Climbing at Symonds Yat

Alastair BegleyRock Climbing Short Link

With the largest piece of coursework of my degree due in within two weeks I am of course heavily procrastinating at the moment, with the beautiful weather on Sunday I was desperate to get out on some rock to make the most of it before it got cold and wet again this week but no one in Exeter wanted to play. So I drove up to the Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley picking Simon up from Chepstow on the way to introduce another one of my friends to outdoor climbing. This meant going back to VDiff again to determine what Simon could climb so we climbed the classic VDiff of the crag, Snoozin’ Suzie, which was fantastic and a great introduction for Simon into outdoor climbing. Climbing up out of the woods and being presented with a view of the Wye Valley was just fantastic! After this we headed over to the other side of the crag to climb up a big pinnacle, up the opposite side to us is a classic VS which is on my to do list but that can wait for another day. We headed up a. Read the full article…

Mountaineering in the Caingorms

Alastair BegleyLandscape, Scotland, Walking Short Link

Following on from my previous post about Winter Climbing on Ben Nevis I have just spent the week mountaineering in the Caingorms where we had a fantastic time. Other than the day we did Ben Nevis we managed two other walks, a day trip over to Glen Coe in order to visit Ice Factor, a visit to some waterfalls where we went for a rather cold swim and a trip to Dalwhinnie distillary. On the day we arrived there was hardly a cloud in the sky and it was really warm so we had a BBQ outside, but with the crazy Scottish weather 3 days later we woke up to large amounts of snow on the ground! On the first day we went for a local walk which I tried to do at New Year but had to turn back on that attempt due to being unable to stand up in the wind. It was a horseshoe walk up to  Sgor Gaoith and along the ridge to do a few other tops as well, it was a fantastic walk which we were able to relax nicely on to enjoy the summit views. On Monday. Read the full article…

Gardyloo Gully

Alastair BegleyScotland, Winter Climbing Short Link

Last week I was up in Scotland for a week, the intention was to go winter climbing but after stunning and really hot weather the two weeks before we headed up there was very little ice left so the prospect of doing any winter climbing was looking very unlikely. However due to a sudden change of weather over two days, from having a BBQ on the first evening then on Tuesday morning we woke up to several inches of fresh snow and freezing temperatures, this mixed with a northerly wind quickly sent Ben Nevis back to great winter conditions on the easier routes such as Gardyloo Gully. Armed with a positive weather & avalanche report from SAIS stating that on the northern aspects there was a low avalanche risk due to the northerly wind scouring the faces we made the decision to get up early and head up the north face of Ben Nevis. We  headed up to the CIC hut very early leaving the car at 7am and got to the CIC hut less than two hours later where we had to hide from the bitter wind as the weather forecast was not. Read the full article…