Life at the end of a rope: 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.