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Rime and Punishment
Part IClag.This British climbers’ word perfectly describes the oppressive, wet, gray-black cloud that hung over the Northern Corries of Cairngorm at the start of the sixth British Mountaineering Council/Mountaineering Council of Scotland International Winter Meet. Forty-five people from 23 countries had come to sample the famous winter climbing of the small but fierce mountains of northern Scotland. Except there was no winter. Not much anyway. The ground was bare and it was claggy in the corries. At Glasgow’s Queen Street station, during a long wait for a train, I saw two men in kilts and three in shorts. In February. At the Winter Meet headquarters at Glenmore Lodge, a government-owned mountaineering center near Aviemore, no snow was in sight. The same was nearly true at the parking lot for the Cairngorm ski area. But here’s the thing about Scotland: That parking lot was jammed. Die-hard skiers and snowboarders were braving rain and clag, and paying good money, for a lift to strips of snow that would be sneered at during a bad winter in Pennsylvania. And, on a day when sun-spoiled Coloradans would roll over in bed and ponder which coffee shop to visit later in the morning, hundreds of climbers were packing up for the one-hour walk to Coire An t’Sneachda and Coire An Lochain: the Northern Corries. Days of thaw had stripped the snow from the corries’ rock buttresses and left only patches of waterlogged ice in the gullies. My partner and host for the day, a climber from outside London named Paul Seabrook, seemed to be sure we’d find something to climb—or at least we’d enjoy the trying. “That’s the thing about Scottish climbing,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to find when you walk up there, or even if you’ll get up anything at all, and so it’s that much sweeter when you do climb something.”
When we finally stepped onto steep, wet snow at the base of Coire an Lochan, we could look up through the mist and see climbers starting every moderate line in the cirque and a few of the harder routes. We picked a line called Central Crack Route. The route had been pioneered by the great Tom Patey, the legendary Scottish climber, doctor, and humorist, which in itself made it attractive. The grade was IV, 5: Translated, that meant the overall grade (IV) was in the middle of the scale, and the technical climbing (5) was slightly harder than average for a IV but well-protected. In practice, this meant about 50 feet of steep 5.6-ish rock climbing that was running with water, leading to slushy snow. The ancient granite sucked up wires and hexes (few climbers carried cams), and the snow seemed stable, though we could hear wet-snow slides hissing down the gully to our right.
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