No Leashes, No Ropes - just Fun!

This is the next installment of adventure, bit delayed due to a big dump of snow and hence very scary snow conditions.

A tragic week in the West Highlands left us all shocked and very sad - we will miss Chris Walker as someone who always made us laugh and was a caring and loyal friend. Unbelievable that he's gone and that it happened somewhere we all would have thought the safe option for descending off Buchaille Etive Mor in the snow conditions.

Things have started to settle down a little bit after some frankly MASSIVE avalanches, check out the SAIS blogs for photos.

This week everyone and their dogs have been doing Steall Falls, I have however been working whilst the sun was shining and the sky was blue and the temperatures were chilly. Andy in the meantime had been getting strapped to some new routes in the NW Highlands, firstly with Rich Cross and then with Blair Fyffe.
Fortunately I managed to get the friday off work so that we could drive south to attend the Llanberis Mountain Film Festival (LLAMFF), which is sponsored by Mountain Equipment and so Andy had been summoned. This meant that we could get a quick lap of Steall Falls in before driving south - result!!
A route I've wanted to climb since walking into the falls the first winter I was in Scotland and realising that sometimes it freezes. Andy was suffering lethargy from new routing but agreed to come with me anyway.
We arrived by about 9:30am in a bit of drizzle to find the Falls still frozen and only one other team gearing up at the bottom. Now our cunning plan was to set off soloing and see what happenend, so with a few screws on my harness and Andy with a rope tied onto his back we set off and before I knew it we were way the hell up there and having a brilliant time. Nice ice - not at all brittle, a few holes on the right side with water running behind, very pretty. There were a couple of chunks came down but they missed us and we made it all the way to the top. One abseil and we were on a path down through the trees and skipping back out to the car to drive back to Wales. The round route trip took us just over 2 hours and I was beaming!! Check out the video clip below for some fine climbing technique!