how to use an ice axe.

They reached the summit by way of the north-east shoulder at 2.30 p.m. Visibility was down to ten yards and the light was bad. Half an hour later they started down, intending to retrace their steps, but it was snowing now and the light was so poor that they lost the tracks. In order to pick them up again they began to zigzag from left to right.

When they were about two hundred yards from the summit, Hughes, with Heron about six feet behind him, stopped and waited for the other two to catch up. They did so, and he started off again, now moving rightwards and away from the cliff. As he moved off, he saw Heron, who was on his left, slip and start to slide down the slope. He appeared to be trying to stop himself with the pick of the axe in the approved fashion. In view of this, and the fact that the slope appeared innocuous (he was sliding slowly) they felt no apprehension. They watched him slide about fifty feet when he disappeared into a dip in the ground. To their dismay, when they followed his tracks, they continued for about a hundred and fifty feet and then disappeared over the cliff.

They shouted for about half an hour, when they returned to the summit and hurried down to the youth hostel for help.

Heron's body was found at 2.20 am the following morning. He had fallen seven hundred feet into Coire Leis and was killed instantly.

The winter passed, the snow melted and the brief summer came to the Ben. That too passed and autumnal gales lashed the mountain, changing to sleet and then to snow, and the convex slope below the summit built up again: not a trap with jaws, but one soft, smooth, curving lip.

On December 19th 1954, a party of eleven from the Royal Naval establishment at Lossiemouth, including three members of the Women's Royal Naval Service, were staying in the CIC hut. On that day they ascended the Ben from Coire Leis, reaching the summit to find visibility poor. Like the party of the previous winter they started to descend, intending to retrace their tracks to the Carn Mor Dearg arête, but they had gone only two hundred yards when they realised that they were not on the correct line. They thought that they were too far to the south (right) and that they should now travel in the opposite direction. This brought them too close to the cliffs of the North-East Buttress, a fact which did not escape their leader.

They were not bunched together. There was a party of six rather Continue to page 10