Yesterday on The Ben

Awesome Weather looking out of an Temperature Inversion towards Ben Nevis

Well, I spent my last day in Scotland for a few days by heading up Anoach Mor, you can’t beat a bit of mechanical uplift, I then headed up towards Carn Mor Dearg via the awesome east ridge. Which was a near perfect alpine snow ridge from about 200m up it, I then turned left to the CMD Arete, again spectacular.

I got a little inspired by Uli Steck the other day, so tried to go Uli on its arse. I ran bits and bounced along the ridge, from a perfect inversion. (I hope you like the piccies BTW. Alway good to here if you do). Then back into the cold cloud before emerging for the final slog up to the summit. Again lovely weather so I thought I’d walk about nesr the rim to try and get some good shots of climbers topping out. Unfortunately, as I was looking I saw a walker disappear into rapidally rising clouds. Before I could get the  map out of my pocket all visibility was gone.

So I had an exciting 20 minutes as I relocated the main path and then the top of No. 4 Gully, I was going to reverse down No. 3, but having got myself into a navigation pickle, the best way out of it was No. 4 gully, mainly due to the large sign to be found at the top of it. Which I happily found, which meant I wasn’t lost on top of the Ben!

Anyway, the Uli trick, meant I was down by 2pm, thanks to Andy Townsend from JSMTC, otherwise known as Unpronouncable, who gave me a lift back down the Ben track.