York Alpine Club Blog

Last weekend, two dozen members and ex members met up at Coniston Copper mines to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of York Alpine Club.

The unexpectedly blue sky on Saturday tempted most of us to get out (fairly) early. Margaret headed off to meet Jonathan Moffett for a walk to the west of Coniston. Simon, Carmen, Rob and Pete B opted for the short walk to the esoteric Little How Crag. This gave them plenty of time for climbing and they notched up ten routes between them, including the atmospherically named Thunderclap, Thunder Slab, Greased Lightning and Sunshine Arete.



Peri, Dave, Jamie and Paul all headed up to Dow. Peri and Dave got a Classic Rock tick with C Ordinary Route, whilst Jamie and Paul did the equally good Giant’s Crawl.

Donal, Simeon, Silvia, Alan, Peter, Simon F, Debra and Annie chose a lovely but short lived scramble as a means of approach to Wetherlam. We then continued on to take in Swirl How, Coniston Old Man and Dow before the long plod down Walna Scar road back to the hut.



 
Andrew and Karen made a later start up the Coniston fells, but Andrew put his foot down a rabbit hole and twisted his ankle. Back at the hut, he swapped his boot for a mop bucket of cold water, which provided lots of entertainment for everyone else.

In the evening, Phil, Tom and Fliss joined us for the party. The weather gods defied Simon’s doom-laden prediction for the planned fireworks and instead provided a mainly clear moon-lit evening.

Thanks to Andrew’s bargain hunting, we managed to acquire a rather large quantity of munitions fireworks, hand assemble by children in Far Eastern sweat factories. Despite fears of a pyrotechnic disaster, these provided an excellent display, with only one of the rockets suddenly changing direction mid-flight!

Celebrations continued indoors with large quantities of food and alcohol (including fizzy stuff) whilst we all watched the increasingly blurry slide show. We mainly managed to identify lots of different YAC members in unusual situations (both physical and geographical). If in doubt, we guessed Simon in Scotland and were usually right! Like all the best parties, we were too stuffed to eat the birthday cake and rolled off to bed vowing never to eat or drink again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day, the weather was not so good, but most people made half hearted attempts at outdoor activities and those that did, at least had the birthday cake to sustain them!

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Climbing, Crags, Fell running, Scrambling, Walking, Weekend Meets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.