No. 4

Here we go.... Day 5 of the first Jagged Globe 'Intro to Mountaineering' Scottish winter course of 2011. In the morning only 2 clients wanted the challenge of tackling Number 4 gully on the Ben, so I took them in my van and made a dash for Lochaber... We were joined by Dave Percy, MIC trainee, who is prepping for his assessment in a few weeks. My clients, Rob and Dan had fitness to spare. I found out today that Dan is an Australian Rowing Olympian - so he definitely had fitness to spare!

Here we are - 20m from the top of Number 4 Gully on the Ben - it's only a grade I gully, but today was capped by a tricky cornice!!! Yesterday (Thursay) Stu from PYB cut this narrow slot into the cornice to help everybody get down (including a skier - who then carved excellent turns straight down the gully). I guess I could have made an effort to make the slot bigger to get up - but that would obviously reduce the challenge for Rob and Dan - so it stayed narrow and Rob and Dan had an 'adventure' getting up!!!

Here Rob is discovering the fun of battling with a cornice. At one point the feet had a choice of air or soft powder snow - eventually after 5 minutes of hysterical laughing we got Rob up - with Tim Blackmore's WML team watching from above!

Tim's team of WML trainees prep to classic abseil down over the cornice.

Dave Percy had fun on the cornice as we all did, and will be fine on his MIC assessment :)