11th March 2023, Coire Nan Fhamhair, Beinn Bhan
The Godfather has some of the richest history of all modern winter climbs in Scotland. All these legends were swirling around up there when Rob and I dared to finally give it a try last winter, and so to set the scene I’d like to re-tell some of the stories.
Martin Moran lived around the corner and had eyed up the line for years around the turn of the millennium. While the top half of the route is a huge and obvious corner, the bottom half of the giant’s wall is just a series of overhanging blank walls. The crag is wet and vegetated despite the angle, so this is winter-only terrain. In 2002 he teamed up with Paul Tattershall to finally give it a shot. After a series of testing pitches they arrived underneath the final corner in the dark. From Martin’s fantastic account in Guy Robertson’s book, Great Mountain Crags of Scotland:
Looking up, I realised that what had started as a grade VI and had graduated to a sustained grade VII was now moving into unknown and even harder territory. The first section of the corner was desperate. Luckily, I was able to find a crack on its left to climb, but the angle still bulged and had I not found a good thread runner my courage might have failed. The pitch debouched onto a lovely little ledge where I thought I could sit snug as Paul led through. Paul arrived puffing, and having already led two big pitches, declared himself too knackered to lead on.
Peering up the main corner, my heart sank. I was dismayed to see a roof which overhung by a metre just where the right wall was devoid of edges. As I approached the bulge my fingers, forearms, and shoulder muscles were cramping badly. On reaching the roof, after much nervous flickering, my torch failed completely. Why had I not checked the batteries or brought spares? I dropped a loop of rope and pulled up Paul’s torch.
Above me reared a gently overhanging corner crack with a depressingly smooth right wall. After failed attempts on the left wall, I arranged some decent protection, calmed my nerves and prepared for a “do or die” effort on the corner direct, fully prepared for a long fall. A flurry of crossed picks, ripping tools and blind torques took me to the exit. The second I planted my axes in tufts over the top my feet came off. Not being strong enough to do a straight pull-up into a mantleshelf, I hooked my heel up into a rock crevice above my head and squirmed my way to freedom. Almost at once Paul’s torch failed completely.
There was zero moonlight. Couldoran’s salmon hatchery was the brightest object in the universe.
We groped our way back to the sack, stumbled down the screes, then thrashed an ungainly retreat over the moor, skidding on every patch of ice and often getting dumped painfully on our backsides. We reached the stalking track at 5:15 am just as light was returning to the sky.
Our wives greeted our dawn return with consternation and relief. I tried to sleep for half an hour but, in truth, my excitement was too great. It was no great hardship to get up and take our Labrador for a 10am appointment at the vets in Broadford. Domestic life soon regained its claim!
The Godfather gained instant classic status, with the epic story of the first ascent fueling the legend. To my knowledge the next attempted ascent came in 2007 with the strong team of Es Tressider, Pete Benson, and Guy Robertson. Es wrote this up in another brilliant article called “meeting the godfather” on the ukc website here. After diverting from Skye and a late start, the team once again found themselves on the business end of the route as darkness fell. On the sharp end of the rope was Pete Benson. The story goes as follows:
Above us the crux looms in the half light, a corner crack rising up in three overhanging steps, the side walls disturbingly blank. We encourage Pete with the recollection that Moran led this pitch in the dark on the first ascent. He turns his head torch on, makes his way up to the first of the steps, arranges protection and launches upwards.
We are treated to an impressive display of light dancing up the corner, accompanied with grunts, curses and the occasional crampon-shod foot reaching wide or high on the side walls. The protection is excellent, and Pete clears the first two bulges in style, recovering his strength on the ledges in-between. However conditions have been getting more and more snowy the higher up the cliff we climb, and Pete is suffering from the handles of his leashless axes becoming caked in snow and difficult to hold. Above him looms a last steepening, and although above this the crag continues, he shouts down that he is confident this is the last section of hard climbing. As he nears the lip of the final bulge the expletives are joined by increasingly anxious shouts of “watch me”. He goes for it, committing completely. As he plants his axes above the bulge with a reassuring thud of forged steel into frozen turf we cheer his imminent success.
But it’s far from over; he’s still fighting, his hands failing on slippery axes, his crampons teetering on imaginary holds. He’s at the tipping point, if he can get his weight six inches higher he’s home and dry, but if one piece of his body-positioning puzzle fails the others are insufficient to keep him on.
He is trying desperately to rock up onto his right foot, poised high on the blank, overhanging right wall, trying to add pulling force from his crampons to the fading strength in his arms. With one more gargantuan grunt he pulls hard, dependent on his foot holding firm. Time slows down as we will him upwards, then the sound we were dreading, a shout of surprise and fear as his foot pops off the hold, his weight shock loads his exhausted arms and the slick sweat-snow mix on his gloves, the elastic lanyards from his axes to his harness tighten, then snap. Pete falls..
He doesn’t fall far, perhaps ten feet, mostly on rope stretch, but his shouts continue, intensify, and are joined by angry expletives. Something is wrong. I lower him back to the belay, he hobbles the last few feet to join us on the ledge. A badly sprained ankle. As the initial pain fades Pete remembers he has just booked a ski holiday to Canada, but neglected to purchase insurance. More expletives.
So here we are, 200 metres up Scotland’s steepest winter crag, the ropes snaking above us to just below what Pete assures us is the last hard move. There are in-situ holds in the form of Pete’s axes just over the bulge. All the work has been done for us, surely the easiest way is up?
We hesitate; how will Pete second the pitch with an unusable and painful foot? How will we get him down from the top of the mountain? Is there really no more hard climbing above Pete’s axes? It still looks steep and hard through the gloom from the belay. Guy and I are feeling intimidated and we let it influence our decision, we pull the ropes and set off down.
At this point Martin Moran dubbed the thank-god turf blobs at the top of the crux the “Benson fringe”, and the legend of the godfather carried on growing. It saw intermittent ascents through the 2010s, and was definitely a way off the cutting edge at this point but was still a long hard route, far far away in the north west.
Back to mine and Rob’s story, and with such an awesome reputation we hadn’t really considered it until a flurry of grade VIIIs started succumbing to our bevel-less front points. After an amazing day out on Hung Drawn and Quartered on Skye on the Wednesday, I squeezed in a day of work / recovery in fort William on Thursday and we set the plan in motion for the Friday. The freezing level was set to stay pinned down to sea level until the weekend and we reasoned that Beinn Bhan was close enough to Skye to surely have the same perfect conditions.
I drove up to Kyle to meet Rob with Orchestra of Wolves by Gallows blaring out of the i20, and those songs will always evoke the fear / anticipation / excitement of that moment, driving up Glen Shiel after work to try the godfather. The next morning we crunched our way across the moor in the pre-dawn. There was evidently a hard freeze down to sea level and our optimism rose a notch. It was my first time on Beinn Bhan, and first time seeing each massive coire unfold one by one. We finally reached Coire nan Fhamair in full daylight and I’ll be honest- it looked black. We stopped in the base of the coire for a discussion, different options washing around. I think we were both a bit deflated at that point, as doubting the conditions isn’t how you want to climb mega routes.
In this paragraph I’m going to write a boring, niche, but honest and open discussion of the marginal conditions we had. For me there was a definite element of now or never weighing on my mind, with my imminent move to California meaning it could be the last winter route for a few years, not to mention we were at the apex of run of top form together. But trying to ignore unhelpful external pressure like that and looking for justification to have a look, we ultimately reasoned that it’s a turfy crag, the turf was in amazing condition, there are no summer routes to damage, and it was bitterly cold with plenty of snow lying so it certainly felt like winter climbing despite the lack of rime. This route would definitely be worthy of a post on the black watch (hilarious but inquisitorial instagram page calling out people climbing out of condition routes) but if I can get defensive about this for a moment I think that presence or absence of rime isn’t the single deciding factor which it’s sometimes treated as. Overall, the iffy conditions took away a little bit of the glory of climbing the route, but had we turned around and walked away from it I think we would have lost out on a unique experience, in many ways the Godfather has more of the character of a big alpine north face than the usual short and sharp Scottish winter experience.
I started up the first pitch, and we may well have been in the wrong place since there’s no defined line low down, but the first five metres to a ledge system were fairly unpleasant. I was brushing powder off compact slabby rock, insecure and badly protected. I had a distinct thought of how stupid it would look to break an ankle falling off the first few metres of the godfather, a 240m route. Luckily my vision didn’t come to pass and the climbing became much steeper and safer. Rob then quested around on the big second pitch, stopping just below the huge terrace due to rope drag. I wasn’t enjoying the route so far, the first two pitches had just been too dry and scratchy. The turf hadn’t really materialised and I was ready to bail. Rob basically convinced me to get us up to the terrace to reassess. Thank god he did. It was dripping with frozen turf and snow, and suddenly it seemed to be back on. I knew we had to find a way through a short but extremely vertical rock band bisecting the terrace, and after 40m of traversing I chose my spot. With so much rope in the system I was well aware that falling off the band would put me straight back on the terrace on stretch, but it looked like a soft landing. At the top of a boulder problem, at full stretch, both axes gave the unmistakable feeling of being buried to the hilt in perfect turf, and the first pull up into mantleshelf move appeared as I squirmed over the top.
The climbing was consistently amazing from here onwards. I was feeling really psyched at this point, and led the “mantleshelf” pitch off the ledge. This had been on our minds since reading Uisdean Hawthorne’s description as pokey, but each successive steep mantleshelf kept rolling by. It’s somehow the only pitch I’ve ever climbed which is covered in stand up ledges but still overhangs from top to bottom. Rob then took over and took us up the first godfather corner pitch which, you guessed it, was steep!
It was just the upper corner pitch left, and looking up in the rapidly fading daylight I didn’t think it looked too bad. Something about the godfather continually tricks you into thinking it’s less steep than it really is. My arms were starting to wilt from the relentless pull ups onto turf ledges however. A sneaky hand jam got over the lower crux roof, and the head torch came on just in time for the amazing moment of committing to the final series of hooks, walloping an axe into the benson fringe and flopping over the belay ledge like a beached whale. Rob took us to the top as the crag finally gifted an easy pitch, where we could relax at last. These post route moments are some of my favourite parts of the whole thing, particularly when it’s just the two of us on top of a cold silent hill somewhere remote, ideally not in a raging blizzard. This was a good one, with a clear sky over Applecross.
I’m writing from California now, and the godfather did end up being my final winter route for the time being. I honestly can’t think of a better way to finish a really defining and at times all consuming focal point of my life in Scotland. I definitely have to mention Will, Rob, and Iain for making it all happen, that chance meeting on Creag Meagaidh five years ago created a lot of good times. I’m sure I’ll be back soon enough once I’ve done a bit of science over here!
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