Diary: 1st May for 'harold walmsley'

Outdoor climbing

The search for Magnetic Wall revisited 7 hrs, 4.40 miles   (0.63 mile/hr, 95:27 per mile) Morning. I went up to the Grugog Ribs with a 30 lb (13.5 kg) sack containing quite a lot of gear including a large cam intending to shunt the projects and build confidence for leading them. When I got there they were all wet so I carted the load on up the hill to check out my ideas on what might be Magnetic Wall. My top prospect, visible by looking up the left hand branch of Grugog Gully, turned out to be terrible and certainly not it. I shunted the main part to get back out and carried on up to the top of the main right hand buttress of Sawtooth. Ostensibly there are no recorded routes on this buttress but I noticed that the left hand branch of the main ridge has many of the features mentioned in the Mag Wall description. The rock is perfect, it looks like a V Diff, the top looks like a pinnacle but isn't. It looks high quality. It suddenly dawned on me that this could be it, hiding in full view and concealed only by a (perhaps deliberately) vague and misleading description. I went to the top and dropped my single 60 m rope single down the top half. There was only about a 5 m coil left on the half way ledge (which could easily be the "Balcony" stance?) so the whole thing could be 110 m high! My rope was slightly over from the easiest climbing line and I had no rope protectors. I was reluctant to swing over on a single unprotected rope so I pulled back up to a terrace and scrambled out. It all looks very good so I'll be back with more rope, a bit less gear and rope protectors both to check if the main ridge line is Mag Wall and to look for other stuff. I descended via the Carreg Fran Isaf stash and picked up some more long slings and a Clogger on the way down. The main rope looked OK in its box. Height gain 920 metres