Dorsal Arete In The Wind

Day 2 of Mountaineering for Ryan. Today we're going to introduce to Ryan a 'harness', 'rope', 'sling', and 'karabiner'.... He'll be using these all for the first time today... A steep learning curve, especially when yesterday was his first day for crampons and axe... So obviously Dorsal Arete was the obvious choice when the wind at the summits was forecast to get up to 70mph !!

We got off to a good start and beat the crouds onto the climb - actually there were only 2 teams behind us, but there were teams on many other climbs in the coire...

The weather was pretty rough. Visibility was sometimes very poor as you can see. Ryan is in this photo somewhere! As we climbed, it got more and more windy - awesome..

We quickly got to the upper section and all was good.. By now, Ryan has learnt how to tie a clove hitch, use some gear and his axe and crampon work is better than you might expect for day 2 !

When I met Ryan on Monday, I knew the red jacket would come in handy for great photos !

Here's the end of the arete and typically the wind was massively gusty (actually I should save words like 'massively gusty' for Thursday and Friday - have you seen the winds forecast for the rest of the week!)

We were done just after lunch time, but the strong winds on the arete forced us to get into the basin before it was time to chill... Time to plan tomorrow...

Winter Mountaineering

This week I'm working on a 5 day Winter Mountaineering Course for Abacus Mountaineering.

In the end I only had 1 client for the week - Ryan Wilkes - from Basildon in Essex. I needn't worry about him being fit enough - he generally runs a half marathon every weekend! After looking at the weather and Avalanche forecast we headed up to the CIC hut for a look about... We discussed strategies for walking and moving, with a theme of energy conservation and efficiency. We moved onto the snow and continued with our theme. We worked on staying on our feet but moved onto slipping and sliding.
We started to look at avalanche avoidance and winter route choice. Later with crampons on we explored all the ice above CIC in the gulches - a great day out, and we were only a little bothered by the wind and rain - why let that spoil a great day out!!

Here Ryan is getting on with sliding - and starting to learn about stopping a slide...

Okay, my fault, I made him pose for the photo!

Ice, ice, wonderful ice !