Saturday night. We must have been quite ripe because we used to interleave Harrison Rocks with our visits to Wales, Derbyshire or the Lakes and go for weeks without more than a lick of flannel!

You may have heard of the mountain rescue on Tryfan one horrid rainy day. Roger Bywater and I were enjoying a V Diff which, as I remember, got quite slippery. Over to our right, 200 yards or more away and a hundred feet higher were two ladies climbing as a rope of two. The leader fell, I can't remember how far but 30 feet or so. She dangled there screaming very genteelly. We immediately made our way over to them where we met another group who sent someone down to call the mountain rescue. After some effort we managed to get this woman down to the path whereupon TWO mountain rescue teams appeared - the Ogwen Mountain Rescue and the Royal Airforce Team as well. The woman had broken her collarbone but seemed OK otherwise. They tried to get her to lie on the stretcher (one with sledge runners on it). The other woman turned out to be her sister and she flatly refused to allow them to put her on the stretcher, she went on and on about how it was safer to walk. Everyone got fed up with her high pitched emotional outpourings. It all got very heated, "There are 50 people on this f…ing mountain - it isn't a f…ing pantomime. Get on the stretcher." They tried to coax her to no avail and feelings ran very high. They had responded very quickly on what was now an unpleasant wet, windy, dark night and the person they came to rescue wouldn't play with them! The RAF team had huge searchlights that were parked on the road and shone up at us from the valley. The wet rocks glistened in the lamplight, then the guys carrying the empty stretcher slipped, they dropped the stretcher and it slithered away. Soon it gathered pace and it bumped and scuttered down the mountainside at an ever increasing speed. It vanished hundreds of feet below. "There you are", shouted the sister "I told you she was safer walking." "Should have put you on the f…ing stretcher, at least we would have got some peace" the mountainside erupted in laughter, it all seemed so funny. As Roger will tell, they turned out to be the daughters of a prominent Bishop and Roger was invited to dinner as a thank you for his part in the rescue.

Lastly, the trip to Austria organised by Graham Daniels about 1962. It cost me £25 including buying crampons, an ice axe, transport and accommodation. Two weeks of bliss. There were 12 in the party to begin with. One was a very sizeable character who wouldn't stop showing off his muscular prowess by doing pull-ups on anything he could find. As far as I can recall we all got fed up with him on the cross channel ferry - doing pull-ups on the superstructure. Inevitably he was the one we had to rescue from a crevasse - didn't have the brain power to work the prussic loops and his stamina was about zero. It took 8 people well over an hour to get him out. A day later we were traversing a simple but steepish rock slab of the sort that you wouldn't think of roping up for. But we were a rope of four and the slab simply lay between two snow slopes so we had kept the rope attached. Suddenly

this big strong guy got scared - "I'm going to fall, I'm going to fall…". There was no means of protecting the party if he were t fall, just smooth rock and a long way to the bottom. Probably because he almost killed 3 of us in the crevasse the day before, the others on the rope silently and simultaneously unroped ourselves. Fortunately he didn't fall but I remember that night Bob James announced that he refused to climb with this guy again, we all agreed. He (the big guy) burst into tears and left the room. He also left the trip and from that moment I have never heard of him again. Graham Daniels was the most experienced Alpine climber there and I was keen to learn. Each day someone else dropped out of the party until there were only two of us, Graham and myself. We had a great time but on the last bit of scrambling to the valley a rock fell off on Graham's hand. He fell badly gashing his forehead. "Bog paper" he said. "I need bog paper." I couldn't understand this sudden need until he explained that it was supposed to be a very good antiseptic - you learn something new every day!

I have a complete set of slides of the Alpine trip somewhere and am enclosing one or two shots that I have found. I very much look forward to meeting you.

Yours sincerely

Duncan Hector