The first tool sounds hollow as it strikes into the ice. I adjust my stance and feed out rope, watching Aidan climb confidently up the stepped ripples of the first icefall. Though my gaze stays fixed on him, movement flickers at the edge of my vision in the corrie. To our left, a line of people queue to ascend the Last Post, and to our right, several groups follow each other up Staghorn gully. Both are staples of this legendary winter crag, which draws in climbers from across the world in the cold season to test their resilience. In the towering amphitheatre of Coire Ardair, on Creag Meagaidh Nature Reserve, the dark cliffs are encased in an intricate network of snow gullies and icefalls.
The winter wonderland before me brings back to the night before, when a seasoned winter climber informed me that this was the best winter they’d had in years. “It isn’t always like this,” he warned me, whilst sharpening his tools at the kitchen table of the Grey Corrie bunkhouse in Roybridge. “But that’s part of the fun of Scottish winter: you’ve got to make the most of conditions when they’re good, because they might be gone by the next day.”
It seemed like most of Scotland took heed of his advice the next morning, when the Creag Meagaidh car park lay rammed full of cars at 7am. Climbers marched swiftly up towards the Coire, eager to get ahead in the queues of parties that were bound to build up on the most popular routes.
By the time my companion, Aidan, and I reached the lochan, which rested partially-frozen beneath the tall cliffs, it was apparent that most of the popular routes were already congested.
“Well, I suppose we could go for Centre Post”, Aidan mused as we pored over the guidebook. “It’s only Grade III, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone on it at the moment.”
“Sure,” I shrugged, “I’m happy with anything, as long as we get on some ice.” It was my first winter climb, and I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.
A few more steps led me here: with the soft cushion of snow beneath my feet, the sharp sound of crampons kicking into the ice, and a small flurry of ice shards spiralling down onto my helmet.
“How’s the ice?” I call up to Aidan.
“It’s fantastic!” He shouts down. “The best I’ve ever seen in Scotland! Absolutely bomber… if you ignore the waterfall running down behind it.”
I chuckle, and before long it is my turn to swing into the ice. I pause to take out an ice screw. A third of it sticks out of the ice, which is too thin to take it fully. A hole in the ice reveals water streaming down behind it. The gradient levels as I top out of the icefall, and a section of ice the size of my rucksack breaks off from the rock. My pick meets schist.
“Hmm.” I mumble as I approach Aidan. “Not sure this ice would pass as ‘bomber’ in the Canadian Rockies!”
“Well, you’re not in Canada anymore,” he chides comedically in response, “you’re in Scotland, so you better get used to it.”
He makes a good point. Part of the skill of Scottish winter climbing is knowing how to negotiate rapidly fluctuating conditions with careful precision. This is evidenced in the next few pitches, where solid ice placements are dispersed with windows cutting through into the waterfall behind. In one narrow gully section, I find myself with one axe in snow, another in frozen turf, one foot on ice, and the other on rock. This, I think to myself, is what makes Scotland so unique. This is why I’m here. It’s impossible to feel bored when you’re working with four different mediums, each with its own set of challenges and techniques.
I stomp up a steep snow chute with 60 metres of runout, collecting a shiny ice screw lying in the snow en route, and bring Aidan up to join me. Ahead of us, another icefall drops down from beneath an overhanging buttress of rock.
“This pitch looks ace,” I comment.
“Yeah – finally some decent ice.”
Aidan heads up the ice, navigating an awkward traverse around the overhang and ascending into the cloud. For a moment, the cloud above him clears, and I see an intimidating wall of ice looming over us from a great height. I fail to pick out a suitable route through it from where I stand, but obstacles in the mountains often look different until viewed from up close. When I join Aidan at the next belay station, he points out that it is getting quite late.
“The sun will be setting in about an hour,” he informs me, “and we’re only two-thirds of the way up the route.”
“What does the description say about the rest of the route?” I ask.
“It says that we’ve done the crux, and that the rest of it is an easy snow gully. So, we should start moving faster than before.”
With further discussion, we ascertain that we’re both feeling energised and are comfortable with the concept of finishing in the dark. As cavers, climbing by torchlight is a familiar concept. We decide to continue climbing, on the basis that it will be quicker to walk off the plateau than to start abseiling down now. We continue up a couple of pitches with questionable belays on crumbly snow-ice. Night draws in. Clouds thicken, until we can see no more than five metres above us. I can’t even see Aidan’s light. Only the feeling of the rope in my hands and the sound of ice shattering down the gully inform me of his progress.
Time flows differently here. Suppressing shivers on the belay, I lose sense of whether minutes or hours have passed. I am lost in a world of shadow and snow, and nothing outside of it exists. Eventually, I hear a muffled shout of “Safe!” falling down the gully alongside another sprinkle of ice.
I yell “Off belay!” back into the fog, and the fog swallows it up. Soon, I am climbing upwards, and relishing the warmth flooding back into my body. I quickly find out why Aidan took longer than expected. Instead of daggering up an easy snow gully, I am swinging into vertical water ice. It is invigorating as well as surprising, and I whoop with excitement when I reach Aidan.
“That was fun!” I exclaim breathlessly.
“Yeah, it was,” Aidan agrees, “but it looks like there’s a load more ice ahead, and we only have five screws.” The belay is almost hanging, with the anchor constructed from a V-thread and a sling looped around a thick ice column. I am especially grateful for the long ice screw that I found in the snow, enabling stronger V-threads than we would have had otherwise.
Putting my headtorch onto full beam, I try my best to peer through the fog to see the route ahead. The steep wall of ice appears to continue for as far as we can see (which is not very far at all).
“You can lead that”, I inform Aidan with a chuckle. He sets off, traversing left up the ice, and is once again enveloped by cloud. With only five screws between us, our pitches are small, and the ice gets progressively steeper. Eventually, I pull over onto a flat ledge in a small rock shelter.
“Phew!” I exclaim with relief. “Somewhere we can actually rest!”
Aidan and I tuck into a snack – realising we haven’t eaten since starting the route – and discuss the next section of ice. Sharp fangs of ice hang down from above, marking the end of the gully with an ominous overhanging wall. We huddle inside the lion’s jaw.
“What time is it?” Aidan asks, “It must be nearing 7pm now.”
I check my watch, surprised to find that actually it is already 9:30pm. We estimate that we’re only around 30 metres below the plateau, but the bulk of ice between us and the top seems formidable. I lie out on my back, peering up at the icicles, while Aidan leans out on the rope and swings from side to side.
“Yeah, screw that,” he concludes, “we’re going to have to head down”.
I groan. Finding anchors to rappel off for some of the pitches will be challenging, and we’re about 400 metres off the floor at this point.
“Are you sure it isn’t best to wait for rescue?” I query. “This is the only place suitable along the route to wait in a bothy bag. Once we start descending, we’re committed.”
After another 10 minutes discussing our options, while the wind swirls snow around the cave mouth like a dragon’s breath, we decide to bail. Having both spent many days exploring the ends of the earth on caving expeditions, we are reconciled to long nights in adverse weather conditions. In truth, we usually enjoy them.
Aidan abseils down 30 metres – as far as our rope can reach – and I barely hear his call of “Rope free!” above the howling wind. For a moment the isolation feels daunting. I become vividly aware of the fine line that we are walking, only one mistake away from death. Leaving the comparative safety of the cave takes an extra psychological push, but once I’m descending the rope I feel like myself again. I thrive best when suspended in space, my body curling around the darkness like a cat at someone’s feet. Though I feel small and vulnerable, that is exactly why I am here: to be reminded that I am part of something bigger.
We pull the rope down, and thread it through the next anchor: a singular V-thread. As I wait for Aidan to finish abseiling, I notice streams of water dripping from the icicles around us and flowing down the ice. The temperature has risen alongside the wind, and rain lashes my face relentlessly. Winter in the Scottish hills has always been fickle, but it is becoming increasingly unpredictable as the climate changes. I descend the rope as fast as I can, doing my absolute best to stop imagining the V-thread breaking.
“Good news,” Aidan remarks when I join him at the next belay. “We’ve got a piton to use this time!”
The ice is melting fast, so this is very relieving to hear. I join him at the anchor which consists of the piton backed up by a nut.
“I’ll go down first, and if the piton holds, you can –” Aidan is interrupted mid-sentence as the piton falls out of the rock. We drop – then jolt to a stop as the nut holds. It saves us from a potentially fatal fall.
“Oh my god,” I exclaim, “does this count as an epic yet?” I laugh nervously, adrenaline coursing through my veins.
“Yeah, I think we might be easing into epic territory.” Aidan responds, and begins hammering the piton in. “There. Hopefully it holds this time.”
We backtrack on our original plan to take the nut with us, deciding that safety of leaving it is more important than the financial cost of replacing it.
The abseil brings us to the middle of the large snow gully. By the time I reach Aidan, he is already leaning into the snow, arms outstretched as he shapes a snow bollard – a horseshoe trench in the snow. The snow is too soft to be an ideal anchor, but it is all we have.
“I’m not sure I like the look of that,” I remark.
“I don’t love it either,” Aidan replies, “But I’m afraid we don’t have a choice.”
He eases gingerly onto the rope, which slides into the snow, but the bollard holds.
“It’s probably best if we downclimb, and put our prusik on the rope to use the bollard as back up,” Aidan muses.
He proceeds to dagger down the gully, disappearing over a lip and switching to downclimbing a section of vertical ice. I stand above him on a small belay ledge we have dug into the snow – my foot placements are good, but my only anchor is my pair of axes resting in the snow above me. As I wait in the darkness, the adrenaline that has fuelled me for 6 hours begins to subside, and I drift dangerously close to sleep. I enter a cycle of nodding off, and jerking back to consciousness as my body begins to tip backwards.
After drifting in and out of consciousness for an unknown amount of time, a faint call drifts up with the wind, and the rope goes slack. It is my turn to downclimb. I dagger down the snow gully easily enough but find myself having second thoughts at the top of the ice section.
“I really don’t like this!” I shout to Aidan.
“You’ve got it!” he calls up. “This is the worst bit, and then it gets better!”
I feel tears building up, but I swallow them quickly, knowing that they won’t help me to get down any faster. Downclimbing water ice 200 metres above the ground, with a thawing snow bollard as my back up, wasn’t how I expected my first winter climb to go. I kick downwards, controlling my breathing and concentrating on each step. The ice has thinned considerably since our ascent, and a torrent of water flows behind the ice. I curse loudly as my foot blows, the ice crumbling away beneath it.
“Well done, you made it!” Aidan cheers me on when I meet him. “For a moment there, I thought we might have some tears.”
“Yeah,” I agree, “It was close. Nothing a chocolate bar can’t fix though.”
While I rummage in my rucksack for a snack, Aidan attempts to pull the rope down.
“Oh no,” I hear him mutter, “not now.”
We both try tugging the rope from different angles, but it doesn’t budge. Once again, we find ourselves with only one option: to climb back up and free the rope. Aidan starts climbing back up, using his prusik on the rope for back up, while I wait on the small ledge below. I switch my torch off to save the battery and realise that we’re just below the cloud base. Even with the dense cloud above, the snow in the coire below is bright enough that I can make out the crags on the other side of it, and the charcoal smudge of the lochan in the middle.
Shivering with cold, being lashed by rain in the early hours of the morning, I smile to myself. Earlier in the day, the crag was full of other parties – but now, we are the only ones here. The isolation brings with it an ability to experience the raw, untamed nature of the Scottish mountains. I feel completely alone and intensely alive. The line between suffering and joy is an incredibly blurred one in this environment: for winter climbers, one feels much like the other. The true test of Scottish winter climbing is not to send the hardest grade, or to climb the greatest number of routes – but to weather storms with a calm resilience.
Eventually, Aidan climbs back down to me, and the rope pulls easily this time. We build an anchor – forced to abandon more nuts – and repeat the process again. I think I hear a whoop in the distance, but put it down to the wind. It would not be the first time I think I have heard voices on the side of the cliff tonight. As I descend, what was once ice is now a gushing waterfall splashing up my sleeves and over my legs. It feels more like canyoning than winter climbing. The landscape looks so different that I don’t notice the ground below until I am nearly on it.
“Wahooo!” I cry as I abseil the final 10 metres. “We made it!”
The mountain is waking again. It is 6:30am, and as we descend the path to the car park, we pass fresh climbers on their way up to a world that, only an hour before, felt like ours alone.
“You two have either had a very short day, or a very, very, long one!” One passerby exclaims.
“It’s the second one,” I sigh in response.
“Ha – we’ve all been there,” the climber responds. “Well done for making it down! Enjoy your well-earned rest.”
As we walk back to the car park, the exhaustion sets in, and fresh light leaks across the hillside. Somewhere high above, shrouded in cloud, our abandoned gear still sits on the mountain. We leave it there without regret. What matters is that we are walking out safe and under our own steam – tired, soaked, and quietly elated – carrying with us the kind of night that will stay with us for far longer than any summit.
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