It is possible to avoid the pinnacles by a deer path on the southern flank of the ridge. This day the path was iced up and the couple decided to take the pinnacles direct. At 2.0 pm they reached the third one and, finding it awkward, decided to try to turn it on the south after all.

They started traversing round the foot of the tower and found themselves on a snow-slope above a gully. Suddenly the man slipped. With no axe to brake his fall he was almost helpless, but somehow he managed to stop himself after he had slid 150 feet. He called back to the girl that he was all right, when, to his horror, he saw that she was starting to slide. For a moment she managed to check herself, and he shouted to her to remain there. But to stay spread-eagled in vibrams and without an axe on steep, hard snow is virtually impossible. She started to slide again. As she passed, he tried to stop her, but could do nothing since he was so delicately balanced himself. She slid out of sight round a bend in the gully below.

The second party didn't witness the fall. When they reached the difficult pinnacle they retreated a short distance to where, looking below, they could see the first couple. The girl was sitting down and the man appeared to be investigating the route. They retreated a little father when they were halted by the sound of a scream. They rushed back to the point from which they had glimpsed the others and now they could see only the man. He was calling down the gully.

He shouted up to them what had happened. One of the two men started down for assistance, while the other attempted to lower the survivor down different gullies one after the other, but without a longer rope they could make no contact with the girl. There had been no sound from her since she disappeared.

At 3.30 pm they turned back to Torridon. There they joined a civilian search party which attempted to reach the casualty from below, but the weather had turned very bad by now and, at 11.0pm they were forced to retreat.

At 9.30 am the following morning Kinloss arrived. Also in the district was an ex-member of the team, now a civilian, called Halpin. The three best rock-climbers: Sullivan, Collighan and Buckley, with Halpin, the survivor of the accident and one of the others who had been on the ridge the previous day, started up Liathach, taking with them a five hundred foot rope.

In gale-force winds and driving snow they worked their way slowly along the ridge to the Fasarinen Pinnacles. Ropes were used on the exposed deer path. Below the third pinnacle the survivor was able to identify the gully down which the girl had fallen. The others lowered Sullivan on the long rope. After a hundred feet he lost contact with them, and was forced to leap down the ledges in an effort to race the slack which threatened to accumulate about his feet.

He came to the end of the rope, or rather the others stopped lowering for that was the extent of it. He waited there and the others climbed down a ridge at the side and joined him. The two civilians were with the RAF. They belayed again and Sullivan continued. Three hundred feet lower he found the girl's body in the bed of the gully.

The progress of the climbing party had been followed through binoculars by those at base, and when they saw the two star reds go up, the main body of the team started out with Continue to Page 13