Glen Nevis trad - boulder - free solo - DWS climbing

My name is Anna and I grew up in Inverness. I moved to Fort William last month. I work as a junior doctor so now I'm working at the Belford in Fort William. Pall Day is a fantastic place that's easily accessible from town. It means I can come up here on an evening if I'm doing shift work, come up with friends or cycle up on my own. It's just a great collection of rocks for climbing on. There's trad climbing, there's bouldering, there's hard routes, there's easier terrain that you can solo. I think it's just a fantastic place to have so close. I think Pall Day is quite a mysterious feeling place because you can see everything from the road amongst the trees. You can see all the rock faces but you don't really get an impression of what any of them are like until you get up close and you're walking through paths in the forest and then suddenly it appears there before you and I really like that. I really like the type of rock at Pall Day because it's very solid and it all feels nice and secure. I think it would also be a great place to learn to trad climb because a lot of the gear placements are quite natural and it just always feels like a sociable friendly place. A trad climb is so much more of an adventure. I remember the trad climbs that I've done so much more than I remember sport or boulder problems just because you've been on such an emotional journey with it. I've climbed a few E3s and E4s before but I've never tried an E5 until Black Friday. I guess E5s always seem like there's a bit of a barrier to it, like it seems like kind of the next step, the next level. Can't believe it, I thought I had it. So gutted, like the tub's easy from there. Really? Yeah. We go in a jug yeah? And my foot just shut off. Is that a feeling of like must come back? Or try it again in like 20 minutes. Aye, we've got to hit those. I wanted to grab the opportunity while I was there to just get straight back on and try and do it. It must have been about seven o'clock and it was starting to get a little bit dark and I was due in for a night shift at work at nine o'clock but I guess if you don't try you'll never know. Yes! That was brilliant. Thank you. I'm so glad I got back on. Delighted. I'm off to work a night shift now. It's coming to its own now Glen Nevis because it's a much more complete playground in many respects. It's now a really highly regarded bouldering area but it's got this amazing wealth of really high quality one to two pitch routes. You have this massive collection of little buttresses and slabs dotted all over the place within a very uniform kind of square. That's what makes it quite attractive really because you can you can pick out a little buttress and you'll find that on that buttress it has a particular style of climbing and it's only when you actually finally get there that you realise there's a real a real gem of a little hidden buttress and the rock's always perfect. It's always immaculate so for me personally at least it's that quality of the rock that's really attractive. I'd started developing a lot of the crags on Glen Nevis so 1984 we based ourselves at Akinty Cottage and at the end of that season I decided that I was going to stay in the Highlands. I'm Jamie Johnston, I come from Cumbria. I came up to work at Three Eyes Monkeys and then yeah I just fell in love with the place. It's super beautiful especially on days like this. I love the glen though it's like right on the doorstep as well so you've got 10 minutes and you're in the glen. It's amazing. I was exploring the glen generally speaking and stumbled across all sorts of fantastic little buttresses hidden away in the birches and Sky Pilot in particular is the one I remember most for its 40 degree undercut base. Going back to the early 80s here I'm pretty sure it's from an Eric Burden track but the line went something like Sky Pilot how high can you fly you'll never never reach the top. That central overhanging section certainly didn't have anything on it. I used to down climb beneath the lip and then jump off and it's quite a big jump actually which is probably one of the reasons why I've got new hips. I first started climbing in Glen Nevis when I was a teenager and I lived in Glasgow at the time and I used to come up and visit for trips and I just absolutely loved it so much so that I moved here. I've been living next to Glen Nevis for 10 years and it's still my favourite place in the world to climb. I think the attraction is the combination of the rock type and the general scenery of the place. It's just such a beautiful place to spend time especially if it's somewhere like Sky Pilot for example where you feel like you're on a mountain crag even though it's only 15 minutes walk to get there and you have just this amazing view and most of the time you have total solitude and the combination of just brilliant bouldering and trad so I just never tire of it. One of the really cool things about climbing in general is that the climbs stay there as a permanent kind of thing so they've been put up by the great climbers of the past right back from Jimmy Ness and Ed Grinley and Stevie Abbott, Dave Cliffordson and a whole host of people that have done all those first ascents and the routes are still there and when you go and climb them now you feel like you can experience a bit of that history and also that same inspiration that made those climbers want to do those routes. The hillside of Pauldo has been gradually covered in birches over the past 30 or 40 years and they've grown up to a kind of height that's starting to affect the climbs now but this year a lot of them are going to be cleared and that's going to make a huge difference to Pauldo just to open it out to let the light and the air in. There's less midges in the summer but also it'll keep the routes cleaner for a lot longer so it's going to make an already really good climbing area just even better. Some of the routes that are enclosed in the trees I've had to wire brush to keep clean and it does take like an hour or two of effort to do that but it's well worth it not only because you clean the routes up and they're really good again but also you know it just kind of helps the general climbing community and those routes will stay clean for years after that.