The Gathering E8 6b, first ascent June 2004 Can you believe it?” A string of sickeningly enthusiastic text messages arrive from our man back in the Coires, Mr Tweedley, as we sit bored over the nth chocolat in a busy French café. Meanwhile, we watch yet another wave of blizzards and sleet spill over the falaise de Ceuse from the window. I might have known that the minute we take off for our hard earned trip to clip the golden bolts at Ceuse, the driest spring in living memory would descend on the homeland, while we battle with the snow and rain we were trying to escape in the first place. “ “Oh great”, another txt gloat comes through; it’s all “bone dry” this and “perfect conditions” that. I found it hard to contain my frustration. However being a Scottish climber well versed to trying to do hard new routes on home turf, at least I was used to dealing with this emotion! Our final week in out not-so-sunkist paradise flew by and in no time I was stepping back onto a hot and sunny runway at Prestwick. Home, TV on, BBC forecast. Three days remained of the two month drought before the Atlantic strikes back. I get straight to the phone and that night I’m in a car to Syke with two friends. At least I’m heading for the mountains, but I have no partner so it’s just me, the shunt and a rumour of an awesome sounding project line on The Cuillin Ridge’s second most famous pointy bit of rock; The Cioch. It was quite appalling that I’d never done a single route on Skye. In fact, my only experience of the Cioch was watching the famous swordfight scene in that dire 80s sci-fi ‘The Highlander’ and the rather better ‘The Edge’ series, where Collie and McKenzie’s historic discovery and ascent of the Cioch in 1906 was re-enacted in period costume. The following day, it was hard to feel the same sense of discovery that Collie and McKenzie must have felt when I followed their weaving line up Cioch Buttress to reach the perched flat summit of the Cioch, along with about 10 other parties! However, from the perfect vista on the knife-edge neck which stretches across to the Cioch, I spotted the project. It was about E8 for ‘wow’ factor alone, so I wasted no time and hung my rope down it to see how clean it was. I’d heard that the line had already seen off a Sheffield raid and the evidence remained of a few brush marks here and there. The line of cleaned shallow ‘pocks’ (the peculiar shallow two-finger pockets found on Gabbro) ran elegantly above a diagonal roof to reach the very most exposed edge of the overhanging side of the Cioch, high above the hard slabs below. “Hmmm, oh dear!”. From my abseil rope I quickly realised why such a stunning line can sit unclimbed until the 21st century. Protection was completely absent until a ‘thank god’ spike high on the wall. From the level of the crux I peered down at the slabs below and cringed. I happily bypassed the protection problem as there was no chance of a lead today anyway. My friends were elsewhere in the Coire enjoying classics in the sunshine. I spent a couple of hours playing on the moves and then another couple sunbathing on the Cioch summit, imagining the stomach churning lead of the project.
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