Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Quirky England...

...and Scotland.

Yesterday I went to a slideshow that a couple people from CUMC put on. One guy talked about his experience climbing the Nose last summer. Most of it was predictable but I did learn one thing I didn't know -- apparently some people take duct tape up the climb and tape over sharp edges that might damage ropes. Sounds like Changing Corners is practically covered in "gaffa" tape. That was news to me!

But the other guy talked about his experiences climbing in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, and the most interesting thing he spoke about, which kind of sums up the whole of climbing in the UK, was "Fuselage Gully." See, apparently, an army training plane crashed into this gully in the 1950s, and because it is so remote, they never got the fuselage out. Instead, when you do the climb, you just climb through the plane remains, Lost-style. Very British.

The other England quirk I came across was the "Listening Ears" in Kent which tried to "listen" for approaching planes before radar was invented. I suspect that future societies will find those way more confusing than Stonehenge.

1 comment:

OldEric said...

Nika Nika Nika

Yes duct tape is used many places where there are sharp edges and you need to protect the rope.

And we have many plane crashes around here - White Mountains in NH and Green Mountains in VT where you can go see the wreckage - mostly hiking situations. That will be a goal for you next summer - we will go find the WW2 bomber on top of Camel's Hump in VT. One of the more famous ones in the US occurred in the Tetons in the mid 50's - Mt. Moran I think. The plane embedded itself in a glacier and there were "remains" galore. The closed the climbing route for several years until the remains got "naturally processed".

How will future generations explain the remains of the Old Man of the Mountains on the Cannon talus?