What's Not To Love?
Posted by Jeremy Windsor on Feb 11, 2022
Winter climbing guides are amongst the hardest books to write. Authors can often spend years waiting for routes to come into condition. Accurate descriptions, clear photo "topos" and memorable "action shots" are hard won. Limited daylight, long walk in's and ever changing weather mean that this is a job for only the most enthusiastic and inspired. Nevertheless these books are vital as they play an enormous part in keeping mountaineers and winter climbers safe. So when something very special comes along, like Lina Arthur's recently published, "Snow And Ice", it's well worth taking a moment to celebrate!
Lina's brilliant book is a compendium of 100 winter routes in England, Wales and Scotland. Each description contains all that's needed for a competent party to climb the route safely and successfully. Importantly, Lina highlights the conditions that are needed to best climb it. This, together with a very thorough introduction covering tactics, equipment and avalanche forecasting means that this book takes safety very seriously indeed. I spoke to Lina and asked her about the writing of the book...
Lina, thanks for talking to me. Can I ask you to start by telling us a bit about yourself?
I've always loved the hills and enjoyed spending time in the mountains when I was growing up. About 12 years ago I started climbing and joined the Oxford University Mountaineering Club. Since then I have climbed all over the UK, in the Alps, the Dolomites and Morocco in both summer and winter. After completing my DPhil at Oxford, I worked for a digital publisher before deciding to move to northern Cumbria in order to be nearer the mountains. This was before working from home was normalised, but fortuitously the Oxford Alpine Club had a publishing project for me to take on – The Alps, A Natural Companion (by Jim Langley and Paul Gannon) - and things proceeded from that.
Who have you aimed the guidebook at?
In part it is aimed at myself, 10 years ago on university club meets, heading up Parsley Fern Gully or Striding Edge for the umpteenth time and thinking that there must be some other good route options if I could just work out what and where they were. I wanted the book to be useful and inspiring to those venturing into winter mountaineering, to give a bit more help with approaches and descents and route selection than you might find in the definitive guides, and to highlight the easy routes as well as more challenging ones.
However, one of the things I realised when putting the book together was just how much fun I still have climbing these routes – many of them are not technically at all difficult, but they provide brilliant days of mountaineering. This has been borne out in conversations with others since the book has been published; sometimes you have a mixed level group, or you want a day without hanging around on belay ledges or you just want a genuinely great easy route – so the book also offers a high-quality selection of routes to those people.
Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis
What inspired you to undertake such an enormous challenge?
I think it was Toni Morrison who said that if there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. I'd written a guide to Cogne ice with Steve Broadbent, and had been involved in other projects for OAC, but the idea of Snow & Ice kept niggling at me. People kept asking for recommendations for easy winter routes and while books like Scotland's Winter Mountains With One Axe and Dan Bailey's Mountain Ridges guides went some way towards addressing that gap, I eventually concluded that, as daunting as the task seemed, the only way the book was going to exist was if I went ahead and wrote it. Luckily, OAC was tremendously supportive of me doing that.
What were the greatest challenges you faced in putting the book together?
Initially the greatest challenges were all predictable ones – getting everything done in short daylight hours necessitated 4am starts, long drives, bivvying in my car only to discover the doors had frozen shut overnight, and jogging down from routes in B3 boots so as to be able to photograph multiple routes on the same day. I also needed good photography weather to coincide with snow and ice conditions (and not so much snow that routes were obscured). The winter of 2019-2020 was initially very wet, then just the weather started to improve, the unexpected challenge of a global pandemic brought a premature end to the winter climbing season. The following winter offered better conditions, but was again blighted by restrictions and closures. It is difficult to get action shots when you're the only person on a mountain, but an unseasonably late May snowfall enabled me to snatch a couple of photographs that I still needed.
Finally, OAC is a small publisher, so paper shortages, rising printing costs and shipping complications due to Brexit have been an additional challenge.
Ice climbing in the Lake District
Can you describe a typical day working on the book?
I'm afraid people are going to be disappointed by what writing a guidebook actually involves! The majority of days are not spent in the mountains climbing – they're spent in front of a computer surrounded by maps and guidebooks, editing photos, researching climbing history, writing up route descriptions, labelling maps, or checking parking restrictions.
That said, those tasks couldn't happen without the mountain days, making an early start to check and photograph routes, then returning to a chilly bivvy or an evening of labelling photos, poring over weather forecasts and maps, and working out what to tackle the following day. Occasionally a bad weather spell that permitted an office day came as a welcome respite!
I found that often climbing days and photography days were separate – a climbing day was a good day to check the approach and descent from a route, and could be done even when visibility was poor, whereas on fine days crag photography took priority and frequently necessitated a long walk up a hill on the opposite side of the valley from a route.
Time pressures meant that I couldn't always wait for perfect weather, so on numerous occasions I did approaches in the rain, only for the cloud to remain impenetrable all day and leave me frustratingly empty-handed. Once while I was waiting in the rain beside Llyn Idwal, a passer-by perceptively deduced that I must be working, because no one would be sitting there for fun. Luckily, an hour later the clag cleared, revealing the snow gullies above and I was able to get the photographs I needed.
The layout of your book is incredibly eye catching and easy to follow. In large part, it takes its lead from other guidebooks published by Oxford Alpine Club. Can you talk about how you hit upon this style?
Perhaps uniquely, Oxford Alpine Club starts from the maps, so it is the visuals that drive the design process. Once these are in place, all the information has to be clearly and logically presented and compartmentalised, so that everything you need from car park to route and back again is easily accessible on a single page. We worked really hard to make this guidebook as user-friendly as possible, annotating and highlighting approaches and routes, and ensuring that key information was available at a glance or with a scan of a QR code.
Forcan Ridge
A better series of winter "action shots" would be hard to find. I'm particularly inspired by the photos of water ice climbing in the Lakes. How did you achieve such a high standard?
Good winter "action shots" can be difficult to achieve unless you specifically set out to take them, because generally belay duties, cold hands, time constraints, dark clothing and poor light conspire against you. I really wanted to dispel the negative image of UK winter climbing as cold and a bit grim, so I always climbed with my camera to hand and made sure to use it. I also had some very accommodating climbing partners, who tolerated requests to wait for ten minutes until the sun came out or to pose while the perfect angle was achieved. I am fortunate to live in Cumbria, so when three days of perfect water ice occurred, I was able to make the most of it, but I am also tremendously grateful to all the people who generously allowed me to use their photos in the book.
Along with the 100 highlighted routes in the book, you've also provided a range of alternatives. I think this was one of the features that made Simon Richardson's "Chasing The Ephemeral" so invaluable. Was it important to you?
I really admired this feature in Chasing The Ephemeral, and I decided right at the start of the process that alternatives were going to be an important element of Snow & Ice. In fact, their inclusion is one of the main ways that this book differs from the OAC's Mountain Rock guide. I feel that it is very important for a selective winter guide to provide alternatives so that climbers can be flexible if they reach the base of their chosen route and find it out of condition or themselves at the back of a queue. It also allowed me to include a few more gems that I would otherwise have had to leave out! There are 150 alternative routes, so I hope that although many of the routes are very popular, teams will also be able to find quiet routes if they want them. Even in the Lakes, I've had many of these routes to myself on days when others have been crowded with climbers.
Newlands Hause in the Lake District
Inevitably with a selected guide, a number of routes had to be left out. Which was the hardest to ignore?
Some routes actually went in and out several times! I apologise to all the people whose favourite route I've left out – it's testament to how many great routes there are that some really good ones had to be omitted, particularly in Scotland.
I wanted to ensure that if people based themselves in an area there were at least two days' worth of climbing described and that most routes were as accessible as possible without making an extended trip. This meant that great but isolated routes such as Black Spout in Lochnagar could not be included. Angel's Ridge on Sgòr an Lochain Uaine is another great route which ultimately failed to make the cut, due to the length of the approach. I also left out several routes in the Lakes and Snowdonia because they do not reliably come into condition, but I couldn't quite bring myself to leave out all the Lakeland ice, because if it does form, it is incredibly special.
Do you have a favourite amongst those you included?
It was hard enough narrowing them down to 100, let alone choosing a favourite! Each of the routes has something about it which makes me smile – whether that's the quality of the climbing, memories of past ascents and good company, beautiful locations and views, or interesting history. Some I've climbed multiple times, others I came across while researching this book and simply had to try. I was never disappointed! If I must choose, a few of my particular favourites are Ledge Route, which justified a long drive up from Swindon the day before, Tower Ridge (which I had almost entirely to myself in perfect conditions), South Gully on Dove Crag, an unexpected icy gem, and Newlands Hause Waterfall – fantastic roadside water ice in Cumbria, what's not to love?
Thanks Lina - Good Luck!
If you’re keen on winter climbing there’s lots more on the blog to look at!
Here’s some ideas for winter climbing in the Peak District! What about the dangers of climbing on Ben Nevis? Looking further afield, why not read about Jerry Gore’s speed ascent of the north face of the Eiger, Bernadette McDonald’s brilliant new book Winter 8000’s or the history of the first all metal ice axe - Enjoy!
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