So this weekend Sam and Jenny got married at Helensburgh, followed by a reception at Auchendenan House on the banks of Loch Lomond.
It was such a beautiful day, Jenny looked fabulous in the most amazing dress, and Euan and I rocked the modern Highland look to the max...
Later, after a daylong orgy of fine food and booze we all got down to some full-on ceilidh action, over-looked by the stags and portraited Scots ancestry hung on the walls of the Great Hall...
On Sunday Rachel and Euan bailed back to Edinburgh, so I joined a merry band headed up north to soothe our foggy heads in the hills.
Without having brought along a sleeping bag, Sunday night was a cold one but Monday dawned warm and bright. A day that starts with jumping off a waterfall into the Etive river is always going to be good, and this was no exception. After a lazy morning of tea, crepes and flapjack, Tom, Diana & I bid farewell to the others and went round to the Buachaille. After Tom had backed off a solo of The Chasm the evening before, he seemed pretty psyched for a big classic route. Bludgers/Revelation was the obvious choice and on the sweaty walk-in, the mountain had a much friendlier ambience than on any previous visit. However, once in the shady confines of Great Gully the foreboding rock architecture began to do it's thing and my throat dried a little. Ignore it and get on it, I told myself and went about racking up for the first steep groove pitch. This went quickly and pretty easily, bridging upwards from jug to jug with gear between every few moves - my kind of pitch! Flailing on this pitch with wooden fingers last July seemed a distant memory. Bludgers is certainly a route for a very warm day as the lower portion of Slime Wall gets no direct light, and even today Diana and I shivered in the breeze as Tom took time getting slighty lost on the ramp above. From the outset, the climbing on this route is exposed as the gully drops way steeply, and on the upper section this goes from
wild to
outrageous! Delicate climbing across the ramp on the most perfect rock takes you to the famed Revelation flake - a welcome jug-haul above the growing void. A final easy pitch took us out on to North Buttress and back into the sunlight...
Another beautiful Highland evening on the deserted summit. Bring on the Real Food Cafe. May has been awesome again...
So this weekend Sam and Jenny got married at Helensburgh, followed by a reception at Auchendenan House on the banks of Loch Lomond.
It was such a beautiful day, Jenny looked fabulous in the most amazing dress, and Euan and I rocked the modern Highland look to the max...
Later, after a daylong orgy of fine food and booze we all got down to some full-on ceilidh action, over-looked by the stags and portraited Scots ancestry hung on the walls of the Great Hall...
On Sunday Rachel and Euan bailed back to Edinburgh, so I joined a merry band headed up north to soothe our foggy heads in the hills.
Without having brought along a sleeping bag, Sunday night was a cold one but Monday dawned warm and bright. A day that starts with jumping off a waterfall into the Etive river is always going to be good, and this was no exception. After a lazy morning of tea, crepes and flapjack, Tom, Diana & I bid farewell to the others and went round to the Buachaille. After Tom had backed off a solo of The Chasm the evening before, he seemed pretty psyched for a big classic route. Bludgers/Revelation was the obvious choice and on the sweaty walk-in, the mountain had a much friendlier ambience than on any previous visit. However, once in the shady confines of Great Gully the foreboding rock architecture began to do it's thing and my throat dried a little. Ignore it and get on it, I told myself and went about racking up for the first steep groove pitch. This went quickly and pretty easily, bridging upwards from jug to jug with gear between every few moves - my kind of pitch! Flailing on this pitch with wooden fingers last July seemed a distant memory. Bludgers is certainly a route for a very warm day as the lower portion of Slime Wall gets no direct light, and even today Diana and I shivered in the breeze as Tom took time getting slighty lost on the ramp above. From the outset, the climbing on this route is exposed as the gully drops way steeply, and on the upper section this goes from wild to outrageous! Delicate climbing across the ramp on the most perfect rock takes you to the famed Revelation flake - a welcome jug-haul above the growing void. A final easy pitch took us out on to North Buttress and back into the sunlight...
Another beautiful Highland evening on the deserted summit. Bring on the Real Food Cafe. May has been awesome again...
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