Not a few climbers were nursing hangovers from the vicious schnapps brewed by the grandmother of Slovenian Rok Zalokar (who did a very hard new route on the 7,000-meter-plus Janak Chuli with Andrej Stremfelj last year). I’d managed to avoid the schnapps but not the draft ales poured in the upstairs bar of the Glenmore Lodge, and now I was happy just to set up at a table in the dining room for a day of noodling at my computer and chatting with climbers from around the world.

In three days of climbing, I’d already shared belays with Luca Maspes from Italy, Maciej Ciesielski from Poland, Fidde Jönsson from Sweden, Jo Dotremont from Belgium, and Nitzan Auerbach from Israel, not to mention hanging out with various British hosts and my American roommates Varco and Wilkinson. In the dining room and during long, stinky van rides, there were extraordinary opportunities to share stories and half-understood jokes. (English of various degrees of fluency was the common language.) The sun poked out that afternoon, but we could see clouds flying across the ridges and there were reports of natural avalanches in the Northern Corries above the lodge. Most climbers seemed happy to chill, but one van left for a tour of a nearby distillery, and another drove about an hour and a half to a small collection of dry-tooling routes at a slate quarry near Birnham.

The next day the weather was still poor and I was still feeling the fatigue in my legs, and so I opted to join a trio headed to the roadside Birnham quarry for a little experimenting with modern dry-tooling. Newtyle Quarry is as untraditional as they come, and had challenged Scottish ethics with its aid-bolted, drilled-pocket routes (pioneered by Dave Brown, Dave MacLeod, Scott Muir, and a few others). These routes were not mixed: Ice would rarely form at this low-elevation crag. They were just for practice or training or a new sport all their own.

I visited the quarry with Nick Colton, the deputy chief executive officer of the BMC, Steve Long, head of Mountain Leader Training UK, and Cirensangzhu (“Sangzhu”) from Tibet. We reached the wet, chossy crag in just a couple of minutes’ walk from the road. In addition to its dry-tooling routes, the crag had a couple of traditional lines and a handful of sport routes. “You know, this cliff has three different grading systems!” marveled Colton.