The Glencoe Quad (for the Wannabe Wad)
Will Hempstead, January 2023
Like most winter climbers who start their career in Glasgow, Glencoe holds a special place in my heart. I had many formative experiences above the A82 – sunny days on ridges, cold days in crypts, hitchhiking, getting kicked out of the Clachaig…
The Glen has four stand-out winter crags : Church Door Buttress, Stob Coire nan Lochain, Lost Valley Buttress, and at the head of the glen the iconic Buchaille Etive Mor. On these four crags are four stand-out, four star grade VIIs: Un Poco Loco, Central Grooves, Neanderthal, and Ravens Edge. Back in 2020 me and Murray became obsessed with trying Un Poco Loco, and thought it would be pretty awesome to set the goal of climbing all four of these routes.
Un Poco Loco
After an attempt earlier in the year which had lacked sufficient rime, myself, Murray and Iain found Church Door in perfect condition. I had the standard mental battle on the walk in trying to decide if I wanted it to be in so we could get on it, or if I wanted it to be black so we could do something easy and go to a cafe instead. I still couldn’t quite work out what my stance on this was as I geared up to lead pitch one but once climbing the familiarity eased in. The first pitch is steep with good hooks, good rests and good gear and is generally also good fun except for the moves to get around the sinister sounding ‘death block’. This basically involves doing a pull up and then standing on the block. Ah well, I’m still here so it didn’t go! I had a slight mishap with my crampon higher up where it became unattached to my boot but thanks to all the good gear I just clipped to a wire and got it back on.
Neanderthal Round One
Its always a bad sign when they give a storm a name, and this Dennis was living up to his. I felt pretty menaced on the long slog up Lost Valley getting blown about in zero vis but with some nav skills from Murrays GPS we made it to the crag. Thankfully the crag was somewhat sheltered and I kicked off up the easier pitch one to belay on as many suspect looking blocks as I could tie together in the back of a chimney cave.
The weather seemed to worsen at this point and it was semi dark even though it was midday. I didn’t feel very gung-ho stepping out on pitch two but here we are, I can’t get Murray to lead all the hard pitches. Some thin climbing out of the cave led to a crack with a peg, and then a scary looking ice smear to escape the cave into the upper corner. The peg looked poor and I remember thinking that it would never hold a fall. As I shook out next to it I was suddenly hanging a few meters down. Damn, well at least it holds. The ice smear felt very committing, my stubby mixed crampons kept popping off and the weather had gone full haywire, but more gear than I had anticipated appeared and I made it to the belay. Unfortunately Murrays pitch above was encased in ice – it was almost entirely an ice climb, but very thin and involving several roofs. We quickly made the sensible mountaineering decision and ran away, although this involved some difficulty descending the Lost Valley in the worst weather I have ever experienced. As we got towards the car snow was pelting down and lightning was
repeatedly striking in the glen. A menace indeed. Neanderthal: one, the Hempstead-Cutforth dream team: nil.
Central Grooves
I had made the long drive up from Sheffield to meet Iain and have a look at Central Grooves up on Stob Coire nan Lochan. The crag looked great, the weather was fair, I had driven for seven hours. It was all to play for. I got about five meters up pitch one, only to be ground to a halt by verglass. A fuck tonne of verglass in all the cracks. Other teams on the crag had run into similar problems and at least two teams abseiled off around us. But I had driven for bloody ages! I was getting nothing from the ice-filled cracks, and ended up doing a massive lock off for a disappointing flatty. “Watch me!”.
I eventually got to the belay and Iain started an even worse looking pitch two. About half way up he started making noises. “I can’t get any gear in this!”. I asked him if he could down climb, which he said he couldn’t, or if he could get anything in to lower off, which he also couldn’t. The only way is up then…
By the time I started leading pitch three it was dark but I didn’t really care. Something about only having one day available to winter climb makes it so much easier to push on. The crux took a bit of up and down but was fine once committed. Arranging a stupid slung hex above my head afterwards was less fine – top tip get the wired hexes!
After the crux Iain got us to the top in one short easier pitch and we strolled down feeling pleased with ourselves, even bumping into the legend Huw Scott himself on an after work solo mission. Two down.
Neanderthal Part II: Redemption
Round two on Neanderthal with Rob and Murray had significantly more factors in our favour than previous. Perfect weather, perfect conditions, whats not to love! This time it went uneventfully, Rob took pitch one, Murray took two and I got the glory pitch. The overhangs on pitch three are pretty awesome, and we even managed to top out in the light. Pure type one. I felt very chuffed belaying on top of the crag. Only one to go now…
Ravens Edge
The most intimidating of the four routes for me is Ravens Edge. Comparatively few logs on UKC, and of these quite a few failures from strong teams as well as its position on the most iconic mountain in The Coe award a sense of mystique. So ironically, when myself, Rob and Murray walked into the Buchaille on a perfect sunny day, it was not our plan A. I had a bit of a tussle with a new route the previous week and so I had decided to return with Murray and Rob, hoping that one of them could succeed where I had failed. Scottish Winter conditions are a complex, multifaceted beast and I had neglected to factor in one very rare occurrence – the weather was too nice. The crag faces South East and had been completely stripped by the sun. As we discussed options, Ravens Edge lurked above in the shadow of Slime Wall. We had the weather, we had the conditions – it would be rude not too. One thing we did not have was daylight. Our potential first ascent was very short and as such we had started really late.
Murray claimed dibs on the crux leaving me and Rob the first or last block. Both of us wanted the easy option but neither knew how the pitches split up which left us both frantically trying to calculate the softest looking option. Rob just beat me to it with the classic “Why don’t I start us off?”, and looked annoyingly smug as he set off up the grade IV first pitch. Pitch two is the first proper pitch and traverses the right wall of Ravens Gully to bring you into the main crux corner system overlooking the gully. Rob was making light work of this too, he was starting to look very lucky with these pitches! And almost inevitably progress then ground to a halt. Ten meters out from his last runner, a fall ending on the snow slope in the gully below, and the hooks seemed to have ran out. Shake, shake, search for hooks. He hammered in a peg which he claims was rubbish and then committed to some extremely thin hooks to get into the corner. Thank god. The peg in question turned out to be a tied off terrier, possibly one of the worst pieces I’ve ever seen placed. Now I was the smug one.
Murray got on the ‘crux’ corner which was thankfully more conventional featuring steep laybacking on good hooks. Night fell, the headtorches came on, and I took over to get us to the top. Half the route would need to be climbed in the dark, fantastic. About half way up the third pitch I became aware of a helicopter approaching. Suddenly we were in a search light. I smiled at them and gave a thumbs up “This is normal for us, dont worry”. It’s not uncommon for tourists in the glen to see headtorches and call mountain rescue on unsuspecting climbers but this turned out not to be the case, and satisfied that we did not require assistance, the helicopter dropped down to enact a rescue on North Buttress. Now all that lay in our path was the top offwidth. Some unconventional ledge crawling got me beneath it and it looked like good sport, if your definition of good sport is something like bare-knuckle boxing. With this in mind the gloves came off, the axes got abandoned on a shoulder, and it got physical. An hour later I emerged, battered and bruised but victorious. I hate the alpha male symbolism of ‘conquering’ the mountain, in this case I felt I had been conquered. My biceps burned but below the offwidth looked like it couldn’t care less about what had just occurred.
And with that, we had completed the Glen Coe Quad. I didn’t feel very victorious because we then had to downclimb ‘Great Gully’ which, at grade II, is a little bit steeper than what I would normally consider a good descent route. Then back to the Fort to plunder the fridge and a very enjoyable Saturday spent having first breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, dessert, supper, and tea.
In Conclusion
So there you have it! The Glen Coe Quad is a great set of routes for any aspiring grade VII climber, featuring iconic routes accessible from the Central Belt. The journey has taken me from being really very scared of grade VIIs to being slightly less scared of them and that feels like a major achievement. All of the routes (bar Robs pitch on Ravens Edge) are safe and well protected so go and have a crack!