Lees forged ahead, the fastest man I know in an emergency, and still fit at the end.

Oh, the agony of those terrible grinding uphill bursts, when great racking groans tore our lungs apart and we looked at each other naked and unashamed and stumbled on, forcing the last thin ounce out of our reluctant bodies - at the will, not of Lees, but of a man or woman we had never seen and we didn't know from Adam. Some of the most strenuous work proved to be unnecessary; the victim was dead when the team arrived - and the spirit went out of the men. But when they found the casualty alive, each man knew his allotted place and the operation was like the running of a well-tuned machine.
This working of individuals as a unit was seen to its best advantage on a big cliff. In 1961 Valley was issued with 500-foot ropes, and shortly afterwards - on Whit Monday - a man fell off Red Wall on Lliwedd.

It had been a day of freak storms. We went to the Moelwyns - above Blaenau Ffestiniog - through a black and sultry morning with no breeze to relieve it even on the hill. The Moelwyns were empty except for the team.

We did several short climbs, then there were a few spots of rain and the thunder came rolling up from the south. We ran down and waited in the transport, eating lunch. The storm seemed to pass and we went back to the rock. Thunder was still rolling in the distance but it had been doing that all morning; if we took any notice we'd never do any climbing. Lees and I started on a Severe.

Half-way up, the storm burst on us. Between peals the centre had approached silently. One roll was five miles away, the next almost overhead. In no time the rock was greasy with mud (dust had accumulated during the recent dry spell) and we were drenched.

I closed my mind to the elements and went doggedly up the last pitch, but on the top, as soon as I was belayed, I tore off my carabineers and slings and threw them away. The thunder crashed overhead and the lightning dazzled me.

Half-way through bringing up Lees I realised that all the carabineers I had discarded were of duralumin; the only one of steel was at my waist and impossible to throw away because it was being used with the belay.

The same day - in the same series of storms - at least three people were killed; a farmer was struck by lightning in Ireland, and a member of the St. Athan R.A.F. mountain rescue team was killed a few miles south of us, on the Arans. The well-known mountaineer, Godfrey Francis, was killed by a lightning-loosed boulder on Pillar in the Lake District.

We drove back to the camp site near Capel Curig through heavy rain. We were all soaked to the skin and looking forward to dry clothes. I was in front of my car and wondered why Lees didn't catch me up in the Land-Rover. But he had been stopped by a local climber, Bill Trench, who had come to tell him that there had been an accident on Lliwedd. They caught me up at camp. I had just time to throw some dry clothes on my upper half and to change into nailed boots before we were off again.

The Bank Holiday traffic was retreating along the roads of Snowdonia in the face of the storms. Lees put the Land-Rover on the white line and kept it there. The warning bell was out of order so one of the boys sat on the bonnet shouting and waving his arms like a Continue to Page 3