In Raven Crag Gully 1986

Apparently there are some strange folk who enjoy climbing in the wet. I’m not one of them.

In Raven Crag Gully

“The rain it rains without a stay,

In the hills above us, in the hills” The Floods. Rudyard Kipling

It was almost the end of a spring bank holiday in Keswick and therefore it was raining. You could have said it was rather wet but it would have been a slight understatement. If you had said it was very wet people would still have argued the toss in favour of “exceptionally wet” and we were rapidly approaching the condition known as being “Totally Fed Up”. People had suggested taking a boat on the lake, going to another pub, going to a tea shop and even, saints preserve us, going for a walk. But every idea fell on stony ground and we were just about ready to push off home when I spoke up and made a suggestion. It was one of those things you say when you are certain no one will take you up on it, but just making it gives you a pleasing sense of moral ascendancy over your mates. Mind you this usually lasts for all of twenty seconds until they convince themselves that you are after all, merely taking the piss.

In this case though, I swear I only said "What about doing Raven Crag Gully?", for the sake of something to say. Unknown to me though, there was one amongst us for whom the chance of doing a wet 500 foot Very Difficult graded climb on a cold and wet Bank Holiday, was something of a dream come true. I had forgotten about PT and his incredible enthusiasm for climbing and before I knew it I had a partner. Even when it was pointed out he had no wet weather gear with him wasn’t enough to stop the hero of the calamitous Verdon trip from ticking off another rock climb. 

I could see only one possibility of escape. If I could only delay our departure until the Borrowdale bus had left then the next one wasn’t for another two hours and by then it would be far too late in the day to start the route. PT had no idea of the timetable so I procrastinated, bought another round of toasted teacakes and prayed.

Fifteen minutes later I looked at my watch, breathed a sigh of relief, pretended to check the timetable and with sadness written all over my face, gravely announced we had missed the bus. It was the shortest lived sigh of relief ever because newcomer Julie, keen to impress and obviously taken in by my bravura acting, offered us a lift down the valley. I was beaten but I noticed her keenness didn’t extend to wanting to come with us.

All too soon then, the two of us were trudging, or rather wading, up the valley towards Raven Crag. As we toiled upwards I couldn't help remembering the amazing cock-up that happened the first time I tried to reach Raven Crag. It was on my very first climbing trip to the Lakes and we wanted to do Corvus, which we’d heard was a superb and easy climb. To cut a long story short, on a day of fairly decent visibility we couldn’t find the crag. This mystified us considerably until we discovered we’d been looking in completely the wrong valley! 

Today though, there was no hope of a repeat as even in much worse visibility PT unerringly took us straight to the foot of the crag. Of course I now know this navigational triumph for what it was, a complete fluke. This was born home to me on a Winter visit to the Cairngorms when he insisted that, according to his map, we had to follow the ski lifts uphill to reach the car park which was odd as earlier that day it had been below the ski lifts. We couldn’t convince him he was wrong and let him get on with it. He eventually turned up an hour and a half later still unconvinced. “Better safe than sorry”, he said.

As expected the gully was a touch wetter than usual, so much so that even PT was having second thoughts. But all this was his fault and now I was here and already soaked, I decided he was bloody well going to do the route, come what may. In fact PT later developed a bit of a taste for gully climbing, well until the day he failed on one. Mind you attempting The Chasm, a Very Severe graded gully on Buachaille Etive Mor in Glencoe during a week of heavy rain in November was probably just asking for trouble.

Back to today. On first acquaintance the first pitch looked impossible, but closer inspection revealed a groove that was merely running with water, as opposed to the rest of the crag, which seemed to be water. I didn’t find climbing it so bad, mainly because PT insisted on leading it.

“Tell you what, do you mind if I lead this bit?” was always more of a rhetorical question when PT said it, because he just hated going second on the rope. This time he’d already taken all of the gear and was ten feet up the pitch when he asked the question. By the time I joined him on the first stance we were both already at that stage when your brain realises you are as wet as you’re ever going to get so you might as well start enjoying yourself. I think medical people call it madness.

As we crawled upwards the weather seemed to be on the mend. Even the Sun made an uncertain appearance; although whether or not it ever stopped raining was still open to debate. 

PT's next lead used up nearly all the rope and the only place he could find to belay was in the middle of a waterfall.  It took me a while to fight my way up to him and by then his happiness quotient was back to zero again. I led through with instructions to find a belay as soon as possible so he could get out of the waterfall. I took him at his word and belayed after about ten feet. This meant he ended up leading the pitch that should have been mine. This turned out to be very fortunate, for me.

Bathed in watery sunshine, (never has a cliché been so literally true), PT climbed up alongside the waterfall and reached what appeared to be a sheltered stance on a large ledge. It wasn’t sheltered for long. While he was sorting out the belay a tremendous gust of wind struck the crag. I looked on with a sort of detached curiosity as the apparently impossible happened and the waterfall performed a spectacular u-turn. As he realised what was being swept up towards him, PT’s curiosity was not quite as detached as mine. He barely had time to loose off one obscenity before he was all but drowned by the half a ton of water that came crashing down on top of his head.

After that little incident the rest of the route was, quite literally, plain sailing apart from a little section near the top. A slab of rock, which today was more of a water slide proved to be an insurmountable obstacle and we had to traverse rightwards onto the face. At least climbing up mud made a change from swimming. In a few minutes we were on the top where the full force of the wind hit us. It was strong enough to make standing difficult and thanks to our extreme wetness, it was soon making us feel very cold. It was no place to hang around and have a picnic. We wasted no time coiling the sodden rope and packing away our kit.

As we ran down to the valley to our camp site we found ourselves laughing hysterically. We laughed at ourselves for doing the route in such ludicrous conditions and we laughed with relief that it was all over. The beer tasted very good in the Scafell later that night.

The next day it began to rain again, but this time I kept my mouth firmly shut.