Slav Route

4th March 2022, Orion Face, Ben Nevis

For me personally, much of the best writing about climbing isn’t really about the climbing at all. The raw facts of an ascent, especially if nothing major went wrong, don’t usually form a good narrative! Other modalities like video and images fare a bit better, since they’re inherently more engaging. But in some of my favourite pieces of writing about climbing, the climb is just a vehicle for the real story arc. I’m thinking of Nick Bullock in Tides, or Mark Twight in Kiss or Kill.

I’m not going to attempt anything like that, so here are the raw facts of mine and Rob’s ascent of Slav Route with no character development or narrative.

After a written-off January with Covid, a much better Febuary spent living with Pete and Louise’s in Kingussie, ice conditions in the west became absolutely brilliant in early March, and came packaged with long periods of stable high pressure weather. The weekend before I’d tried Sticil Face with Dan and had a fairly nightmareish lead up horrible steep snow above the crux ice pillar (we bailed). This left me feeling lukewarm about getting on any more steep and badly protected snow/ice routes. On the day, me and Rob just headed up the hill without any strong plan in mind.

As usual, good ice conditions on the Ben were no secret, and so we essentially ended up being funnelled onto Slav Route as one of the best lines without too many teams above. There was just a single pair above who traversed onto Zero. The first pitch lead easily up past a step, and below a steep groove. After Rob continued up this with solid ice screws every couple of metres, I started to get an inkling that the ice conditions on the route were promising.

The next pitch took a lovely little ice pillar, featuring some mega bridging which is always quite photogenic.

This took us up to the middle part of the Orion face, and the view opened up to a magical sweep of slabs dripping with ice. I carried on with another lead. A lot of the ground at this point in the route is classic Ben Nevis steep snow ice (potentially traumatic in the wrong conditions). Although we often moved a long way over the next couple of pitches without gear, every belay we found was good. The snow ice was just on the happy side of an invisible threshold, and as the metres rolled on I felt more and more comfy in the climbing. It was in total contrast to one week before on Sticil face where every step up the vertical trench drained my composure.

As Rob followed up the 7th pitch of climbing and set off towards the exit wall, we were totally enveloped in one of the most amazing sunsets of my life. I’ve seen a lot of good ones from the top of a hill, but this time it felt like we were completely in the middle of it. The classic view over Lochaber would disappear over and over again as luminous orange cloud banks rolled off the summit plateau, while the sky in the distance cycled through every shade of blue. I spent a long time staring at the scene, trying my best to imprint it into my memory.

Up above, Rob probably wasn’t quite in the same state of blissful awe. The steep exit wall had a crazy coating of rime, the gear could barely support its own weight, and the climbing became a lot more tenuous. It was a pretty impressive lead, and one of the only times I’ve climbed directly on rime feathers stuck onto steep rock. Hopefully one of the last as well. We wandered back down in a blurry headtorch bubble of fatigue and satisfaction.