 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Traverse of the Cuillin Ridge The Isle of Skye is on the North West coast of Scotland. It's not really an island in my books - at least not since they built a bridge five years or so ago. Anyway, that's not important. What is important is that it has mountains. Real mountains. Big sharp pointy ones, with gorges and scree slopes, gendarmes and sentry boxes. I'm buggered if I know what a gendarme or a sentry box is, but the guide book mentions them. More than likely we abseiled off one or got lost on one. 
We based ourselves in a place called Sligachain. Not much to it really - a pub on one side of the road, a field of tents on the other. It does have the three things you miss most when camping in the wild: a toilet, a shower and a pint. The evening was glorious when we arrived, sunshine, warm breeze, not a midge in sight. We went to bed fairly early that night - we'd all been up at five to catch the plane to Glasgow, and the following nine hours of train and bus finished us off. Our plan was to do The Ridge. It is one of the longest mountaineering routes in Britain, and includes the only Scottish mountain that requires a rope to reach the summit. The route is almost 10km long and though the climbing is never above V.Diff standard, it has extended sections of moderate scrambling. Ha! That sounds easy, doesn't it!? That's what we thought anyway. It corresponds roughly to an Alpine climb of PD standard: "Peu Difficile." John had even brought a book on Alpinism - "Extreme Alpinism, climbing fast light and high". This explains Mark Twight's philosophy of fast daring ascents on the hardest Alpine climbs all around the world. Not completely applicable to our "Peu Difficile" climb in Scotland, but it served as an inspiration to us. We too planned to travel light, fast, and as high as you can get in Skye. Just under 1000m in fact. 
The Ridge itself takes ten to fourteen hours to complete, but this does not include the three hour walkin, or the three hour walkout... or other delays... The next morning could have been an Alpine start of 4:00am, but since we had to get the 1:15pm bus to Glen Brittle, the start of the Ridge, we just stayed in bed. Arriving in Glen Brittle we filled our water bottles, tightened our rucksack straps and started walking. We each carried enough food and water for two days, sleeping bags and some climbing gear. John must have skipped the "light" chapter in his Extreme Alpinism book though, as his bag was extended way over his head, and included such things as a kilogram of apples, a trangia, a weeks supply of meths and a litre of milk. I can't slag him too much though since he carried my fleece on the first day, and four weetabix for next days breakfast. The hike to the start of the ridge is long and agonizing. It starts at sea level and ascends eight hundred metres. It's pure slog, with scree slopes dotted here and there to slow you even more. Reaching the top is worth it. The featureless scree slopes end, and you find yourself on the brink of a precipice, a sharp ridge linking summits and twisted peaks all the way to the horizon. We could see properly for the first time our objectives: Caisteal a'Garbh-choire, the Thearlaich-Dubh Gap, Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, and lost in the distance the Inaccessible Pinacle, the Bhasteir Tooth and numerous other peaks. We reached Caisteal a'Garbh-choire quickly. Easy scrambing, but exciting because of the steep rock and the drop on either side. We decided to bivvy just before it. In retrospect we should have pressed on, but we were knackered, and weren't sure if we would find any more suitable bivvy spots further on. Anyway, we had made a start and would have all the next day to finish. The days are very long here in the summer. It was still quite bright when we finished eating at eleven, and even though I woke up several times during the night, it never really seemed dark. Finally at five the next morning, John kicked me awake and we had breakfast. Great stuff weetabix, gets you going in the morning. Porridge seems to be the mountaineers food of choice, but mountaineering books also seem to be full of climbers unable to eat, vomiting their food up, regurgitation etc. Someone should tell them about weetabix. The Food of Kings. 
The sky was still clear, and getting light. We were looking forward to another scorcher of a day. Then everything fucked up. In the space of a half hour the cloud descended. We watched as the summits along the ridge disappeared from view one by one. Finally we could no longer even see the Caisteal, only twenty metres away. It began to rain. Our optimism took a bad dent, and we thought bitterly of the sunny evening and morning we had wasted. We packed up and were moving again by six. Declan scampered up the Caisteal. It's only a diff, but with a big drop to boulders either side, and our rucksacks tugging us backwards, both John and I wussed out and called for a top rope from Declan. After strolling across the top of the Caisteal we abseiled down the steep far side. The scrambling that followed, linking three of the smaller summits is typical of the easier parts of the ridge. Nothing hard, but it has a feeling of exposure, and requires concentration. You have a wonderful feeling of moving fast over good rock. It was unfortunate that while the day before only the furthest peaks were obscured - by heat haze, today we could barely see each other. After an hour we reached the Thearlaich-Dubh Gap. Here our story reaches its sorry end. We missed the moderate scramble up to the gap in the mist. Declan attempted climbing the side of the tower, but backed off. We waited at the base for the conditions to improve, but the cloud seemed to thicken even further. Finally at about eight or nine we decided to back off the ridge. This was immensely depressing, and Declan was particularly against it. However, even though we had found the moderate route up the Thearlaich-Dubh Tower, we had to abseil into the Gap itself. After that there would be no going back, and no guarantee we could find another escape route. It was probably the best decision. Route finding is difficult on the ridge, especially in the mist. Even worse the rock is magnetic so a compass cannot be trusted. Parts of the climbing are marked as being treacherous in the wet. We even had difficulty retracing our steps to the Caisteal. From there we descended into Coir a'Ghrunnda. We slogged slowly, in silence, back to Glen Brittle. We then discovered that the bus from Glen Brittle doesn't run on weekends. After a age-long walk along the road in a steady drizzle a very kind climber from the North of Ireland stopped his BMW and offered us a lift. This was particularly kind considering how wet and smelly we were. The Ridge is a much more ambitious undertaking than we thought at first. It is very frequent for parties to back off. We made a mistake by not starting the ridge earlier. The forecast was good, but in Skye forecasts don't apply. The next day we went back and did another section of the ridge, from Bruach na Frithe to Am Basteir. It was a long grueling fourteen hour day, particularly the six hour hike home after descending from Am Basteir. We learnt again the difficulty of route finding on the ridge, where one shallow gully and chimney looks much like another. We got back to the tent too tired to even eat, and went to bed immediately after a shower. On Monday morning I left. John and Declan stayed on til Wednesday. they remained out of sync with the weather though. Monday was a good day, but they were so tired they spent most of it in bed... Tuesday reverted to high winds and downpours. 
They've left for Italy now, to do more routes like the ridge - but in the Alps and Dolomites. As John said, they'll be fit little fuckers by the end of the summer ;)
I know I'll be back to the Cuillin Ridge again - I won't be happy
until I do it. Next time I'll be far better prepared, and have a
better awareness of the size of the route.
|