7th April 2013 - Good Friday Climb and a hasty retreat

Heading towards Observatory Gully

The climb ahead....

Today Anna and I took the long walk into Observatory Gully on Ben Nevis in order to climb Good Friday Climb, a class Grade 3 which tops out literally at the summit cairn. It was a long, hard walk in on bullet hard snow with patches of soft, fresh windslab which made getting into a rhythm pretty difficult. Anna was recovering from a 6 week illness and was finding it quite tough. The ice being knocked down by other climbers made us a moving target and so we had to move quickly to avoid these lethal objects!

By the time we had reached Tower Scoop and the terrain steepened again, we were both prett knackered, but Anna had hit a wall. I popped a few srcews in and started to prepare a rope to make her feel more confident, but as I did so a big dump of snow crashed down the first pitch of the climb, and that put us both off continuing. We plodded back down, happy to have at least got out but a bit disappointed at not getting on the climb. However, the climb will be there another day and having seen Anna like I have never seen her before, I have no regrets backing off.