Hardwear Sessions

Check out more photos of Freddie Wilkinson in action on Mountain Hardwear's Flickr profile!

Of course, good as they are, I didn't fly all the way from New Hampshire to my present location of Edinburgh for the fries. I came here for the mixed climbing. Every other year, the British Mountaineering Council holds a winter climbing festival at the Glenmore Lodge in Aviemore, nestled up against the Caingorm Mountains. One or two representatives from different countries attend, and each visitor is paired with a local host for six days of climbing and six nights of merriment. This year, John Varco, Dougal MacDonald and myself comprised the American deligation.

As we soon discovered, there are a few peculiarities to climbing in Scotland. For starters, you are only allowed to climb in bad conditions. In order to dry tool a route, it needs to be plastered with snow. This means that you are constantly cleaning off the snow to find drytool placements and gear. It means a lot of hard work, sweat, fear, and burnt calories -- maybe that explains all the chips. These folks over here also like to walk. A "roadside" crag means about an hour of hoofing it, and a "normal approach" is about three hours. Good help you should you be taken to a remote crag. Most of us were a bit mystified after the first day of the meet, when we hiked an hour and a half in the rain to a crag full of appealing crack lines that looked ripe for drytooling fun, only to be told that no, we couldn't climb them because they weren't in condition. But, as Ian Parnell says: "In Scotland there are only relatively small cliffs, but if you wait until they are in full winter condition, you end up getting a big experience.

The conditions improved as the week went on -- far and away the best day was the last. I got out with Rok Zalokar, a young Slovenian climber. I was quite keen to climb with him. First, there was his name -- Rok Zalokar. Sounds pretty bad ass, huh? Indeed, last year Rok, when he was only 23 years old, put up an amazing route on the 7,000 meter Himalayan giant Janak with Andre Stremfel. Then, there was the fact that the guy is pure muscle and must weigh in at one-ninety, maybe a duece. A couple of nights previously, just as we were enjoying a quiet beer before bed, Rok produced a slighty sketchy looking 1.5 liter water bottle with something scribbled in Slovenian on it. "This is Slovenian schnapps", he said. "My grandmother make it for me. I tell her I am going to Scotland, she says, "oh, the wetter is very bad there, you must take this". a half our latter, the entire meet was gobsmacked. Needless to say, the next day was a rest day.

Anyways, the Rok and I did a route Ian had put up the year before, the Sioux Wall. It was great fun -- lots of digging, sketchy hooks, pounding on pins, nuts and hex's, and all the rest of it. The best part of the day was watching new friends on the surrounding routes, everyone out there giving 'er in proper Scottish conditions. Rok and I made it back to the car just at dark, where we waited for another hour for our mates Ian and Sean Issac, who were having some good old fashioned alpine fun doing a new winter route just to the left us. "That was awesome, but I am f***in' starving. I need chips now." Sean raved. We hopped in the cramped car, full of smelly gear and smiling climbers, and headed towards the lights of Fort William below, in search of the finest in British cuisine.