Day three

This will be a fairly short post as I'm knackered - mainly because Tom, one of the other elective students, thought there was a tutorial at 0750, so I got up at 0630 to make it in on time but it turns out it had been cancelled! Not his fault but resulted in very early start by my standards.

After that the board round went well, although lots of people in the room again, with the new F1s starting shadowing properly today. I was meant to avoid the ward work by going into theatre with the anaesthetist, however the op was cancelled as when we hooked up the patient to the monitoring it was discovered they weren't fit for surgery. Could (/should) have been picked up in a more thorough pre-op assessment, and wastes everyone's time and money in terms of booking theatre staff and facilities. Frustrating.

Spent the rest of the morning in A&E which was great, saw a few patients and felt like I was helping the docs a little. It was pretty busy with some complex cases, however as the forecast was good I decided to take the afternoon off and maximise my use of the good weather opportunites by heading off into the hills!

Number 5 gully

The ledge of Ledge Route, massive exposure!

I parked up at the Ben Nevis hotel carpark, and smashed it out to the CIC hut. Weather not perfect, cloudy with occassional drizzle. After leaving the tourist path barely saw anyone else. I ascended the north face of the Ben via Ledge Route, a grade 1 scramble which was awesome! Starts off up number 5 gully, moves right onto Carn Dearg buttress and then a long ridge walk/scramble to the summit from where it was an easy hop to the Ben. The exposure was pretty mind blowing, the whole of the north face is just so impressive, so much rock. Definitely hoping to explore it alot more!

Being on the hill makes Martin a happy man!

The upper ridge section of Ledge Route

From the summit it was 1h18m back to the car, where I met my host John who had just returned from some training for the Ben Nevis fell race -  an annual race up and down the Ben. He's done it for the past 24 years, incredible. Although even more incredible, the record up AND down is a total of 1h25m... Insane.

Back to the house, food/tv and relaxing, then skyped everyone. So good Skype - free and video, makes the distance a lot easier to deal with. But pretty knackered now, especially as got up at 0630!

On the top!