PROGRESS OR CONSOLIDATION?
Early last season I walked into the Northern Corries with a view to taking some photos. The conditions were not ideal so I left behind the noise and general chaos that was choking Jacobs Ladder and scuttled diagonally across the slope towards Aladdins Couloir. An awkward little traverse led into the bed of the gully and suddenly it was quiet again.
One of the great things about climbing are the places you visit and the people you meet and who should be standing there but Andy Cunningham. Andy is a climber of some repute, one of the infamous "two Andy's" - Nisbet being the other - who between them took the Cairngorms and the north west Highlands by storm in the eighties. Perhaps Andy's most coveted climb was the first winter ascent of White Magic, which was immortalised in the BBC 2 climbing series The Edge.
Andy was instructing two novice students on the ins and outs of leading and had the whole gully to do it in. "That's some sack you've got on your back", he remarked, in his typically dry-witted manner. "How's it going anyway?"
We shook hands and chatted, largely about recently acquired aches and pains and things in general, while his students enthusiastically dug holes in the snow to bury ice axes and place Deadmen. The situation was very relaxed in the couloir and the conversation flowed, inevitably steering towards the conditions, who's doing what and ethics etc.
We must have sounded like a couple of old men harping on outside a corner cafe. We eventually concluded that cutting edge standards in winter had not really moved on in the last 15 years. Was I simply out of touch? Were both of us or was it true? On that note I left Andy and his two students behind and made my way to the top.
I thought about our conversation as I walked across the plateau towards the Lochain where I knew two friends would be climbing. Rock climbing standards were certainly lagging in Scotland and it appeared to me that they were in winter too.
Kenny Spence was a man of some vision, a climber who bridged the step-cutting and front-pointing era and was thought to have been one of the last of that generation to chop steps on Point Five and Zero Gully over consecutive days. Spence was a key figure in the development of modern, high standard mixed climbing, particularly in the early eighties, and was responsible, along with Hamilton, Taylor, MacKenzie and Anderson, for a string of outstanding routes that include Mousetrap, Tilt, Central Grooves and Centurian.
Spence always maintained that each important rise in winter invariably came from somebody with considerable attributes on rock. I have to confess, however, that I've always been intrigued as to just how hard the Scots climb on ice and mixed ground without being particularly adept on rock. From my own experience, it is not uncommon to witness climbers operating at V Diff or Severe, ascending classics grade V's, and with relative ease.
To get back to the topic of current day winter standards, history has shown that a period of consolidation generally follows an intense period of new route developments. Yes consolidation, I thought to myself, we're experiencing a period of consolidation. Mind you fifteen years is a long time to consolidate!
More recently Mark Garthwaite has proved that he is no slouch on rock and his Logical Progression - a one pitch sport-style winter climb, repointed and graded X,11 for an on-sight - certainly supports Spence's view. The rapidity with which Garthwaite is repeating other top routes further supports his ability and fitness as a rock climber.
I do believe however that a bold rock climber of average ability, E2 or thereabouts, yet extremely fit, possibly with alpine experience, tough and resilient to the hardships of winter, will possibly deal with the majority of top routes in Scotland. Now if we take that same person and increase their rock skills to say E7 on trad, an on-sight and redpoint ability of 8a and 8b+ respectively, add a touch of focus and vision - having sought a suitable line of course - then we should witness something quite special. This then begs the question - does such a climber exist in Scotland, or the UK for that matter?
On a final note, and to be somewhat opinionated (again), it seems odd to me that in this day and age climbers are still using aid on relatively short climbs, regardless of their significance and how admirable these ascents might be. In the late seventies during a free ascent of Titans Wall Hamilton said to me, "If we don't do it free, we don't do it at all".
His remarks have stuck ever since and yet over twenty years later we are still squabbling over aid. All said and done I do admire anyone who quietly goes out there and puts up first ascents without getting sucked into climbing politics or the increasing number of rules and regulations that climbers are occasionally expected to abide by.
We need those people and their climbs to provide something for the jackals. The two go hand-in-hand, those with the pioneering flair and those without. Armed with the knowledge that a line has been climbed and a psychological barrier broken down, the jackal tidies up the remains. This is how our pastime evolves - assuming of course that conditions on the day were acceptable - but that's a whole different topic!
Cubby
15/12/2000
