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.
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