Petestack Blog

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…)

Today, with the north face of Ben Nevis starting to look snowy again after the thaws of the past fortnight, I climbed Number Three Gully Buttress (III) with Adam Thomas. There was more new snow than we expected and perhaps not many routes at anything like their best, but that didn’t seem to stop ‘Team Petzl’ (with Ueli Steck among their number?) racing up Coire na Ciste to film some hard stuff. We also met Andy Nelson from Glencoe on the hill. (more…)

Got a text from Matt Watts on Friday afternoon telling me he’d seen my photo in MCofS magazine Scottish Mountaineer, so checked my newly-arrived copy as soon as I got home and, sure enough, there it was… one of the pics Dave MacLeod took of me on Secretaries Superdirect at Polldubh: (more…)

On Sunday 22 February I climbed The White Line on Ben Nevis with Stephan Mors from Glasgow. An absolutely cracking route done in eight pitches of alternating leads, about half-and-half steepish ice and easier snow climbing, with two rope lengths of dripping icefall (freezing at 850m, aye right!) followed by two of snowfield, another two up a ‘chimney’ that’s maybe more of a groove leading to a gully with one very steep section, and another two of mostly easier (and much crisper) snow with some icy sections and no cornice to finish. (more…)