We all were more or less dry-tooling virgins, and so we started with the three easiest and lowest-angled dry-tooling routes, from D4 to D5+. The grades roughly correspond to mixed-climbing M-grades, but based on my limited mixed experience at Vail and other Colorado crags, they seemed slightly stiff—the routes we did felt like M5 to hard M6. (The short online guide to Newtyle suggests that D4 translates roughly to a Scottish technical grade of 6.) Even on the easiest routes, many of the holds and pick placements were manufactured. Up the hill was a deep, slanted cave whose roof was lined with rows of drilled holds and quickdraws. This was the Tube, home to Scott Muir’s Fast and Furious (D11), Dave MacLeod’s extension Too Fast Too Furious (D12), and MacLeod and Will Gadd’s Good Training for Something (D12+). It also held a 5.13d manufactured sport route that MacLeod had free-soloed, as well as an E7 traditional route that MacLeod also had free-soloed (because it has no pro).

As traditional-minded Britons, Colton and Long were highly skeptical of the small, muddy, manufactured crag when they arrived, but were willing to check it out, and they quickly found they enjoyed the technical and pumpy climbing. They even started speculating about where they might find similar abandoned quarries that might be equipped for dry-tooling near their homes in England or Wales. Sangzhu, who guides high-altitude climbs in the Himalaya and had trained as a guide in France, had never seen anything like this. He flailed a bit on the first route, but quickly got up to speed and flashed the hardest of the three lines we did, despite being handicapped with two frontpoints on each of his crampons, which made for sketchy footwork in the rock’s narrow toe slots.

I, too, found it compelling, and the lower-angled routes actually seemed like good practice for “real” climbing; the angle was something you might find in the mountains. (This statement belies my own inexperience: In fact, the limits of onsight, traditionally protected mixed climbing in Scotland are being pushed on vertical and overhanging routes, not on slabs.) I made good use of my leashless tools and took my first two leader falls in 25 years of wielding axes and crampons. No harm done.

The eye-opening quarry at Birnham might not be exactly what traditional Scottish climbers had in mind when they signed up to host the International Winter Meet. But the experience of climbing there was exactly the sort of exchange of ideas the meet was supposed to foster.