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Castle, Ledge, Curtain

Posted by Max Hunter on 15th February, 2015

Beginning of the day on Castle Ridge

The Shroud in the Background

Working for West Coast Mountain Guides with James and Nicola. We parked for Ben Nevis, and I don’t think I have ever seen so many cars in the North Face car park, or along both sides of the road leading to it – and this was still pretty early. The path leading up to the CIC was a little bit like the tourist track with quantities of people – so I knew it would be busy, and everybody was ahead of us by the looks of it. My vague idea of Tower Ridge went out of the window, due to numbers already on the route, so we went for the smaller brother of Castle Ridge, which only had 1 party on it. As we climbed I watched all the queues slowly move on all the ice climbs, including The Shroud (if you open the photo above and zoom in, you can see the climber).

After only yesterday for practice, Nicola and James are now proficient at using their crampons, so we made light work of Castle Ridge. I set up Nicola’s GOPRO at the top of the crux on it’s extendable arm, so it would film the pitch.

We walked up to Ledge Route, and came down the route, meeting nobody else along the way, until we got to The Curtain. We went over to the Curtain to say a sociable hello (Lena and Mark were busy on the first pitch), but before I knew what was happening – Nicola and James were climbing on that as well! So a brilliant end to an amazing first 2 days on crampons. My brief for the weekend was to get the couple crampon ready for the alps – job done. They started with Winter Skills on Friday morning and finished with The Curtain on Saturday afternoon. Thanks Nicola and James for great company, and for helping catch my van, when it made a bid for freedom on Friday morning!