28 May

The wind dropped during the night and the next morning it was possible to be out of the tent. Large amounts of snow were now piled up against tents, food boxes, barrels of gear and anything else left outside. My tent porch facing into the wind was completely full of snow. Everyone spent some time digging in the snow. John had left his skis lying down and now they were completely buried. Luckily he knew roughly where they were and so it did not take too long to find them buried under a foot of snow.

The day before Glen had seen a mountain around the back of the range we had been exploring so far. It looked straightforward. No one had been up it so Glen and I decided to go around and do it. To get there we would have to cross some terrain that looked like it could be crevassed so we took a rope, harnesses, crampons etc, but not mountain boots, just ski boots. We skied down to the col between Dickens Bjerg and Mallory Fjeld. Glen had been down that way the day before and knew what it was like. The other side of the col drops down steeply and is bare blue ice - impossible to ski on and probably not too pleasant to walk on in crampons. It was just possible to skirt around the eastern edge where there was a slim passage of snow between the rock walls of Stob Coire an Lochain and the ice. This was steep so we both took our skis off and walked down. On a previous day Paul had tried it on his skis, side slipping his way down, but lost it. He fell over and slid down on his side off the snow and onto the ice. The then skidded over the ice for 20 meters until the angle eased and the snow returned and he came to a stop. He was luck to be only bruised after such a fall. We made it without incident to below the ice and put skis back on for the remainder of the descent down into the lower valley.

From the valley we were to skirt around an icy area and then over the main glacier leading down to the sea. Looking around we changed our minds. Besides us was a mountain we had not climbed yet. We could see what we thought could be a way up. It did not look like a straightforward snow plod which we knew our intended summit was, but it looked interesting. It was also much closer. So we decided to give it a go.

The mountain we decided to climb instead of our original summit. The route goes up the snow gully and the rock gully in the center to the nick in the ridge

The first four fifths would be technically easy. Up the snow scoop on skis are far as possible and then on foot. A snow gully looked to lead most of the way to a notch in the summit ridge. The top of the snow gully led into a rock gully that looked to have a number of steps in it separated by small snow slopes. Once onto the ridge we would traverse along it to the summit. It was very much an unknown, looking from below it's always hard to tell how hard such routes are. The foreshortening makes everything look smaller than it is.

We skied a good distance up purely on wax. The angle of the snow started shallow and slowly got steeper until skiing did not make any more sense. It was not until we looked back down at our tracks did we release how much ascent we had actually made on skis. It would make a fun descent on the way back. Out came the rope, harnesses and crampons and we geared up. I took the lead and slowly plodded up in big zigzags and then took a more direct route when it got steeper and I kicked steps into the soft snow. The snow gully was fine until I hit the first rock band. It consisted of steps around three feet high. The edge of each step was rounded and the top sloped outwards and was covered in gravel and stones loosely frozen is place. There were no good hand holds to aid climbing up and crampons would skitter around on the rock. I slowly made progress over the first band and got into the middle of the second when i got a bit stuck. Since we did not expect to be scrambling over rock we had not brought any rock gear. I had nothing to protect myself with. Below Glen was getting cold from inactivity and stood in the shade. I only needed to get up one more step and then would be on snow again until the next step. I could get down but it would be slow and require quite a detour to get around the current problem. So I wedged my ice axe into a crack and belayed from that.

Glen could then get moving to warm up and find another way around to get above me and further up into the gully. He managed this and got 20 meters above me before it became hard again on dodgy rock. He had got a little way up the next rock step but progress was now slow. It was time to consider our position. We were lacking in rock gear. All we had were a few slings and a couple of ice-screws. We had brought gear to get someone out of a crevasse, not to go rock climbing. Looking up it looked like we had a lot more rock to get over before we would reach the ridge. We also had to be able to get down again. Normally you can abseil over stuff that is not easy to downclimb but we had seen little we could use as an anchor. All spikes were just loose lumps of rock. Maybe we could have pushed on and reached the summit, but we decided against it. We didn't have the right gear and it would be too easy to get into a situation it would be hard to get out of. So Glen belayed me off the last step of rock I was on and then I traversed sideways and then down another way. I managed to find a thread to protect Glen as he came down than descended further until all the rope was out. Glen then followed down. That put us below the difficulties and back into the warm sun. We soon walked back to the skis. What we had done had been fun. If this had not been the last full day of the expedition we would of probably come back another day with the right gear and had another go. It looked like an interesting route with some real technical difficulties, but still do-able. Defeat and living to try again is all part of exploratory climbing.

Looking down on Glen as we descend back to the skis.