In response to Buzz’s suggestion in the Winter Hillwalking thread, here’s one to start the ball rolling…
Many years ago one February, me and H. drive up from our normal haunts in the Lakes to Ben Nevis to do the ultra-classic grade V ice climb, Zero Gully. After the obligatory miserable half-night’s half-sleep in the golf course carpark we trudge up the Allt A’Mhuillin for two hours in the dark, put on harnesses and crampons outside the CIC hut in the murky dawn light, and head up the snowslopes to the start of the climb. In the process one of my crampon straps disintegrates, so I find a spare piece of cord in the bottom of my rucksack to fix it and we carry on. Picture the scene: the top of a steep sweeping snowslope under one of Scotland’s greatest natural ampitheatres, surrounded by 1500-foot cliffs plastered with ice where some of the most famous winter climbs in the world go.
Unfortunately, it’s a typical Ben Nevis day. By this I mean the clag is well down, it’s blowing a hooly over the summit plateau and and spindrift avalanches (fine windblown powder) are coming down all over the face at regular intervals. Normal Scottish climbing weather, in other words, but on top of that the ice conditions really aren’t all that great – it quickly becomes clear that Zero is a bit too thinly iced for comfort, besides which it acts as a funnel for the worst of the spindrift on days like this.
So. What now? Looking around at other nearby climbs we assess the ratio of (climbable ice) vs. (frequency of avalanches) and decide that Minus Two Gully looks the least stupid choice. It’s another classic grade V and neither of us have done it before. So we move over that way, H. finds a belay in a sheltered spot and I start up the first pitch.
Thus begins one of the more precarious couple of hours in my life. After some thrashing up 60-degree powder snow I’m under a tapering bomb-bay rocky chimney. I manage to excavate a #1 cam placement for protection, which H. subsequently couldn’t extract so it’s probably still there. This was the good news; the bad news was the lorryloads of spindrift coming down the chimney at regular intervals. Hood up and get on with it. A couple of steep and irreversible moves and I’m into the chimney with my feet bridged across it, but from here the walls are blank and it tapers further: some fancy footwork steals a bit more height, might be able to reach through now, swing a tool at a loooo…ong stretch and yes! it’s in good ice above, feet are scarting about on not-much but a quick swing to set the other axe next to the first, just pull up and out and… oh ****. I can’t pull up, because the chimney tapers to narrower than shoulder width, so I’m wedged there, hanging from my tools with nothing for my feet when the next installment of spindrift comes swishing down the face to swamp everything in its path. There was little risk of actually being swept off (the axe placements were solid) but I honestly thought I might drown at that point.
After an indeterminate period which I’ve mostly deleted from memory I managed a sort of gymnastic half-twist pull-up-with-pike manouvre that landed me on out of the chimney and into the wider gully above. A hundred feet of more conventional climbing on moderately rubbish ice, then wait for a long enough gap between avalanches to scuttle across leftwards to the upper gully and the belay.
Another three or four pitches of really quite good ice climbing land us on the crest of the North-East Buttress, one of the great winter ridges on Ben Nevis and a grade IV climb in its own right. By now the light is fading, the weather is still foul and North-East Buttress has a notorious short-but-sharp crux right at the top. Going up does not appeal. On the other hand the lower part of NEB starts up a long snowy rising traverse onto a ledge system called the First Platform, where we are now. So we unrope and solo off down the traverse line into the gloom.
It takes a long time. Headtorches on. I go first picking a line down and across, downclimbing little icy steps and gullies and snow patches, spindrift swooshing by, H’s torch beam swinging around somewhere above me, down more snow patches and icy bits. Suddenly I realise the slope drops away steeply, can’t see anything below in the dark and swirling snow but there is that stomach-pit feeling of a very large drop right under my feet as the spindrift streams past into the void. Okaaa…ay. Go back up to find another line. Further left, keep going down and across mechanically, how long is this going to take?
Finally the angle slackens off. We’re back down in Coire Leis under the face. Just a two-hour walk to the car and a four-hour drive back to Ambleside for beer and medals.
Several years later H. pointed out to me that Minus Two doesn’t actually finish on the First Platform, it goes to the Second Platform which is much higher up on North-East Buttress. We were nowhere near the easy traverse line and had accidentally downclimbed a grade III ice climb, in the dark, solo…
