didn’t seem to have written up.
I then had to climb the very greasy V Diff in my wellies to get out, I kept the shunt close to me.
Another evening we did a route right of Butterfly Recess at The Broch, it was getting dark as we finished so we called it Moth Corner.
At the celebration of Steve’s life Nigel had talked about a memorial for Steve at Kintra. I didn’t think it was the right time to have a rant about memorials, I didn’t tell him about the time I went up Sgurr MhicCoinnich intending to remove the memorial there.
I told him a lot of people think there should be no memorials in the countryside, and I agree with them.
He then went on to speak to Cynthia about it, she told him that the memorials on Ben Nevis had been removed.
We said we would try to sell Steve’s climbing gear so I went round one evening to collect it. Steve’s wife, who is Tibetan, said she had been out to the cliff and had left some prayer flags.
Next time we were at Kintra we saw the prayer flags and some white gloss paint, hopefully the winter storms will dull the paint.
We were climbing on an unnamed crag near the prayer flags when a pod of dolphins went past so the area became Dolphin Walls.
I soloed some short routes at Croig one evening, they might be new.
Work is still going on under Ben More where the bridge was washed away in the flash flood. Four months, so far, to bridge the trickle.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012