members did the second, while Jack and Stella Emmerson kicked steps up the length of North Castle. Jack Emmerson was not a member of the Kinloss team, but, being an expert mountaineer and living on the station, he was often called out, or offered his services for the more difficult operations. At the time of this accident he was on leave and camping in the glen with his wife.

On this second day the lower parts of Numbers Two, Three and Four Gullies were examined. These are possible ways of descent. The snow was soft and there was avalanche debris about - as indeed, there had been in the Castle corrie into which the two Castle Gullies descend. Here there was a small avalanche cone. On the third day the RAF started to excavate this, but the snow was too deep and soft to permit any depth to be reached. On the fourth day they abandoned it to continue searching elsewhere on Carn Dearg.

But the avalanche cone possessed a sinister significance, not least because it lay at the foot of the gully the missing men had intended to climb. Kinloss were drawn back to it and, borrowing long rods from the factory in Fort William, over the next two days they followed the Continental procedure of probing the avalanche debris, moving uphill in a similar fashion to a sweep search.

At 4.0 pm on the sixth day they had reached the foot of North Castle Gully when they were forced to retreat as the snow was avalanching. Fresh snow had fallen and was still falling. The debris varied in depth from four to fifteen feet.

Some of the team were now called away to salvage a Sabre jet which had crashed in a peat bog south of Kinloss. Shortly afterwards the rest of the team was recalled.

A thaw must have followed for, on April 19th, seventeen days after the climbers disappeared, two bodies were found lying on top of the snow and still roped together at the foot of South Castle Gully. They had been under the snow until two or three days before they were found.

Since the cornice was unbroken at the top of the gully, this accident may have been caused by an avalanche in it, possibly precipitated by the climbers themselves. However, from the position where the bodies were found, it is equally likely that they fell, not from the gully, but from the Castle itself. Men of their experience might have decided that in the dangerous conditions of that day it was preferable to reject the gully in favour of the buttress where there would be more wind but less snow. But near the top of the Castle there are smooth slabs on which the snow lies, consituting an avalanche danger as acute as any to be found in a gully.

Although, as elsewhere, the majority of accidents on the Ben befall inexperienced people, it is probable that more experienced climbers are involved in trouble here than on any other mountain in Britain. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it is the mountain par excellence for winter climbing - and belays on steep ice and snow are seldom so reliable as those on rock. And climbers tend to concentrate more on the technique of rock climbing, in particular that of anchorage, than on belaying as applied to snow and ice climbing. Not enough is known about the technique of belaying on steep ice, nor about the methods of checking the leader's fall under such conditions. In most serious winter climbing accidents the leader falls and the second's belay fails to hold him. Continue to Page 4