With a fantastic forecast, Greg and I headed to Beinn Udlaidh again hoping there would still be some fat ice free of avalanche risk. We headed up after negotiating the almost multi-storey car park on a well tracked path into the West side of the coire as most of the snow has been completely scoured off this side. The East sector was heavily laiden, with most of the routes under a lot of snow with large, and in some cases, double cornices. We headed up to look at The Smirk which has seen lots of ascents recently, there was a party half way up the route and another party waiting at the bottom and before I could convince Greg to stop for a Snickers he was off scouting for something else to climb. After some snooping he decided on a gnarly looking continental style mixed route onto a prominent hanging icicle, followed by an icy groove onto more hanging ice, just left of The Smirk, check out Greg's blog for full details. Given there was a large and comfortable ledge to stand on I put him on belay and watched him work his way up the route, throwing caution to the wind as to how I would follow him up and take out the gear! Fortunately Tamsin, Helena and Tim showed up to climb The Smirk and Tim kindly offered to save me the hassle of swinging around on fallen down icicles.
As the queues slowly disappeared Greg and Tim had topped out and came back down raving about the quality of the route; they decided on naming it The Grin. After snapping some shots of Tamsin cruising up the aesthetic line of The Smirk I got on the sharp end and started up it myself.
The ice was nice and soft and with the number of recent ascents it was very featured, which was fortuntate as the strength in my arms was failing proportionately faster than my rate of ascent! The climbing was fantastic though and it was perfect for me to get on lead on something steeper but with lots of hooks. I'm looking forward to getting on some more of the classic routes that are in such great condition at the moment. Unfortunately my GoPro camera went GoBroke and will be out of action for a while, hopefully some of the photographs will justify this though!
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