the stretcher, approaching the gully from below. Meanwhile the advance rescue party shepherded the less experienced civilians off the ridge to easy ground where they were left to find their own way down.

The lower started at 4.0 pm but three hours later they had managed to descend only 1,300 feet owing to the difficulty of the ground, which was extremely steep and interspersed with terraces of heather. They were lowering the stretcher on the five hundred foot rope. They left it when darkness fell and returned to their base.

They reached the road with the body the following afternoon at 1.0pm.

The officer in charge of the team considered this operation would have been beyond the capabilities of local clubs. Two members of the team who had spent six hours in the gale on the ridge (and still were the key men on the lower) received commendations from the Air Officer Commanding.

The following year the same team was highly commended by local police for the recovery of a body which would have been a task 'almost insurmountable for us' (that is, the police in question). This was the case of the naval officer who had been walking on An Teallach with a woman companion. He had left her on Sgurr Fiona while he went on to take in one or two more tops. At 3.0pm she saw him for the last time, disappearing round a shoulder. She waited an hour and, when he failed to return, started down to the road where they had left their car.

She switched on the lights to guide him in case he was descending in darkness, and then hitched a ride to the hotel where she was staying with the missing man and his wife.

He didn't return that night and a local search party went up An Teallach the following day. Although the sighted the body about one hundred feet below the top of a gully on Sgurr Fiona, they were unable to reach it. A keeper in the party thought that marks on the scree at the head of the gully indicated that the man had lost his footing there.

Kinloss were sent for, and the officer in charge, Pete Addis, was lowered 120 feet to recover the body. This was the task the police thought nearly insurmountable.

One of the basic rules of mountaineering is that parties should not, under normal circumstances, split up, even in good weather. The number of times that parties report to the police that one of their members is missing seem to be greater than the occasions on which solitary walkers disappear.

Above Loch Einich in the Cairngorms rises Sgoran Dubh Mor, 3,635 feet: a long rampart of mountain on its eastern aspect with a mile of buttresses and gullies above the loch. The two easy ways up Sgoran Dubh Mor avoid these cliffs; the first reaches the summit by its long northern ridge, the second goes along under the eastern wall, into the head of the glen, whence it zig-zags up through harmless outcrops to gain the ridge south of the summit.

On July 16th 1961, four hill-walkers, all men, decided they would go straight up the east face from the loch. They carried neither map or compass.

They toiled up steep heathery slopes to the south of Number Three Buttress and most Continue to Page 14