Just got back from a weekend at Glencoe for a somewhat sombe family occasion on the Sat, so we stayed over to Sun and took the kids to the indoor climbing wall in Kinlochleven.
The Ice Factor is the site of a former Aluminium smelter,which closed some years ago.
The massive empty building has been re-used as an indoor climbing wall, and the building has a half-dozen very tall bays where some industrial things once stood.
Several of these have normal indoor climbing walls, but one of the bays has been converted to an indoor ice-wall.
It's been insulated and set up like an industrial freezer.
The climbing walls have been sprayed with water, to give an ice thickness of about 3 feet at the bottom, thinning to nothing ( mixed climbing ) at the top.
It's utterly fantastic.
I wish I could have learned the basics of ice technique here!
The instructors were superb, and obviously knew what they were talking about.
Here's a couple of pics to give you an idea of what an indoor rock-wall inna freezer looks like:
Junior 2 topping out on his first ice route:
P1000667 by
Ron Lowe, on Flickr
Junior 1 topping out on his first ice route:
P1000678 by
Ron Lowe, on Flickr
Looks like next winter, we're going to have a family ice climbing session on Lochnagar, conditions permitting!
