Weather actually surprisingly nice (ish). Had a walk over the Devil’s staircase to Kinlochleven, bagged the geocache at the top, saw rather a good rainbow.

Long slog up hill. Clag. Long slog up hill. Rain. Long slog up hill. Wind.

At which point we decided that suffering wasn’t the name of the game, and retreated in search of tea and toast.

Daylight dawned depressing. The hills turned out to be green rather than white, which wasn’t *quite* what we wanted. I intoduced people to the delights of geocaching - I think I have more converts.

Then back to the cottages . . . where I have been exiled to a different room for snoring. ::o)

Wednesday night, Self, Horse, CarolineMc, and the Fussy Pussy here early enough for the pub. Captain Paranoia and Rob Naylor just arrived. We shall wait and see.

“Bramble Buttress? You where?”

 Tremadoc, apparently. And very nice it was too. It being the third weekend, we has a couple of new-to-outdoor-climbing, new-to-the-club bods along, and after something of a fiasco further along the whole confusing mess that is Treemudrock it was just what we needed. I led the whole thing - the bod seconding still learning to extract gear, never mind place it - and jolly good fun it was too.

So that was Saturday. And on Sunday, we went for a play in the slate quarries. Where the club Neanderthal, sure of instinct, went for a trad route and sent Dan up it.  I seconded, and it really was a total b*stard. Sorry, but I prefer rock that actually has friction.

Still, good weekend.

(Score so far:
Winter Routes (survived): 3
Sport Routes (seconded): 5
Trad Routes (seconded): 1.5)
Trad Routes (led): 1.5

I hadn’t been up Creigiau Gleision before. It’s one of those slightly off-the-beaten-track hills that doesn’t immediately spring to mind when planning a walk in Snowdonia. It only came to my notice because there was a geocache up there I hadn’t found yet.
Walked up there on Saturday and the view off the top was a cracker! Highly recommended.

Dan has a new car. It’s very new and very shiny and doesn’t look like a climber’s car at all. I offered him some of the litter out of mine (two empty Red Bull cans, a chip paper and a pasty wrapper, to be precise) to make it look a bit more used, but he said no, he’d rather keep it pristine.
This probably explains why it was me who ended up driving round to Cwm Idwal. And then halfway back up the Oggie Valley, since the good conditions and late-even-for-us start had left parking spaces at something of a premium.
Trogging round the Llyn, we dug the guidebook out and considered. Someone appeared to be trying what looked like a very thin route on the slabs: we picked on the gully just right since it looked fairly user-friendly and didn’t seem to have anyone on it. Gear on, rope out and Dan was away, stopping intermittently to furtle screws in. Somewhere behind me, the party from the slabs, defeated, trudged off in search of something more possible.

I looked at my watch and the old familiar jitters started up, a lurking sense of “we’ve started too late, we’re dooooomed”. Too late to do anything about it now, if you wanted to bail you should have said so earlier, now get a grip and climb the frigging thing. Whack, whack, stamp, stamp, stand up and whack, and suddenly all the tension melts away and I am the happiest little nut in North Wales. This is perfect, this is awesome, I could keep doing this forever, more please, gimme more!

At the top, we shared a little lukewarm ribena. I don’t know why it has to be ribena, but it does. It doesn’t work anywhere nearly so well with orange. We followed the footprints off and scrambled down via a little gully that’s probably horrible in summer, but well worth remembering as a descent in winter.

Down. In daylight. We are not going to have an epic. We’ll be back to the car in daylight. Romp off down the path, crampons still on due to the ice, and . . .

“Are you Ok there?” Silly question, she clearly wasn’t Ok, people who’re Ok aren’t usually lying in the snow grimacing in pain. Out come the belay jacket and the blizzard bag, out comes the phone, no signal. We mug the next party past for any spare warm clothes and they have a phone on a different network that does, amazingly, want to play ball.

“Can you call the mountain rescue for us, please?”. He gives me a somewhat panicked look and hands me his phone.

“Emergency - which service?”

“Police, please.”

“North Wales Police”

“Hello, can I have a mountain rescue call-out, please?”

More details, and it turns out the MRT have already been called and are on the case. We do our best to cheer the casualty up while she’s waiting. I venture the opinion that she’s lucky she fell over here rather than Llanberis - the Ogwen rescue team have much nicer bums than the Llanberis team . . . . .

We eventually got back to the car just after 9pm.

Sunday morning was a nightmare. Getting out of bed felt physically impossible, we started stupidly late again and I felt hopelessly knackered. I will freely confess that I was in far too much of a bad mood about not very much. Fortunately Dan was well up for more climbing and had enough motivation for both of us - and, as usual, the first few feet of climbing were enough to chase away the blues. We climbed the Idwal Stream, plenty of water coming down under the ice but the route was still perfectly climbable. And so endeth another weekend in North Wales.

Stuff learnt: Taking the back stiffener out of your rucksack stops it knocking your helmet over your eyes. At the end of a long day out without drinking very much, drink lots of water before bed or you *will* feel like shit the following day. If one phone doesn’t work, try one on a different network. Getting someone with an immovably-painful leg into a bag doesn’t work, something blanket-shaped would be a far better bet. Stretcher carries are chuffing hard work.

Oh, yes . . . that’s the only time I have ever called 999.

(Score so far:
Winter Routes: 3
Sport Routes (seconded): 4
Trad Routes (seconded): 0.5)

LOTS of snow today, and the boss is making worried noises about people getting home. Apparently the official advice from the Powers That Be is:

“For Gawd’s sake don’t do it! Don’t even THINK about trying to travel anywhere! There’s SNOW! It’s DANGEROUS! You’ll be KILLED TO DEATH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The official advice from Wingnut’s Desk of Public Disinformation:

“Clean all the snow off the windows before you set off, leave big stopping distances and look where you’re going for a change.  Don’t try to brake or turn violently as it may not work. Then dig through the kit cupboard for your crampons and hope there’s still some left in the hills at the weekend.”

Was at a party on Saturday night. Given that the Birthday Bloke is a climber, you’d expect a fair few climbers among the guests. Amazing how easy it was to tell just by looking which ones they were.