My first winter route of the season...

...and I'm still in two minds about it. 

With good weather (winter weather that is) on the cards I plotted and schemed with Simon Holloway to get up to Mam Tor in the peak district for a spot of winter climbing. I've done Mam Tor Gully under summer conditions in this past year and I've been looking forward to a chance to tackle it under snow. In summer it's forms a pretty interesting rock-climb/ scramble/ tottering death trap. If you ever go there I recommend you either solo the entire thing, or take some pegs and a hammer if you want to increase your safety margin.

With Mam Tor Gully being my big worry for the day I set of at about 5am to meet Simon. Getting stuck behind various bit of traffic along the way I planned to make my time up shooting along the buxton road, confident it would be quiet however this was clearly to no avail. There was snow falling heavily and small drifts across the road wherever there was a gap in the wall. It was the kind of conditions when using use highbeams just casues more problems. I text Simon to tell him I was going to be late. 

I did get there with minimal problems, mainly just sliding the car around a bit and then almost not making it up one hill. On my drive though I only saw one car that had slid completely off the road (ironically through the chevron sign on the outside of the bend). It seemed like just getting there was a problem in itself. However I did arrive and safely only to call Simon and find out he was at the wrong car park. I wasn't going to move my car down winnats pass, so I told him to come to me. In the mean time I moved into the back of my car to kit up and more importantly brew up with my jetboil in the boot. 

The walk-in was pretty easy, it was always going to be. Mam Tor is literally right next to the road but as we walked in the ground underfoot wasn't really frozen. I decided not to worry about it and carried on plodding. We gear up near the centre of the face (if you can call it that) as I've already done the actual gully in summer conditions I wanted to try something a little harder. We went for what I think is gully 3 but I'm not sure. Either way I set off up the short buttress at the base of the cliff to try and reach a decent belay. 


Lets just say that the belay wasn't decent. I ended up hammering a mixed hook into some shale and then tying into it with a figure of nine in the hope it would tighten if any load came onto it. I should have used a screamer but that idea never crossed my mind. I guess it just goes to show that you should practise, practise, practise to train you mind up to use all the gear you have. I told Simon not to fall off and as we're both still here, he didn't. Instead of pushing a line up the wall ahead of us, the lack of a decent belay had frightened me and scooted off left in an effort to get us back onto the original gully line. 


This pitch was reasonably cool as it was nothing more than a walk along a very steep slope, but I did manage to get some gear in. I'm not ethically adverse to placing pegs, on the condition that they are a last resort, you've nothing else that'll fit and it'll increase the safety margin to an acceptable level. All in all placing pegs damages the rock, but then againall climbing and mountaineering leave some damage, whether it's from worn gear placements, worn out descent gullies or abseil tat left behind, it all adds up. So I placed the peg, actaully placed two stacked together then tied them off. I felt a little better afterwards.


We continued climbing. It seems silly me giving a pitch by pitch account as there are few "pitches" in winter climbing, just lenghts of rope till you find a decent place to belay. It's a skill I'm still learning. Whether to bypass a decent belay and try and run it out another 10 metres only to find nothing. Sadly I find myself selfishly doing pitches of different lenght, just so I get the crux. It shouldn't have mattered as I was leading everything on this day. 

The final rope lenght I climbed was up the last bit of gully, where the "real" climbing began. There was poor gear here and there and I avoided the final head wall. When I climbed it in summer I avoided it, as there was a couple of fridge sized blocks dangling above me and my partner was in the firing line. This time they were not there. It gave me food for thought as I branched out left, trying to force a line up the turf and bad rock. Finally there was some decent snow for me to plunge my axes into and I could move quickly up the top. I ended up doing a waist belay whilst wedged behind a snow drift. Spindrift poured over me as it was whipped off the plateaux and I got soaked.

Waist belaying is a long and odd experience. I've never had to hold a fall on a waist belay (as yet) so I find myself constantly questioning what the experience would be like. Given that I was getting soaked by spindrift I had a lot of time to think about it. Simon didn't fall off and we topped out to go and shake cold bare hands of the summit, barely 600m above sea level but encrusted with snow like the Cairngorm plateaux normally is. 

It's not bad for one of the peak districts true winter adventures.

brewing up in the boot of the car before hand

Simon, sporting a new hat

Mam Tor. The gully takes the gully on the left and satys left as much as possible.

My first piece of gear, and belay. I told Simon not to fall off.

Simon topping out on the final pitch.

And walking to the summit

waiting for winter...

This time last year I'd actually got a few routes in before one of my yearly trips to scotland. I have to say that I'm still pretty psyched to get out enough if I've spent most of the winter season so far climbing the frozen waterfalls of my mind. I'm getting a little frustrated. 

I've cleaned all my winter climbing gear. The other day I got my crampons out to give them a service, inspection and a sharpen. They really needed it after last winter too. My Super12's sadly are showing some pretty bad signs of wear & tear. I did buy them off the UKC forums for £25 posted about 4 years ago, so I can't say they've 1 had a bad life and 2 or that I'm disspointed in them. They've seen me up various different routes from all kinds of different grades. I like them because they're light and simple, great for throwing my my pack when I don't expect to encounter any hard or mixed conditions. It seems like they'll be retired for a few weeks now until I can effect a repair that'll work. In the mean time it looks like I'm be bumbling around on my G14's, which despite being really heavy are pretty bombproof. Thing is I've got them set up on monopoints and I can't a arsed to faff around changing them. 

I also packed up my pack for a couple of days winter overnighting this year. The plan for this years scotland trip is to bumble up to scotland, and they travel from pub/climbing area and have a bit of a road trip/chasing the decent conditions out of the back of my car. With 9 days to play with and only 2 of those actually with a definite roof over our heads it'll be an interesting trip to say the least. I think I planning on packing something like 3 sleeping bags with me.

But I packed up an overnight bag with full winter rack, tent, stove and sleeps stuff (you know all the crap you need) into one bag just to see how much it would weigh. After carrying it around the house for 5 minutes I came to the conclusion that it needs to be lighter, much lighter. So I'm going through each item and seeing trying to work out if I'll need it or if there is a lighter option. Gear is something I can get really hung-up on and I find this to be really sad as it takes away from climbing and mountaineering for me. I know this is almost a social faux pas in alot of climbign circles, where what gear you seem to be using is as important as what you're actually climbing (I know quite a few climbers who seem to operate the other way round on this point). All the b/s surrounding gear in general seems to increase tenfold in reference to winter gear!.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter that I've not got the lightest, most ergonomically designed axes, or the lightest crampon/boot combination. I simply can't afford to pay for the lightest climing gear out there. I prefere something that'll last more than one season (especially when the price tag is so normally large) opting for indestructable gear, which has easily replacable and repairable parts rather than something that super fast and light... and gets destroyed after an impromptu sack haul. 

So below there is a photo I took out of Alpine Climbing: Techniques to take you higher. I'm probably breaching copyright by it's too good not to share. I think what I'm trying to get at is that climbing should be about the climbing an experience, not what gear you've got.

Wet weather in wales...

I had a bit of a wet weekend in wales but considering all the rain, I managed to stay pretty dry. Of course bad weather meant that we ended up at Tremadog climbing at Bwlch y Moch. I was climbing with Simon Holloway (who is a regular poster here). The original plan was to try and get some winter climbing in, but like I said the weather conspired against us and was wet, no frozen.

We did get a bit of climbing done considering our late arrival to Eric's Cafe. After wandering along the bottom of the crag trying to find something that resembled a dry route. We climbed One Step in the Clouds (VS 4c) with Simon leading both the first and last pitch. I have to say it was an impressive lead as this was his third VS lead to date and first multipitch route. The bottom pitch, which although is a bit rambling, was pretty damp which made some of the moves really hard. Simon coped fine with it. Pitch 2 I realised as I was on it, is pretty easy to loose sight of where you're going. I guess thats why it gets the VS grade because you can't exactly shout down to your belayer to tell you where to go.

When I got to the belay and placed my two wires I relived the feeling of clipping into that belay from back when I'd done Vector and Weever and the intense sense of satifaction I got from doing those routes. I sat there belaying Simon up, gradually rolling down my sleeve, then putting up my hood and eventually zipping everything up in an attempt to stay a little warmer. It was truely a beautifel spot to belay in though. 

Dispite the fact we where using my 60metre ropes and I could have linkned both pitches together to make our progress a little quicker but we were in no rush. I knew that Simon would enjoy the final pitch too and I think he did. We topped out happily and abseiled back down from the Grim Wall abseil point. 

Dispite our slow approach to climbing that day, we decided to have a crack at another route. The route we picked was a bit of a Tremadog trade route. It was Christmas Curry (severe) of course. It was getting dark while we started off but that didn't bother us as we'd both added our headtorches. What did bother us was the soaking wet layback crack on pitch 2. Simon had lead it and he gave it a bloody good go but it was getting darker and darker until we decided to bin it. I don't think that Simon really wanted to go night climbing and I was getting cold. However we turned it into a postive because it gave me a chance to run through how to back off a route with Simon, which I've found over the years is a pretty useful skill.

As it was dark we bugged out to the car and sat in the cold cooking up some pasta for tea (with red pesto of course) before heading to Plas y Brenin in the hope that they we're running a free lecture on something climbing related. When we found out it was on river canoing in the borneo jungle we opted to finish our beer and headed for the car to take us to our bed for the night, under the boulders. I'm not going to lie but I was pretty cold. My sleeping bag system of teaming a light downbag with a lighter synthetic bag over the top just wasn't really working. I even added my bivi bag over the top to try and squeeze a few more degrees out of it. I even went as far as adding a hot water bottle!

None of this really helped but then again I was stubbornly refusing to don thermals or my belay jacket as I figured that would be admitting defeat. At least I still have this option left in the future. Now all that is needed is for me to finish building my footprint for my tent so that the ground sheet will stay a little more waterproof!

Esoterica: High Tor Gully

It doesn't seem like I've blogged anything in ages. It seems like I spend a lot of my time dream about being out in the ice and snow. I think it's amazing that coating of frozen water in it's various forms can cause such a stir of emotions in a person. I can't wait till I manage to get out there. I'll enjoy everything, from the early wake-ups and long walk-ins to the first hot aches of the season. 

Climbing this weekend just gone was as close to winter climbing as I've ever come when I'm supposed to be on a traditional rock climbing route. I actually had a day off on saturday. I spent the day fitting a radiator with my Dad which was an interesting experience. We ended up shutting the water off twice, wrapping a kilometre of PTFE tape around various screw threads and visiting 2 separate plumbing stores. It was a pretty good day considering that I'd only gone over to use the tumble dryer to reproof my waterproofs

So with a day of tinkering with gear, reproofing and getting generally grubby out of the way, Rachel and I woke up early on the sunday morning, jumped in the car and nipped into the east peak to tick off another esoterica route... high tor gully. I've only climbed at high tor once before with Dan Masterman (who's disappeared to the other side of the world now in NZ). Now last time I was here I didn't really explore any of the caves and came a cropper on a HVS 5b because I stupidly didn't take enough runners with me. A lesson that has stayed with me I think. Well this time was different, we did manged to explore some caves (albight briefly) and I didn't fall off anything.

Like normal we packed tow small sacks as we'd be climbing with them. I had a new toy to play with in the form of a dirty great big headtorch (Petzl Duo mit 14 LEDs). I found it cheap on UKC and have been after one for ages. MY old TIKKA-XP is starting to get very old and battered but it's still running pretty well. It is still a great torch but being scared of the dark make you appreciate light providing devices and more power = more light which make me feel alot better when venturing under ground. We took a my thick old single rope in the end, based on the fact that so far the esoterica routes have been a little cruel to rope and Rachel wanted her rope to last a little longer than one crazy route. 

The walk-in to high tor is pretty much the same as the guidebook description but the obvious path isn't so obvious anymore. What makes up for it is a BMC sign that I figured would only have been placed there in the event of climbers actually using the path. It is a long a winding path taking you right round to the front of high tor and passing a load of awesome little buttresses along the way. I've never really given peak limestone the time of day (actually I've never given any limestone the time of day) but when I was confronted with these massive white walls I felt the need go and climb them. Too bad I only packed half a rack and no climbing shoes. I'll have to go back! 

Instead we wandered along the path and stopped off to have a brief look into the small cave systems that are there. I wanted a chance to try my new headtorch out and see what lighting effects I could get with it for some photography inside the cave. I never actually got the chance as about 6 metres in while me and Rach were sitting around gazing at the cave I spotted a cave spider behind her. Now I'm not scared of spiders, in a general sense but these things are much bigger than I'm used to. (A couple of interesting links to information on them are here & here). Rachel however is very much in the "I dislike spiders to the point that I'll run out of the cave and leave Matt behind" camp. I did try and carefully point out that there was a cavespider behind her, and that it wasn't doing anything other than just sitting there but I think you can imagine what happened. Now left standing alone in said cave, regardless of my massive headtorch, I bolted for the exit. 

We continued around on the path in daylight, enjoying the light flitting through the trees. I really was a proper cold wintry morning, I think all it needed to top it off was frozen ground. I had left the guidebook behind in the car because it's heavy and I figured that a VD gully shouldn't be too hard to find because it split the Main Head wall and Left face of high tor. I was wrong on that point. High Tor Gully does indeed split the main wall and left flank of high tor and it presents itself as a deep cleft. High Tor Gully is actually about 6 metres above this massive cleft that sinks some 20 metres underground. I really did take us a while at actually notice the gully which was sort of hanging above us. 


After a lot of uming & ahhhing we decided that we may as well go for it. The start looked pretty hard and we didn't have a rock shoes or anything. I lead the first pitch and managed to sting my crotch on a rogue stinging nettle. There really wasn't much gear in the gully either but that didn't stop me and I carefully climbed on up trying to not to dislodge any of the loose material. At the first decent opportunity to build a belay I did because I knew Rach was worried about the first bit of climbing. As it happened Rachel was fine and joined me at the belay for a brief respite before she led off up the next section.


It looked pretty easy but it soon became apparent that it wasn't. The entire gully was just loose and Rach quite sensibly down climbed and sent me up to deal with it. I climbed as carefully as I could because it was just so loose. At one point I had one foot on the left wall, both hands on the right wall and was propping myself up with my final foot trying not to knock off any loose material. I soon managed to gain the safety of some trees growing in the gully and the difficulties were over (for now). Rach joined me at my tree belay and we set about working how the hell we were going to get out of the gully. I think the original exit is now used as a sort of rubbish dump by the local area management group. We didn't really fancy climbing through rubbish to try and get out, and even this exit looks pretty sketchy. Instead we managed to find a little crack that led up the right hand wall. It was actually the hardest bit of climbing (and probably one of the only bits of actual "climbing" we did all day). We were soon sat on the top checking out the awesome view down on Matlock and Matlock-Bath. Not bad for a single route at High Tor.