Self reliance is a fundamental principle of mountaineering. By participating we accept this and take responsibility for the decisions we make. These Conditions Reports are intended to help you make good decisions. They do not remove the need for you to make your own judgements when out in the hills.

Thursday, 23 July 2015


In preparation for the Ben Nevis North Face Survey this year, Roddy (from Midland Valley) and I went to Poldubh in Glen Nevis to make sure we had a good system for abseiling the big cliffs we will be working on on Ben Nevis. The survey is a Nevis Landscape Partnership project in conjunction with SNH and Heritage Lottery Fund. We did a week of surveying last year and got some great results. We were working on all sorts of areas including some 250m high crags (The Comb) with some serious abseils so Roddy wanted to make sure he is completely ready for the job.


We use rescue eights to abseil on so that we can abseil right over a knot in the rope if we need to. The back up is a shunt mounted above the rescue eight and we practiced releasing the shunt if it got stuck, abseiling over knots, releasing something stuck in the rescue eight and just getting comfortable abseiling. We went up to Pandora's Buttress for a slightly bigger abseil to put the techniques into place and it all worked very well. We are all set for another North face Survey adventure!





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