Petzl Gully Review and Good Ice Starting to Form :-)

Today I was out looking for thick ice while testing a the latest ultra lightweight Petzl Gully hammer with the new Petzl Sum'tec ice axe. 

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the Petzl hammer's thin pick easily penetrated the water ice despite it's ridiculous low weight (280 grams). 

I didn't get a chance to try the hammer and it's maybe not the tool for hard mixed, extreme ice and dry tooling but for general mountaineering on snow and ice it works really well.

The Petzl Gully is sold mainly as a steep skiing snow gully/couloir tool but when reviewing the hammer I found it was equally well suited to easy ice climbing on some steep ice bulges especially when paired with the slightly heavier and more robust Sum'tec mountaineering axe. 

Quite worrying approach over any hard snow towards 'Mhearad's Fall' due to avoidable depth hoar or facets, so I am told, unless of course you are trying to access the ice route but being able to plunge the Sum'tec into the ground below gave added confidence!

Once on the ice it was nice, relatively safe and really enjoyable. With a brief freeze thaw it'll get even better unless it all melts OR gets buried by lots of fresh snow ;-)

Bespoke Guiding and ice climbing on Cairngorm's 'hidden Alpine Face' routes can be booked online here >>>

A n ice day with the Vicar!

Great weather, great snow, great ice, great company - in fact it was a great day!

I was out climbing with Morris today who was keen to see how a leash-less Scottish Grade 4 ice route felt like following his recent ice climbing trip to Canada where he had top roped some WI4+. 

As Morris was still recovering from a badly broken leg he didn't fancy any long approaches. 

We headed into Coire an t-Sneachda and then up to climb Aladdin's Mirror Direct, before abbing off to climb a fat icy Red Gully. With the warm temperatures on the plateau I was expecting the ice to be slightly wet and plastic however everything was frozen solid, unclimbed and really quite brittle. This gave Morris a chance to dance on Scottish ice and good workout with his unmodified leash-less Petzl Aztars. As Morris hung on for dear life with fading grip, extracting my ice screws at the steep bulge of water ice, his language was, err well, colourful - now Morris where's that video clip ;-)

The weather and winter climbing conditions were phenomenal and we were expecting queues of folk on AMD and Red Gully. In the end we were the only ones to climb AMD and there was only one other party ahead of us on Red Gully - Goat Track Gully, the ski area and Aviemore were very busy though!