Yesterday I took a day off from painting the loo and drove up the Duddon to Cockley Beck Bridge. I hadn't climbed the Scafells for ten years or more, and thought it was worth another go. Up Moasdale, skirting the bogs where possible, then the slog across Throstle Garth to the boggy wilderness of Upper Eskdale. The morning's mist was doing its best to clear, and all the bristling lower buttresses of the high mountains gleamed in the sun, Esk Buttress rearing up like a crag that has just been told to improve its posture.
I climbed Thor's Buttress, a Grade 3 scramble that takes you up to the summit of Pen, a southerly outlier of Scafell Pike. The hardest move was about what you'd expect on a Difficult rock climb, though in walking boots, alone, without a rope and above a big drop, that was quite gripping enough.
After counting the other climbers on top of the Pike (46 including myself), I went down to Mickledore, where the mantrap of Broad Stand awaited, a sunlit cuboid of dangerous allure. I had climbed it three times before, as far as I could remember: once with my Dad aged about 9 or 10 (when I was probably dragged up on a rope), once in 1987 when I helped a Spanish waiter from Keswick up, and the last time in September 1992 on my stag weekend in the pouring rain. Despite this, I felt nervous. Broad Stand is a notorious black spot - people regularly fall off and some die. No-one else was on the route, and there was no-one to be seen on the easier ground above it either.
The entrance lies up a narrow slit, now wet and polished, known as Fat Man's Agony. Then you go round a little corner and up to Broad Stand itself. The bad step is a sloping slab about the size of a ping-pong table whose lower end drops abruptly the best part of a hundred feet to scree. Standing on the slab you are faced with two walls at right angles about 7 or 8 feet high. The right wall you can forget. The left is the way up.
There are pretty much two alternatives only. At the left side of the left wall there is a crevice just a little too small to accommodate an adult. It looks easy, and this is indeed the way my Dad took me aged 9. But it is right over the slab edge, and if you fall from here without a rope you are finished. I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid.
In the middle of the wall there is a small block, a mounting block if you like, and obliquely up left a polished-smooth sloping scoop of a hold; up left again a really quite good foothold that looks as if it might be a game-changer. All you would need to do is hold yourself in balance against the tendency of the wall to push you outwards, and step up. But the top of the wall is rounded and offers little of the reassuringly positive variety, and the second foothold, the polished one, yesterday had a small stream running down it in a thin pulse.
I had three or four goes, flapping about with my hands on top of the wall to try and find the generous handhold that memory assured me had been there last time. Nothing better than a thin crack for the finger-ends. I retreated, puzzled and intimidated. I even had speculative look at the crevice on the left, which left me shuddering at the doom-laden possibilities.
By this time I noticed that a man on Mickledore below had stopped to watch my efforts. It would be humiliating to give up in front of an audience, and if I fell off I would probably stay on the slab. Probably. I picked up my rucksack and chucked it on top of the wall. I made a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to dry the polished scoop, stepped on the mounting block, cantilevered my left foot high on the good foothold, got my right foot into the scoop, pushed up on my left, got my fingers in the crack and somehow thrutched over the top, with all the grace of a wave trying get to the top of the beach and then collapsing into the sand. It was over in ten seconds.
Elated, I waved at the man watching. He waved back. At least I think he was waving.
A few things occur to me. One, it was much harder than I remembered. When I got home I googled "Broad Stand" and "missing hold" but nothing came up. But yesterday I asked my Dad (now aged 90) what he remembered about it, and he too thought there had once been a massive jug handle hold over the top. So maybe it was once easier. On the other hand maybe that was because 21 years ago everything about my body worked, and now much less of it seems to.
Secondly, above Broad Stand there used to be a path. There isn't any more. In fact you can see where the path used to be, but it now has grass growing on it. Maybe internet warnings (like this one) mean that walkers can read about the accidents (one a year for the last few years) and are warned off. Funnily enough Lord's Rake, the easy but unpleasantly loose way to the top which wends its way underneath the crags, is now apparently "closed" to walkers because of a precariously poised boulder; and when I got to the top of Scafell there were only three or four people there. Scafell is now quite hard to get to from the Pike, and demands a detour via Foxes Tarn.
Thirdly, the rock climbing grade for Broad Stand, is ridiculous and misleading. Even if it isn't harder than it used to be, grades are given for climbers with a rope and wearing rock boots. Alone, in walking boots, which is certainly the way most people used to climb it, the impasse is a much more serious undertaking than the "Difficult" grade attributed to it.
Lastly, for a father of three, climbing Broad Stand, or Thor's Buttress for that matter, is probably an unjustifiable risk. But these are a bit like the big hit in cricket - get it to the boundary and everyone says "Good shot"; get it wrong and they say, "He chucked his wicket away".
At the moment I am still not out; but undeniably giving the bowlers a bit of encouragement.
