Another trip up my favourite local scramble to the summit of the Kleiner Barmstein, this time with Erinna and Blackmore for company. We took bivy gear (including sleeping bags this time...) and awoke after a -8° night to a beautiful sunrise on the summit. Great to have Sweep the dog for company too. Woof.
A wonderfully white and silent morning tour to Baukogel 2224m with Evelyn. The 5am wake up was more than worth it to summit first through yesterday’s deep fresh powder. I only fell over once going down.
Winter had clearly not arrived in north west Scotland yet, but even so, Owen, Clay and I made a somewhat speculative hike up into Coire Mhic Fherchair. With the wrong mixture of wet rock and soft snow we abandoned climbing and topped out onto the col into a monstrous wind roaring across the mountains.
We pitched for £1000 of support from Berghaus at the Keswick Mountain Festival this weekend for the Altai 2012 Expedition. And we won! Here we are collecting a huge cheque from climbing legends Mick Fowler and Chris Bonnington.
Our main mountaineering objective in Uzbekistan was a route on Big Chimgan. After aborting our first attempt the day before in torrential rain, we set off in beautiful winter conditions the next day with Vladimir and Demenskaya. After many hours of uphill ascent we reached the bivy cave and geared up for the snow to come.
Sadly the heavy overnight snowfall was bonded terribly to the warm rock beneath and we we decided to bail a few hundred metres from the summit. The two locals were great company and also demonstrated some rather curious short roping techniques, although fortunately Erinna's first winter abseil was conducted a little more safely. It's a honeymoon, not an expedition!
Spent the morning introducing Matt to outdoor climbing at Birchen Edge. He excelled himself and followed me up some of the classic routes of the crag such as Camperdown Crawl and Topsail.
