In reply to Horse:
I’ve actually had two epics on Big B. The first nearly killed me twice, and the second was just plain embarrassing.
The first was prior to taking up climbing, when I went with a mate to scramble Curved Ridge. It was early June, and looking from the car we could see just a ‘tiny’ bit of snow in the descent corrie. Hence we made Mistake No. 1. and left our axes behind. As we walked in, a large cloudbank moved in, and by the time we reached the mouth of Crowberry gully, we could see about 25 feet. We found what seemed to be the start of the route and set off. The scrambling was fairly easy to begin with, but slowly got harder and harder, until we reached a steep slab about 40 feet in height blocking all further progress up the now well defined ridge. After a quick conflab I set off up this thing, soloing in steel shanked leather boots. The holds were all rounded and sloping outwards, and by the time I was 30 feet up, I was both committed and terrified. Luckily I got to the top of the slab in one piece, but my mate refused to follow, and found an easier way past it, descending into the gully and bypassing it.
At this point the mist began to thin a little, and over to our right we could see another ridge with a group of scramblers on it. A brief shouting session of ‘what route are you on’ etc. confirmed our suspicions that we were on the wrong one. It turns out that I had just soloed the Hell’s Wall (?) pitch (severe) of D Gully Buttress (I think, memory is a bit woolly and I don’t keep my guides at work). We then scrambled across to Curved Ridge and reached the top of Crowberry Tower without too much difficulty. We were rewarded by an amazing cloud inversion, with our Brocken Spectres and Glories below, and The Ben, and a few of the other bigger peaks peeping through here and there. Quite magical.
Much later on we reached the rim of the corrie to descend (can’t remember it’s name, the great big one to the side of North Buttress that has the main tourist path/descent route) to find that the ‘tiny’ bit of snow we had seen from the car was in fact the headwall of the corrie, about 600 feet of it, banked out with iced up snow. Rather than detour miles, we decided to give it a whirl, and I set off tentatively plunging steps through the now freezing crust. After a few feet my rucksack pushed me out and I was away. Whoooooosh. It was great fun at first, but after a minute or so of making whooping noises, I realised that the boulder strewn slope beyond the snow was approaching me at something like 25 miles an hour. Miraculously I managed to hit the scree running and despite shredding both my shins managed to stay on my feet running like the clappers. I came to a halt about a further hundred yards down the corrie, and had ran straight between two other walkers, who had looked more than a bit startled. Had I caught my footing at any point, I would have been pretty badly hurt. On getting back home from the trip, I joined a climbing club.
The second epic there involved playing the experienced mountaineer to my then new girlfriend, setting off much too late, faffing about, and being forced to ab off the second pitch of an easy route because it went dark. If anyone collected a Hex 8 and a long sling from mid way up the second pitch of Agag’s Groove in 1995, can I please have them back. Flailing down the same corrie as before by head torch was tiresome in the extreme. The excitement was added to by the fact that we had parked in the lay-by on the far side of the road, which has a large sign saying NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. As we picked our way down the corrie we could see the orange flashing lights of a pickup truck, which we convinced ourselves was about to tow our car away. Luckily it wasn’t.
