Tower Ridge

Tower Ridge is meant to be one of the the classic mountaineering days out in the British Isles, and the photographs say it all really. Even on Monday it was busy and despite a fairly early start at 8.00am from the car park we were pretty much last on the ridge. Everything would have been fine apart from a rather inexperienced party in front who struggled on anything remotely technical and seemed to want to pitch it in 20m rope lengths. As to the grade, under the conditions we climbed it in it was a straight forward grade III with the technical crux being the avoidable chimney at Douglas Gap

I had never done the ridge before so it was fantastic to do it on such a good day. After the first chimney it was quite a distance of grade I/II ground to the base of the little tower.

After about an hour and half wait in the sun we climbed the Little Tower in two long pitches with a 60m rope - all on ice. Another short flat section followed before another long wait for the Eastern Traverse to clear of other climbers.

The drop was awesome - very similar to No 3 Gully Buttress and the rest of the climbing to the Great Tower was pretty much banked out and everything was coated in a nice thick layer of ice. Mark dropped into Tower Gap and skirted round it on the left from where it we moved together for the last hundred-odd meters.

Just as we were finishing the route the clouds started to gather and we walked down in a light snow shower past halfway lochan and back to Allt A'Mhuillin. The sunset was spectacular as behind us the Ben gathered the clouds into the corries.