Crowds at Beinn Udlaidh

 

A heavily snowed up East Sector

  

 Doctors Dilema

 

Looking up White Caterpillar III

Today Campbell and I headed to Beinn Udlaidh for some more ice action. On arrival in the car park at 08.30 there was already15 vehicles so we were not surprised by the number of people in the corrie. We headed to the bottom of Doctors Dilema but as we were waiting at the bottom, the team ahead continued to shower us in brittle ice and after I got hit in the mouth by a block we decided to move on elsewhere. Also waiting near us for this route was Baggy and his clients.
We headed round into West Gully and managed to sqeeze past a couple of teams from Jagged Globe and get to the bottom of a route called White Caterpillar III. We climbed this in 2 pitches but not before I took 3 more hits from falling ice.
Finally we climbed an unnamed route at the far right of the West Face and this had the best ice we had encountered all day. The route seemed to be at about III 4 and my only compliant was that it was too short.