The Mystery of the Number 2 Gully Avalanche.
30th January 2025
Yesterday evening a friend got in touch to point my attention to a route report on the website UKclimbing.com. After describing the route and conditions there was a few sentences at the end which caught my attention. This was “Back at the CIC, after opening the door hearing frantic banging outside I was greeted by two climbers looking like ghosts that had survived a full depth avalanche trying to top out No. 2 Gully having been swept down 1200 ft to Coire na Ciste, they have some angels watching over them for sure.” The report was dated Sunday the 26th. Intrigued I though I would go up the Ben today for a wee look.
Below Number 2 gully there was a small amount of debris visible. However, there had obviously been a fair bit of snow since (Sunday evening and overnight into Monday?), and it was hard to tell the full extent of the debris as much of it was buried. Wandering down the slope below the debris I spotted something sticking out of the snow, the end of a climbing rope. Given that it was mostly buried it seemed likely it had been dropped a few days ago. However, it came out reasonably easily suggesting that it had been dropped since the last thaw which was last Friday. This would suggest sometime around the weekend, around the time of the avalanche reported in the first paragraph. Now I have seen enough TV detective programs to know such coincidences are very suspicious. I am sure Columbo, Inspector Morse or Sherlock Holmes would have noticed few more little details that would have solved the whole thing, (the knot in the rope, the 2015 sticker on the end, perhaps the way it lay in the snow) but I did not. So if it is your rope and you want it back, or know anything about the avalanche on Sunday, then leave a comment in reply to this post, and we will get in touch.
In other news it was a lovely cold winter’s day. There was some reasonable skiing reported by a colleague on Aonach Mor, and a few teams out climbing on the Ben. It looked like there was a bit of verglas about on the crags, but things seemed to be generally white and frozen,
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matt dalby
31st January 2025 2:14 am
This isn’t the first time people have survived a long fall out of Number 2 Gully. About 18 years ago I was traversing below the gully when 3 people, roped together about 5m, apart came hurtling out the gully. Fortunately they came to a stop towards the bottom of Coire na Ciste without sustaining any serious injuries. The avalanche hazard that day was probably low to moderate, for several days there’d been no new snow and fairly light wind, so it seems more likely their mishap was due to a fall that became serious because they were moving together without the leader placing protection, rather than an avalanche. I wonder if the recent fall resulted from similar circumstances and the climbers said they’d been avalanched rather than admitting they’d made a mistake regarding how they chose to climb the route.