I have been able to book us twenty places at Lagangarbh for our regular September, Glencoe meet but NOT on the dates in the club handbook. This meet will now be the weekend of Friday 17th to Sunday 19th September, still at a cost of just £16 per head. I will start taking bookings for this immediatley, so please send your cheques to me, John Holden, at the usual address.

Well the summer programme has started reasonably well, after the let down of the first evening. All the other Thursday meets have come off and been well attended, particularly Tony Morely's evening at Shepherds....even Tony was there, which made the evening that bit more special. Even the often chilly winds have not kept people away and I am sure that everyone has been having a good time.

Tuesday evenings have been equally successful, and in all our meets we have only managed to clash with another club once, The Keswick Club at Castle Rock.

Helen Costelloe's Newcomers meet, at Shepherds on April 18th drew a good crowd, with everyone meeting up as planned at Shepherds Café, where we were joined by Chris and Ellen Mothersdale and their children, who disappeared for a family walk after saying hello, Chris at least has since been along to an evening meet, and by Simon Morehead, who

Well what can I say? Is this winter or is this winter? This year is really throwing everything (good) it can at us in The Lakes. January saw the valley icefalls coming into condition, with mediocre snow conditions higher up and now in February we have seen a gradual reversal, the snow conditions improving at higher levels first, followed by the high ice getting fatter and bluer all the time.

The Lakes meet on Feb 14th fell inconveniently on Valentines Day and at the start of half-term, so the official meet was dropped, however various groups got out in both The Lakes and Scotland making the most of the great conditions, as people have been doing every weekend...and some even in the week, lucky devils.

Dorine has written of her exploits in Scotland with Tim Millen, clearly one of the club's rising stars, he seems to be unstoppable at the moment and excels at everything he tries, snow, ice, mixed....whatever, its all cannon fodder to "The Terminator".

Falling out of bed to bacon, sausage, black pudding, beans, egg and potato cakes rustled up by Tim to fuel us for the day ahead on the Ben is definitely the way to go. Subzero temperatures saw us leaving the North Face car park by star light - half term and not much activity here. I could tell it was going to be a stunning day but where was everybody, arriving at the CIC hut we felt very alone - maybe the big dump of fresh powder had put everybody off.

Cautiously we decided to put off Green Gulley and head for the ice falls - a great warm up despite an attack of the hot aches. More climbers appeared over the horizon as we decided to head up towards our route - very hard work breaking trail in the deep soft snow - avalanche debris could be seen in the distance - most of the few climbers around were heading for Ledge Route.