Meet Report

12th to 14th March 2004 - The Smiddy, Glen Etive

It was back to basics for this meet. The smiddy hut is a cosy 2 roomed job but in a spectacular situation at the bottom of Glen etive.

We were all up nice and early on Saturday morning courtesy of Gillian's half past six wake up call. Those that had not stirred (including Gillian) after ten minutes of beep, beep, beep, beep, beep were soon awake by the dulcet and rather loud tones of K Robb "For F...s sake turn it off". It turned out Gillian was still operating in Norwegian time after coming back from a skiing trip in Norway the previous weekend - she must have got some strange looks at work that week coming in an hour early every day.

This enabled us to give the new members a totally wrong impression of the club with an unprecedented early start. Most of us were walking before 9am in a mass attack on Ben Starav and the 2 adjoining munros. Unfortunately the cloud was down on the tops for most of the day but it was a good long winter walk, especially on the ridge traverse. There were some interesting decisions as to when crampons should be put on and taken off. At one point half of us had crampons on and smirked as the others skittered down the icy rocks whilst the crampon off brigade got their revenge by storming past us on the ice/grass combinations. There was also some tricky navigation and towards the end of the day we managed a partial descent down the wrong spur into the wrong glen. Fortunately we and the GPS realised the mistake in time. At this point Bill B was down to one eye, having lost a lens from his glasses and it seemed to have affected his judgment because he carried on much further down the wrong spur on the basis that we may as well just carry on now that we had started.

At least we got some views when the clouds cleared at about 4pm. Everyone else walked individually and Lesley and Jessie conquered Colditz Corbett. The razor wire has been removed but there are still 4 locked gates to get over.

We had a very sociable evening. The new folk commented that they could see that you would have to come on all the meets otherwise you just get talked about at the ones you miss. Are we that transparent?

We had a nice long lie on Sunday since we were back in Scottish time. It was wet, windy and miserable so anybody that headed back to Edinburgh made a good decision. Tim, Tom, Kenny and I "enjoyed" a very wet ascent of Beinn Trilleachan.