Petestack Blog

Ask anyone familiar with Polldubh to list its VS classics and you’d expect to see Phantom Slab and The Old Wall high up alongside Damnation and Resurrection. So, having done the first pair just once each and not been on either since 1991, I was keen to revisit them and teamed up with Jim at last night’s breezily sunny Polldubh Club meet to climb them again. (more…)

It’s been an uncharacteristically miserable start to May, but things are looking better with what appears to be a drier spell starting yesterday… (more…)

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…)