ML Assessment 3 day Exped

All I can say is the horror is over, the suffer fest has ended. I am now safely back down in Allt Shellach and have warmed myself and soothed aching muscles in the bath. What has just happened has happened, there is nothing left for me to do but wait for the verdict at 7pm.

To give you an idea of what we just did, we headed up into the grey corries, and arrived at our snowholing site at 4pm, after a couple of wet hour digging, we made our home.Due to the weather, it was drizzling as we dug our holes, and the weather was set to get warmer and wetter, requiring me to invest in a new gore-tex bivy bag at £150 a pop, my sleeping bag has a waterproof outer, but I feared that it just wouldn’t suffice under such conditions.

The night was a short one, as I got up ever hour to check that the snowhole wasn’t in the process of collapsing on us. Then at 2.30 we got up, rather late, and hurriedly packed. Not getting any breakfast, and then traversing the whole of the grey corries in a series of zig-zags up and down from the ridge. Until day break when we kept on going down and up stob bhan, before journeying on to our new residence of a bothy.

A few hours of shut eye and then we headed back out for some more night navigating up on the flanks of Stob Corrie Easian, and then returning to the bothy, for nearly a whole nights sleep. We ran into some guys from the peak who were excellent fun, and a light relief after the assessment process. Whats more they had great food and cake.

We walked out this morning, and thats the story so far. I currently don’t know the final verdict, but I feel I have given a good preformance over the 5 days, and whilst there is always room for improvement on these things, I am happy with what I have shown. I just have to wait a few hours for discussions to be had, and decisions made. The latest is that I will have a result by 7pm, mainly due to the course director having to be out on the hill today working.

On reflection come pass, fail or differment, I have had a good time. At despite it rain on us throughout our first night of traversing the Grey Corries, in what was one of the hardest three days of my life. I survived it, it was onteresting to hear from Dave the assessor that it was one of the worse ML assessment he’s worked on weather wise. Even more interesting, whilst we were having it up the Easain’s on our second night out, the assessor got a text to suggest we head back that night, and do something today.

Possibly the funniest thing of the whole expereince was getting back to the vehicle, and turning the radio, and Crowded House comes on the song was Weather With You, and the very lyric we turned on to was something like ” wlaking down the road in stormy weather”, little did they know!

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