The winter blizzards begin

Dave and Kev, happy men on snowy mountains

Fresh back from film school in Banff and with Dave just back himself from climbing travels in Spain, I was pretty keen on filming something again. Our friend Kevin Shields called and was psyched up to climb a hard route in the Cairngorms since winter had arrived in the highlands.

We were pretty keen to try some more filming in winter in Scotland. Filming harder winter climbs in Scotland has been very rarely pulled off because of the hardship of dangling around on a rope taking the full blast of a raging blizzard and the difficulty of actually shooting any useful footage. The damp cold of our climate has a habit of killing electrical equipment faster than you can say ‘condensation’.

We went, we stumbled in powder snow covered boulders, Dave rigged and abseiled into position. But it didn’t work out on the climb for Kevin this time. Dave thought it would be really good for both of us to go there anyway, even if we couldn’t film just to learn more about the logistics of filming winter mountaineering. We learnt, once again, that without a support team it’s really, really hard!

Baltic

The way down started off pretty scary for me, traversing steep ice slopes with my crampons getting clogged up with wet snow. But getting through all the snow covered boulder fields in the dark was the most tired I’ve ever been. I didn’t realise how fit you have to be to winter climb!