Rock-climbing in the English Lake District: Third EditionJones, Owen Glynne
General
Rock-climbing in the English Lake District: Third Edition
Jones, Owen Glynne
Lake District (England) -- Description and travel; Mountaineering; Rock climbing -- England -- Lake District
Ellis braced himself firmly at the highest corner of the recess, and
manipulated the rope with special care. I started working up between
the two buttresses in a manner that recalled to us both the well-known
picture of the Funffingerspitze chimney in Sanger-Davies’ book. When
some twelve feet above him, it seemed safe to quit the left-hand
side altogether, and a stride effected the change of style. But the
return was now almost impossible, and in the anxious five minutes that
followed I had time to repent the sudden resolve. The top of the wall
was within reach, but it was fringed with loose grass tufts that
scarcely seemed secure enough to offer purchase in the upward heave
that I wanted to give myself. However, the time spent in hesitation was
sheer waste, for at the end the pull-up was perfectly safe and easy,
and a little wriggling over rock and steep grass brought me to a long
terrace, that naturally suggested a halt for the second man’s advance.
In good time his head appeared above the grass tufts that formed the
limit of my foreground, and a few seconds later he was sitting at my
side and speculating as to the length of the difficult piece. The
whole climb so far had been veritably one single pitch; we had had no
interval of comparative ease, and were now eager to find some temporary
freedom.
That we found in perambulating our terrace. It was about a yard wide
and fifty feet long, and gave evidence that our gully as such had
practically terminated. We found it rather awkward clambering up the
wall some thirty feet to another similar terrace. This stretched
horizontally from the large ravine that now disclosed itself on our
right, and across the face of the mountain towards the Great Gully.
The former, we could see, involved some pretty climbing a hundred feet
below us. At our level it was merely a scree-walk finishing at the
highest part of Doe Crag.
Our route lay up the rocks above the terrace. Two narrow clefts offered
choice. We took the one to the right, about fifteen feet long and
sufficiently tough to make us remember the place. Then followed easy
hand-and-foot work till we could distinguish the branch exit of the
Great Gully. Down this we carefully picked our way, and then returned
to gather up our belongings and make tracks for distant Wastdale. The
round had taken three hours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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