Tuesday 2nd December

Pamela & I headed over to Creag Dubh on Geal-charn in the Drumochter pass, hoping to find some ice at low level given the weather over the last few days. Ice is forming and Knickerbocker Glory looked climable. We didn’t descend around far enough to look at Swordfish etc. as we felt it wouldn’t be in and chose to climb a possible new line on the buttress up and left of the main crag (where Wafer Me and Ice Cream are?). The buttress has a large easy angled gully with a cave at it’s bottom at it’s left end and we climbed the butress approximately 5m right of this giving and easy stepped turf and ice to the higher of two bent over trees and then a pitch up and right with an ice/rock slab, which was climbed to pass an overhanging triangular nose on it’s left. Hard to grade as it’s short, mostly easy climbing and quite escapable, but with some tricky moves across the slan, we decided a II,4 in the condition we climbed it in, but could be a III with better ice. Turf was frozen where exposed, ice is forming but not fat and there was 4 to 6″ of soft fresh snow. Light flurries of snow during the day on a northerly.