Climbing Routes: Buachaille Etive Mor – The tale of 2 idiots and a big Scottish mountain

I haven’t posted much about climbing routes recently. Sorry about that. The summer hasn’t been up to all that much weather wise so I haven’t managed to get as many outdoor climbs as I hoped I might. However there have been some adventures, and I’ll share those with you over the next couple of weeks. The first is one on Buachaille Etive Mor (Big Herdsman of Etive) at Glen Coe in Scotland.

Ever since we began climbing a couple of years ago, David and I vowed we would go to Scotland and climb some big routes. We both work full time in jobs where we have to book time off in advance (at the moment anyway). So we booked a long weekend for the last weekend in July. The plan was to head out on Friday and drive back the following Tuesday. It’s a 7 hour drive so we elected to drive as far as New Lanark, stay over and drive up to Glen Coe early the following morning.

Friday morning we hit the road at 7am on our merry way to Glen Coe, stopping for a hearty breakfast at one of the villages along the way. The journey took a fair bit longer than expected, and by the time we pulled up alongside the monster Etive Mor we were anxious to get started before the ominous big black clouds that loomed overhead dumped their watery load on us. Unfortunately (and rather typically) we hadn’t planned ahead very well on the food front. Between us we had half a family size bag of crisps and a large can of Monster energy drink – very poor indeed.

Our route of choice was on the South East Face, Rannoch Wall. Allegedly an hour and a quarter walk-in. The route: Direct Route, a 237m Severe (4a). Excited at the prospect of some good quality climbing on a big route, we stashed our half bag of crisps, guzzled the can of monster and began the walk in.

Our first mistake was that we walked in from the wrong direction and started to ascend way too early. We approached from the North East and started up the east side, this lead to some pretty horrific scrambling on a mixture of loose rock and wet grass. Eventually this lead up a soaking wet gully, narrowing to a point with walls either side. From here the only way to get out would be to climb on some really wet, slimy rock, and work our way around to the South East Face. I took the lead and moved over the treacherous slime, relieved to find some nice clean, dry rock above. Placing a piece of protection I quickly moved up to a belay stance on a large ledge.

Once David had joined me we spent about 30 minutes looking at the guide book and the rock face in front of us, trying to establish where we were. We eventually decided (with much uncertainty) that by some miracle we had actually reached the first platform, the start of the climb.

As always, I took the first lead. It was a steep 20 metre pitch, most of which was up a fist-wide crack. The initial moves felt pretty hairy; a short, fingery traverse then a big step to bridge a wide gap to place myself beneath the crack. I felt better once I had reached up and placed one of our nice new cams into the crack above. Catching my breath I moved up and established myself within the crack. The climbing felt more like the Very Severe climbs that I have tackled in the peaks, than the alleged severe grade that the guide book suggested. However, reaching into the crack revealed small but positive holds just when you needed them most, and the width was perfect for a pretty secure foot jam. This all made for an engaging and enjoyable first pitch.
At the top was ‘Abraham’s Ledge’, a small, uncomfortable ledge with loose rock and spikes adorned with old pieces of tat for abseiling off. I built a belay and settled in to what was to become my home for around the next hour!

I had worried that I might have made a bit of a meal of that first pitch, and that David would breeze up it and think we a wimp. I needn’t have. On several occasions he called up asking how I had tackled certain sections, this made me happy.

Once David had completed the first pitch, I passed him the rest of the gear so that he could start pitch 2 (the alleged crux). this is where things started to go ever so slightly tits-up!

As David made his way up the relatively short pitch (only 12m) the rain started to come down. I kept trying to stand up and peer round the corner to track his progress as he seemed to be taking an age. Eventually he managed to get level with Greig’s Ledge, at which point he had to make an awkward traverse movement to get onto the ledge. From where I was sitting, the move looked OK, but David was having huge problems. As he moved round onto Greig’s Ledge he went into complete meltdown! “You OK bro?” I inquired. “No, I’m really panicking” came the reply. “Don’t worry mate, your gear is just round the corner” I yelled back at him. By now, small, loose rocks were starting to rain down from the upper ledge, bouncing off the slab directly above me. I leaned into the rock hoping that nothing bigger would come!

After what seemed like a lifetime of gasps, whimpering and a string of expletives, David got to a safe spot and built his Belay.

I took a more direct route, directly under the corner onto Greig’s Ledge. It was only when I moved up onto it that I realised why David had been so freaked out. The move onto the ledge had no holds and the start of the ledge was a smooth, sloping ramp, green and wet with bits of scree all over it. It felt unnerving as a second, I imagine it was pretty horrific as a lead!

By this point, the rain was pretty heavy and we both felt a bit out of sorts after the drama we had endured to get this far. The moves to get started on pitch 3 looked like they would be OK in the dry, but awful in the wet. We decided not to take any chances, so I lead a good 50 metres of scrambling up the wet rock to the right of the climb, which appeared to take us to the top of the route.

We pulled out the guide book to check our options for getting down. By this point it was absolutely chucking it down with rain and our book was becoming soggy. The description for the walk off was rubbish, but we attempted to follow the instructions, and set off down a narrow path with a big drop off to our left. We came to a gully which had the look of a way down, but would be too serious as a down-climb. I spotted a big spike, which we decided to use to abseil from. Tying our twin 60m ropes together (with big knots on the ends in case they weren’t long enough), we hooked them over the top of the spike and David lowered himself a good 40 m down the gulley to a big platform. I followed shortly after.

When I reached the large platform below I was disappointed to discover no obvious route down. We had a quick look around, but it all looked really sketchy. The last thing we wanted to do was abseil into a place we wouldn’t be able to get out of! We decided to pull the ropes through and have a more thorough look around. David pulled one of the ropes, but to our horror they were stuck fast. We both tried heaving away at it and whipping both ropes to try to clear any obstruction but it was no good, they were well and truly stuck.

At this point David seemed to go into a sort of mini melt-down, convinced that we were starting to get into real trouble. I still felt fairly up-beat, but that wasn’t to last…

We decided that the only course of action was to climb back up and retrieve the ropes. David set of up a steep embankment once again on a mixture of rock and now very wet grass. He powered up like a man possessed, with me struggling to keep up. Upon reaching the top we agreed that I would examine the guide book again while David retrieved the ropes. After a good ten minutes of sitting in the rain, pawing over the ever more soggy book I went after him, with a bit of a plan.

When I reached the top of the gulley, David had more or less sorted the ropes out and was eager to hear my plan. I think he thought that I might have somehow magically extracted more detail from the book or gained some kind of mystical insight. In practice, all I really had was “Erm, I think we need to keep ascending, up there behind the gulley, and make another assessment”. This seemed to satisfy David, so off we went.

The ascent entailed a few moves up a grade 2/3 scramble. In the middle of it was a large stone with a tiny cave underneath it. “We might be sleeping in there if we can’t find a way off mate” said David, now quite cheerful. I shuddered at the thought. My clothes were wet through, we had no food, there was no way I was going to spend the night under that rock!

Once past the scramble the terrain opened out onto big scree fields with a ridge running across the top. It was very misty so we couldn’t tell if the ridge was the summit or not. By this time, it was around 7:30 in the evening. We probably had around 2 hours of daylight left. Both of us had headlamps, but the idea of descending by torchlight in the wet was less than appealing.

“It’s this way” said David, and confidently strode off in the direction of another gulley. Being David’s older brother, I have know him all his life and have come to recognise his uncanny ability to come across as absolutely sure of something when in reality he hasn’t got a clue! I hesitantly followed him down a steep embankment toward another gully, thinking “I gotta bad feeling about this…”

David’s chosen descent looked like the jaws of Hell! I protested but he just kept shuffling down a few inches at a time on his ass, shouting “it looks do-able”. After a good half hour of shuffling up and down, it was obviously not do-able! This combined with the previous shenanigans took us to around 8:30, at which point I decided enough was enough!

“Dave, I think we should call Mountain Rescue”
“Awww, your f**king joking”
“Nope. We don’t want extraction, we just want some advice”
“Well you’re calling them then”
“Fine pass me your phone”

David reluctantly handed over his mobile, and I dialled 999…

After telling our sorry tale to a Police officer, I was called back by a guy from the local mountain rescue team. He was massively helpful.

I was able to describe our location, and he recognised it almost immediately. “You’re almost at the top” he said, “Just head toward the ridge and you’ll find a path”.

I followed the instructions of my new best friend on the phone as he described, in incredible detail the terrain I was to look out for. We happily bounded down the path until the guy on the other end of the phone told me that we would soon lose signal. He was dead right, we did lose signal, but not before he told me where the descent proper began – whew!

Just before we lost our telephone guide, David and I saw saw a stag in the mist, only 15 metres or so away. He didn’t seem startled, and stood there for quite a while as we bounded down the path. It was a beautiful sight and felt like a good omen, now that we were safely on our way down.

The actual descent took us to around 10pm. Neither of us had eaten more that handful of crisps and a few berries that we picked, since breakfast, we were ravenous and relieved to have ended our failed mission. On the way to the hostel at Glen Nevis we stopped off for Chinese, ordering battered sausages to eat while we waited (David had a pie too). Never before has a battered sausage tasted so good!