Tag: snow

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Legges Tor 2016 Aug

Legges Tor in the snow (mach 2)
On Tuesday, Angela had the day off work, so the two of us headed up to Ben Lomond to catch some snow and do a white ascent of Legges Tor from Carr Villa. On this trip, I decided to get all my possible snow errors over and done with in one day so I can have the rest of the season clear. It seems there were many to dispense with.

Firstly, there were problems doing up my spiders, which were needed twenty minutes into the climb once the track became a smooth frozen river of very shiny, very slippery ice. I couldn’t remember how to do them up, so improvised a method. Really, I knew it was insecure and had to fail. I just couldn’t devise a better one just then. Five minutes later, predictably, they came off. I tried again and off we set. Five minutes later they fell off again. Now I tried a new method, it felt better. Five minutes later they fell off again. At last I worked out how to attach them at the back too. They were on the wrong feet, but I didn’t feel like delaying Angela any more, so hoped that wouldn’t matter. It did. Seven minutes later they fell off again. Ok. I sat down and changed the feet around. Hoorah. No more delays from the spiders for the rest of the day. Angela had just slid her rubber topped, chain-crampon booties on in .05 seconds flat.

Now trying to fit these wretched spiders had involved quite a bit of pulling and tugging. At one moment, I was pulling very hard indeed and my hand slipped so that my fist bounced speedily upwards biffing me on the nose. Blood poured out immediately and copiously. I didn’t do much about this as I was too busy roaring with laughter. I had never known anyone to bop themselves on the nose so hard that they bled like that. I guess I was lucky I didn’t knock myself unconscious. The extreme cold soon put a stop to the bleeding. Luckily I had toilet paper to hand.

On we marched. I heard a snap. The buckle on the waist band of my pack bounced undone. I fixed it up. Angela said: “Aren’t you going to collect your lens cap?” I hadn’t even noticed it had snapped off too. Five minutes later I wanted to photograph something beautiful. Oh no. No lens cap. I just had to go back and search for it. It had obviously come off a second time. Luckily, I did find it lying in the snow, a bit away from where we’d been. It must have rolled.

Despite all these delays, we eventually neared the summit. The wind was furious and freezing, but I just had to photograph this beauty. I took one glove off, tucking it under my arm, and snapped away at ice rime on beautiful dolerite, while Angela, too cold to stop, continued towards the summit, hoping I’d hurry up no doubt. I photographed her in the act of summiting and then dashed off to the side for some more shots. By this time, my ungloved hand was ready to drop off. That was the only reason I stopped my mad clicking. I went to put the tucked in glove back on. You guessed. It was gone. I retraced my steps. Poor Angela was now totally frozen with all my fooling around. However, these were very special windproof gloves (they weren’t even an ugly black like every single pair of gloves on sale in 2015-6, as they’d come from Switzerland). I needed to give this glove one more chance of being found. Angela pointed out that in this wind, it would have blown away and could be anywhere. I promised her minimal time spent on this and raced back to where I’d been. Halleluja, over to the inside, blown away but still visible, lay my precious glove. Off we set, quickly, before Angela turned into an ice pillar.

As I had run out of smart ideas for further errors, the trip back was uneventful. It felt good to drop out of the gelid wind, and the temperature increased as we lost height as well. We even shed some layers. It was a beautiful day, which we both enjoyed.

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Projection Bluff 2015 Jun

From the base of Projection Bluff as we passed it the first time

Luckily Projection Bluff is not far away from our intended mountain for the day, which had been Rats Castle, for we piked out of the latter. The story goes like this:
We stood at the base of Rats Castle, feet crunching the icy snow, wind howling ominously around our ears, numb, aching hands held close to our bodies in a vain attempt to warm them – and we hadn’t yet begun clutching icy vegetation. Our overpants seemed ineffective at offering any kind of help in protecting us against this blast. I gazed up to where our goal lay, up there beyond the couple-of-kilometre-long band of frosted scrub, and up above the blocks of now white dolerite. Dark clouds were swirling on the tops. It would be slow work along the ridgeline, making sure we didn’t slip on the thin ice carapace that covered each rock. Snow started falling again as we considered. This worsened matters.

The walk begins …

“If this snow continues, it may make the road undriveable on the way out,” I mused aloud. I was beginning to feel decidedly wussy about this whole venture. Luckily for me, Angela agreed to a change in plans. Let’s do nearby Projection Bluff instead – short, sweet, a pad with markers hopefully so that we didn’t have to bush bash and could move quickly enough to maybe even warm up. The path would debouch us onto the rocky area much more quickly than the alternative in front of us, and if the rocks  were treacherous, well, we’d turn around. The trouble with our planned Rats Castle was that we could work for a few hours and only then discover the rocks wouldn’t admit passage under these conditions. By choosing the shorter Projection Bluff, we’d at least get a mountain in for our drive.

So, here we were at the startling line a second time, ready to push through snowy bushes, wondering where the “pad” was, buried somewhere there under arching bushes and covered in white. We had trouble locating it at first, and decided it wasn’t there, but then some markers appeared, then disappeared in a frozen lake, but eventually reemerged in icy rainforest once we happened on the right spot out the other side. After that, it was plain sailing – just the normal game of “spot the marker” as we climbed, being careful not to be caught out on slippery ice.

 The exercise even warmed us up enough for me to shed my ridiculous oversized goretex mittens that made me shockingly clumsy and that fell off every few metres. I had enough feeling in my fingers to plait my hair at last so I could begin to see. I even had enough movement in my fingers now to tie my shoelaces properly for the first time that day.

The views from the moment we popped out above the tree line were worth any discomfort we may have felt earlier on. I was in love. Click, click. Two or three metres’ progress. Click, click. Poor Angela. She waited with great patience as my photography slowed us down far more than the icy rocks. What a privilege it was to climb something, even as small as Projection Bluff, in conditions such as these, and to witness such enormous stretches of beauty laid out before us.

 

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Ben Lomond 2014 Aug Snow Walk

Ben Lomond on Crampons. August 2014

Carr Villa
It is my opinion that if you receive an email inviting you to come and play in the snow then you can count yourself amongst the Lucky. I thus consider myself to be a very fortunate person, as such an invitation is exactly what arrived in my inbox. I was the only invitee who could accept, so it was a party zu zweit.

We had only half an idea of what conditions would be like on top of Ben Lomond, our destination, so each selected a variety of play tools. I took 6-point crampons and my Grivel spiders, as well as short XC skis and poles. Phil, the initiator of the expedition, took very short skis and walking poles for us both, and spiral-wire shoe chains as his chosen anti-slip device. Once we could see the vast amounts of ice around Carr Villa, it was obvious that walking without either crampons or pseudo ones was out of the question (I nearly went for a sixer just crossing a 2-metre band of ice before we’d begun). There was not enough snow for real XC skis, but we might have enough for the little ones up higher where we were climbing. We both took them in case.

 I kept trying to work out what it is that makes rocks covered in a light dusting of white powder so very appealing, but never came up with an explanation that satisfied me: all I can do is talk of the observable outcome, viz., the fact that most of us find rocks with a soft, finely textured layer of white, delicately poised on the uppermost surface, to be a glorious sight. As often as possible, I zapped out my camera and took a few shots. In my haste (I didn’t want to delay things with too much photography) I barely had time to notice if my efforts resulted in a photo that would later please me, but the attempts were fun anyway. Up higher, the landscape was almost totally white, but it still retained moments of colour from the underside of bushes and twigs, or the sunny side of rocks. The scenery was spectacular, especially as we were lucky enough to have soft blue sky as a background, and sun to give lustre to the snow. Blue and white: the well-chosen colours of the Greek flag. These are also the colours of our east coast beaches that I love so much. It’s always a combination that pleases me.

Phil going up a shallow gully

 At first we followed the path from Carr Villa up towards Legge’s Tor, but at some magical point hived off and headed to the right towards Borrowdale Valley and Old Bill’s Monument. I have never walked with poles before, but found the combination of spiders on my boots and poles to help propel me forwards felt like cross country skiing without the forward slide each step, and I enjoyed the exercise as well as the scenery.

Phil’s lump I

Once nearer to the monument, we climbed a few lumps on the terrain which were, I was told, nameless, so I christened them, at least momentarily, Phil’s lump 1 and II. As Phil is the first person to have climbed all the Abels and all the Abelettes, he deserves something named after him. We were basically just playing up there, enjoying the beautiful white scenery and the fun of movement in it. Phil’s lump II (which had two separate summit cairns) had a view way down into the green valley below, past the rocky organ pipes and piles of broken rock that formed chutes between the top and bottom. Phil indicated his chosen descent chute and we began our way down, keen at this stage to get out of the biting wind. That second lump was high enough to feel the brunt of the cold blast.

Nearly at the top of the lump.

The descent and the long traverse across the bottom to the car were much slower than the dance up onto, and then along, the plateau. We had to be very careful on all the jagged rocks that presented a line or point rather than a plane to the foot and that each harboured its own little ice-snow cap. I was too scared to risk jumping, and kept up four limb points of contact for two (or was it more?) hours of the traverse. Some people pay vast amounts of money to go to the gym. We had a mega full-body work out and paid nothing if you don’t count the foot gear that has served us often and will continue to do so in the future.

Phil’s lump II (one of the summit cairns)

Phil with the other cairn behind him
I returned home tired and with a good appetite for the delicious food Bruce had decided to cook in my absence. The only negative was that I now had to quickly dry my gear so I could have similar fun the next day down south with my Pandani friends. I was a going to do the long drive that night, but now opted for setting the alarm for 3.30 next morning instead. The hot shower felt very good.