Pushing The Limits

In the gale you are buffeted and knocked sideways. With no visual bearing to focus on, your balance goes and before long you are stumbling blindly, directionless. Is this uphill or down? You want to stop but you daren't let your companion get more than an arm's length away. How, anyway, would you signal in a howling gale when you can't hear anything, and can barely see?

Then you are down on all fours. Crawling along on hands and knees gives a better sense of security because, more than anything, your senses are screaming that your next step is going to be over the edge of a cliff. It is a primal, frightening place to be.

The route out of Coire an t-Sneachda has no cliffs, but escaping that retching instinct that you are about to go over a precipice is not easy. Graeme Cooper and Richard Hardy must have felt that knotting fear as they made their way down from their abandoned climb in the Cairn Gorm last Sunday afternoon. It seems that the young climbers were caught out during their ascent of the ice-coated northern face of the huge gully, when they became the first of this season's mountain fatalities.

They abandoned their ropes in a tangle on the cliff face, an indication of a hurried departure, and were walking back to safety when they were crushed in the fist of the storm. The mountains did not release them until the following day. Their bodies were found, 400 metres apart and just 20 minutes walk from the Cairn Gorm car park early on Monday morning. Hardy was just 18 years old and Cooper only 23.

Student Richard Hardy, from Alton in Hampshire, was a novice mountaineer, but he did the right thing in teaming up with the more experienced Geography graduate Graeme Cooper, 23, whom friends describe as keen, fit and with a huge passion for the outdoors.

Having hitched a lift across to the mountain range in a university minibus the pair set off for the climb as their friends from the Lairig, Aberdeen University's mountaineering club, were settling down to a mountain skills seminar in the valley below.

Conditions on the mountains were poor on Sunday morning and the forecast was for worse weather to come. But caution only comes with experience. Some members of the volunteer mountain rescue team that later searched for the climbers planned to go out on Sunday themselves but turned back because of the conditions and the forecast.

"I doubt there is a single climber who hasn't thought, Stuff the forecast, let's go for it', at some point," admits David Black, a committed 33-year-old climber who took the same decision as Cooper and Hardy on Sunday morning. "The Mountain Weather Information Service forecast and the actual conditions in Sneachda on Sunday were almost identical. If anything the forecast was about an hour late, but the substance was spot on," says Black. "I know because I was in the coire at the same time as the two guys, in fact I met and spoke to them." Press reports had the pair leaving the car park at 11am but their friends have subsequently corrected this, timing their departure two hours earlier.

It is still early in the winter climbing season and although there is plenty of snow lying on the ground, the stuff is very loose and collects in the deep hollows which abound in the corrie.

"Moving up into the corrie from the car park was difficult and tiring," recalls Black. "The path was almost impossible to see and deep drifts of thigh- and waist-deep snow were unavoidable, leading to periods of what climbers call post-holing' - wading slowly through thick snow."

As the morning wore on the wind gradually picked up and although it had started fairly clear, cloud gathered and lowered gradually. The air temperature was probably only just around freezing, but the wind made it feel much, much colder, about -20 degrees. The Cairngorms are known to climbers for their occasionally terrible weather but on Sunday, according to Black, the combination of factors was especially sapping with the thick snow and high winds making simple moving and climbing much more tiring than usual.

By 3pm the windspeed on the top of Cairn Gorm was 70mph and at 6pm it peaked at 120mph - a full-on winter storm. Making any progress in those conditions, no matter how experienced, would be impossible. The windchill factor - a measure of how much colder the air is than the ambient temperature - would be off the chart.

Here, some perspective might help. We have all been out in high winds. A 35mph constant gale is something that an adult can lean into, arms stretched like aeroplane wings. You will still make progress at 60pmh to 70pmh, but at windspeeds higher than that you will be blown off course. At 100mph you will be stopped in your tracks.

"I got out, I got lucky," says Black, who has climbed almost all his adult life."By the time I left the corrie at around 2pm, the wind had increased to gusts of about 70mph in exposed places, making even walking around very difficult.

"It's a tragic accident, but it could have happened to any of us. I don't blame the two guys for going up, they looked fit and experienced to me, in fact they were up into the coire faster than I was."

Rarely do mountain rescue teams, the police or other mountaineers pass comment on an accident that has occurred. No-one in the climbing community is judging Cooper and Hardy. They conclude, in the words of John Allan, leader of the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue, that the pair had "bitten off more than they could chew".

There is a view that unless you were there you cannot put yourself in the position of the person who made the decision. "Most mountaineers will simply say, There but for the grace of God go any of us'," says Tim Walker, the principal of Glenmore Lodge, whose gentle voice belies decades of hard mountain experience. "Most people who have been on the mountains for any length of time will recount experiences when things did go badly wrong and they got away with it."

In fact getting away with it, coming through the washing machine of a storm, or getting off a hill in the nick of time, is part of the draw of mountaineering.

For winter climbers, explaining the allure of threading your life through a few karabiner clips hung from metal screws hastily driven into an ice cliff face, is difficult. Someone famous once said that he climbed "because it is there", and that is as far as anyone has gone towards unravelling the irreconcilable dangers and primal attractions of climbing up high.

Climbing is free, it is unregulated, it gives you a connection with the elements and with the landscape and it is not part of a calorie-controlled diet. The mountains can be a beautiful muse one minute and dangerous siren the next. In that sense, they fill a large gap in our risk-averse modern lives.

"It's satisfying to do something that challenges you mentally and physically," says Black, articulating a passion that takes him back to the hills week after week. "We don't do it to be slim, or for our blood pressure, or cholesterol, or self-esteem, or because we think we ought, or because a magazine or TV programme tells us we should. We do it for one reason alone - because we want to."

There has been a bit of backchat on climbers' websites about last Sunday's fatalities and the inevitable reaction, from those who do not go onto the mountains, that access to the hills should be restricted to prevent another tragedy.

However, although Scotland's law-makers may be in a mood to ban everything from smoking to Christmas Day shopping, there is no realistic chance of stopping people going onto the hills.

"The whole ethos of mountaineering is freedom from restrictions," says David Gibson of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland. "No-one says you have to take a particular route or path but we offset that by saying you have to be self-reliant."

The Mountaineering Council, through centres like Glenmore Lodge, provides training and advice particularly aimed at student groups who are considered more at risk on the mountains. "It could be that there are more students on the hills than any other category," says Roger Wild, the SMC safety officer. "You get more incidents with hillwalkers rather than climbers for the same reason, simply because there are more hillwalkers."

No-one is sure how many people take part in walking or climbing. Sportscotland count "four million participation days" but a more digestible statistic is that an estimated 60,000 people will be on the hills on a typical winter weekend day. According to Dr Bob Sharp, a former sports scientist who monitors mountain rescue incidents, there are on average 32 fatalities on the Scottish mountains each year. Every one is an individual tragedy but comparatively, the number is very small. There are, for example, an average of 170 drowning deaths in Scotland each year.

"The figures have stabilised in the past 10 years," says Sharp. "Partly that's down to better training, better information and better equipment. There are very few incidents in Scotland now involving poor equipment."

Each year more and more Scots head into the hills, their presence and that of a nearby Munro marked by the clusters of cars parked by the side of Highland roads. From a sporting point of view the landscape is Scotland's greatest asset. The hills are a little over half an hour from the outskirts of the country's cities, access legislation is among the best in the world and training and advice on responsible use of the outdoors is being promoted through a network of mountaineering clubs. There is even an indoor ice climbing wall at Kinlochleven that can give any prospective climber a foretaste of what is to come.

But there is no substitute for experience, which is exactly what is lacking among those in the highest-risk mountaineering category: students like Richard Hardy and Graeme Cooper. Unfortunately it is getting harder for young people to be taken onto the mountains by experienced adults.

Nowadays, if mountaineering clubs want to take out anyone under 18 they have to apply for a licensing inspection and pay £500 a year for the privilege. Operating on the margins of profitability, many outdoor centres have opted not to include under 18-year-old participants on their courses.

The dearth of mountaineering opportunities for young people is an issue raised by Cameron McNeish, editor of the TGO magazine, as he puts the finishing touches to an editorial on last week's tragedy. "How do young people get experience of winter routes today?" says McNeish. "When I was a kid you joined a club and there was always someone who was willing to take young people out. Clubs don't do that any more as they are scared of the litigation and paedophelia angle. Across all youth activities we seem to have demonised volunteers, particularly male volunteers, and have put all kinds of barriers in the way of working with young people."

Like most of the mountaineering community, McNeish is a disciple of the outdoors. "I say, send young people to the hills because the only way that you can cope with these conditions is to experience them. But you have to go with experienced climbers and learn low. Go to the Campsies, the Pentlands and learn from there. We had some horrific escapes as youngsters but we learned from them."

Even though mountaineers have more chance of being killed on the road to their chosen peak than on the hills themselves, Sunday's tragedy, which is unlikely to be the last of the season, provides a reminder that in winter, Scotland's mountain ranges are as demanding, technically and mentally, as any in the world.

Although an avalanche was not to blame for the deaths of Graeme Cooper and Richard Hardy, consideration will now be given to starting the Scottish Mountaineering Avalanche Service a month earlier. The information service, which is credited with reducing the number of incidents in the hills, operates across the five main climbing areas of Scotland during the winter season.

The speed at which conditions can change means that anyone on the hills in Scotland needs to be ready for the weather to turn at any time. This weekend the Scottish Executive is warning climbers and walkers to take extra care because of worsening winter conditions.

"After incidents like this we face a huge problem in reassuring volunteers that it is worthwhile getting involved and reminding them that the vast majority of expeditions and outings with youth clubs are successful and safe," says Tim Walker of Glenmore Lodge.

"These young men made all the right decisions to come off the route, they made their way through the boulder field at the bottom of the Corrie, all the way down the hill, which would have been a real battle but, ultimately, they succumbed. They were within 15 or 20 minutes of making it out of there but they encountered ferocious conditions."

No-one talks about an honourable death these days, but Walker, after years on the mountains and coping with fatalities, recognises that what Cooper and Hardy were engaged in was not futile.

"When you hear about all the drink and drug-related deaths among young people, what these two men were doing was quite commendable," he says.

"They were pitching themselves against nature and the elements, doing something that was physically and mentally challenging. We should be proud of them."

www.glenmorelodge.org.uk www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk