Ben Nevis' steep northeastern side is nearly two miles wide and rises as much as 1,600 vertical feet, but those impressive numbers don't give the full picture. The wall is a complex maze of buttresses, gullies, and smaller faces that have yielded hundreds of individual routes. Moreover, with numerous routes starting higher the summit elevations of most Scottish peaks, the Ben has an extraordinarily long winter season for a low-elevation mountain, with some routes climbable until June. Long snow gullies allow easy access to various elevations — our route would start just 500 feet below the summit, after an approach of several hours. That's a lot of hiking for only three or four pitches of ice, but climbers who love Ben Nevis value the overall experience as much as the individual technical leads — a day on the Ben is very much an Alpine outing.

Although ice conditions on the upper mountain are usually very good, the weather is generally bad. Climbers carry compasses and laminated plastic cards showing the bearings for navigating off the cliff-lined summit plateau in a whiteout. Most veterans have a story or two of epic wind events. The best I heard at the Winter Meet was from a British climber whose name I didn't catch: He had topped out somewhere near Observatory Ridge in huge winds and whiteout, and he started crawling with his partner toward the summit, 500 feet away, with 15 feet of rope tied between them. Suddenly his partner vanished — he had broken through the cornice above Point Five Gully. The fellow at the meet said, “In all the blowing snow, I didn't even know where he was: I could see he'd fallen, but there was no weight on the rope. And then he was blown back onto the top by the updraft from the gully. I reeled him in like a fish.” It's possible I was being reeled in by this story, but every Brit at the meet seemed to have a similarly desperate tale from the Ben, so who knows?