Petestack Blog

Yesterday was historically ‘Polldubh Day’ in more ways than one with the arrival of my first edition Klaus Schwartz/Blyth Wright guide, the first regular outdoor meet of the Polldubh Club and some 50th anniversary ascents of Ian Clough’s Wanderlust. (more…)

It’s been quite a week for both personal climbing and the future of the sport in Lochaber… (more…)

So here I was, on my last day of Easter holiday, leaving a *sunny* Lochaber early yesterday morning to go cragging a good three hours’ drive away up Glen Clova and wondering who to blame… Sonya Drummond from Angus, for telling us all that Proud Corner has got to be the BEST single pitch VS EVER? Simon Davidson from Edinburgh, for hijacking my Polldubh Anniversary thread on Sunday evening to suggest climbing together? Me, for listening to Sonya and suggesting Clova to Simon when he was happy to meet me at a more convenient Weem, Dunkeld or even my home patch of (sunny) Glen Nevis? Or maybe even all three? :-P (more…)

Have to say that the Polldubh 50th Anniversary Game took a bit of a nosedive yesterday with a nice morning developing into a wet afternoon just when I was about to go out (meaning that I had to go running instead!), but I still took myself up there today and did two of the four Sullivan/Clough routes ‘scheduled’ for yesterday. Started by shunting Iche (I swear that overlap’s easier than Damnation’s!) and soloing Pine Wall before heading up to Secretaries’ Buttress to shunt Twitch (John Cunningham’s brilliant little pitch of Etive-style padding) and finishing by soloing Enigma on High Crag.

So Iche and Enigma might strictly have been a day too late for the ‘game’, but it was a nice, sunny day (odd spits of rain just as I finished rigging Twitch, then some more as I drove past Corran Ferry on the way home) and I got my first 5a and 5b pitches of the season, so it was definitely worth the trip. And it’s still game on AFAIC, because at least I made the effort! :-)

Today Jamie Bankhead, Rich Parker and I headed north-east from a wet Lochaber in search of dry rock. With Plans A & B to visit Duntelchaig or Glenmarksie crags still looking like damp squibs after smartly bypassing the former and optimistically driving to Strathconon to look at the latter, Plan C finally took us to Cummingston on the Moray coast, where climbing that’s steep, juggy, sandstone and ‘different’ (home of the overhanging Mod?) can be strangely compelling even for a delicate slab creature like me… (more…)

Today I climbed Styx Right Wall (V Diff), Resurrection (VS) and Three Pines (Severe) at Polldubh with Angus, 50 years to the day after Resurrection’s first ascent by Clough and Lakin. Have already posted an account to the UKC Forums (under the title of The Polldubh 50th Anniversary Game), so quoting that here: (more…)

Yesterday I took Angus to Polldubh to climb Heatwave, Flying Dutchman, Pine Wall and Secretaries’ Direct in glorious spring sunshine for what amounted to a quick ‘best of Polldubh Severe’ tour. (more…)

Yesterday I climbed Tower Ridge on the Ben with Jamie Hageman after a ludicrously optimistic trip to the start of Point Five on the second or third day of a monumental thaw convinced us not to try that, and have to say we were thankful we’d left it when most of the routes we could see (and hear) spent the rest of the day falling down! So large chunks of Smith’s and the Indicator Wall routes were breaking off (it was raining ice down Observatory Gully) and at one stage we heard a stupendous crack from the opposite direction (somewhere over Coire na Ciste way). (more…)