It was in this ridiculous climate that I stumbled across this really cool arete. It looked really hard, but for me really hard was E5, so I decided it must be E5. The obvious thing to do was for me and Dave to have a go at leading it... We gradually got higher and higher up the arete. The only gear we had was a cam on the lower wall, which held just long enough to pull us in away from to drop, but always popped just afterwards. As a result we kept taking these stupid groundfalls, where we'd just be pulled in away from the really big drop and cave, but would always land in a load of brambles. Thankfully Dave decided to abseil the line and persuaded me to stop trying it from the ground. We hadn't even got to the crux. I'd have never done it ground up and it took me a good few months to do it even after working it. [1]