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1980s - WALES AND AUSTRIA

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I found these images while sorting through some stuff I had in storage recently. They take me back to the 1980s, and the Land of Kodak Instamatic! Dusty, stained where the damp had got at them, they brought back a few memories so I thought I'd scan a few in and see what Photoshop could do with them. They wouldn't enlarge much but here they are, same as the original print size. If I find any more I might put them up!




The blizzard in early January 1982 was a memorable event and this and the next photo were taken while driving from Birmingham to Aberystwyth a few days later. The top one is on the Knighton-Penybont road, where it goes over the N flank of Radnor Forest....



And this is the A44 just E of Dyffryn Castell above Ponterwyd. What happened was that the snow mostly blew off the hills and ended up filling any road cutting it could. Snow like this is unusual in Mid-Wales and certainly doesn't happen every winter. I have a few press-cuttings someone has sent me which I'll sort out in due course.

The storm is still spoken of today: tales of helicopter evacuations for anybody needing medical assistance for several days; people gleefully sliding down snowdrifts from first-floor windows; in Machynlleth snow was piled 15ft high by the Clocktower where JCBs had tipped it while at Aberystwyth the snow was dumped on the beach where the last dirty remnants were still there weeks later!



More cold winters happened in the Mid-80s. In early 1986 the 400ft, damp, seepy rockface overlooking the Craig-y-Pistyll waterfall above Bontgoch was frozen for weeks. The photo does it no justice at all! It would have made a fantastic ice-climb - and still would if it freezes up again!

I remember that winter well - walking up the Leri from Bontgoch to solo the waterslide and short ice-pitches below the Llyn Craig-y-Pistyll dam and a ridiculous epic that I had on the final ice-pitch below the dam. Somehow, I managed to break through the ice with the point of my axe: next minute freezing water was spraying out into my face! It froze my hat to my hair and covered my glasses in ice! All of this 10ft off the deck, perched on the front points of my crampons: how I managed to extract myself, unable to see at all, still remains a bit of a mystery to me....



December 1985 on the Crib-Goch ridge of Snowdon........



......and a close-up of the ice formations!



Among the photos were some I took in 1980 in the Austrian Alps, when I was fit and climbed mountains all the time! This is a crevasse on the upper slopes of the Otztaler Wildspitze......



And this is the summit ridge of the Fineilspitze. 2 days after this was taken I was caught in a severe thunderstorm on the way off a nearby peak and was chased away by C-G strikes which were hitting the glacier only 100m away at one point. That gave me serious respect for lightning!

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