Roger comes to Scotland....

As is normal Rog comes to Scotland and the weather takes a turn for the worse! After the weekend trip to Liathach I was pleased to see that the forecast for Tuesday was actually looking pretty good, just a bit of drizzle in the morning.

So we decided to head up the Ben with Andy and Ian and see what was looking good. Thankfully

the thawing over the last few days meant that the Ben track was passable so no need for the sit down start. Andy and Ian disapperared at a rate of knots with promises of kettles being put on, Rog and I took a more leisurely pace and arrived at the CIC hut to brews. The difference in conditions since my last visit was amazing the CIC cascades were looking much much thinnner and everything lower down the mountain was black. After much discussion Rog and I decided to go and do Slingsby's Chimney (II) as it would mean a relatively short walk and being able to abseil off form the top.

The photos above show me on the 1st pitch and Rog on the 2nd. Not without incident, Rog had a case of the butter-fingers and managed to drop one of my pink quickdraws and then one of my gloves that he was borrowing! The top pitch of the route was in pretty poor condition with very little snow so after setting off I found a lovely spike and decided to retreat. So we scuttled back to the hut for more tea and then headed down. Andy and Ian did Vanishing Gully (V, 5) which was apparently vanishing before their very picks!

The next day a rather exhausted Rog wasn't up with the larks so we had a gentle day and wandered into Steall Falls whcih was in a very different state to my last visit. For a start we had to use the bridge to cross the river and with temperatures of around 10 degrees none of it was frozen! The following day the forecast was miserable so we went to the wall and got pumped! Thanks for visiting Rog and hope you had at least some fun!