Page 9 - 2017 AMA Winter

current funicular railway). 75% of failures in Mountain Leadership scheme are due to navigational inability. Being a soldier does not imply that you can automatically use a map and compass to the standard required. (No GPS in those days).
Newsletter 3/70. I believe the time has come to cease the use of a waistline as a means of tying onto the climbing rope. A climbing harness, be it specially designed, or a 4 metre length of rope spreads the load over a part of the body more capable of withstanding the shock of a fall. (A waistline was made of hemp cord long enough to make seven turns around one’s waist. Into this you hooked a karabiner and attached this to you climbing rope which in those days might as likely be hawser-laid rather than kernmantel).
Newsletter 2/71 This year’s expedition to West Greenland will endeavour to bake bread in a small oven on a Primus stove at basecamp. The prospect of biscuits for six weeks does not appeal. (The experiment was a success. The oven was a burnt out 5 gallon oil drum with a steel shelf dug into an earth bank).
Newsletter 3/71. Crispin Agnew (now an eminent member of the Scottish legal profession but no longer climbing) has recently been wearing a prototype of a new boot which Robert Lawrie (an upmarket London alpine boot maker. You did not just go and buy a pair of boots, you went and had a consultation and the boots were made for you not just off the shelf) is producing and alleges it is the best climbing boot he has ever worn. Known as the East-North-East it is in reversed hide, elastic round the ankle, very comfortable and warm. The cost is high, £18, but if you want a good boot this could well be it.
Newsletter 4/73. Well-designed packframes are now available with the American Camp Trails Astral and Cruiser models at about £9 leading the field. Karrimor are a cheaper (and poorer) alternative. The current idea seems to be
to use a frame with a nylon sac to move into an area then take the sac off the frame for actual climbing. It had to happen. There is now a school of thought that thinks that people should not wear orange clothing on the hills. The idea is that orange is a distress signal which is only displayed in an emergency. An extension of this idea is that orange is an environmentally bad colour. I forecast that in a few months time ex-WD Smocks, Windproof (which a few years previously could be bought for
about 7/6 (371⁄2p). I know because my first anorak was such) will be the ‘in-thing’. In the next paragraph the Newsletter Editor (then an irascible officer by the name of Gavyn Jenks) wrote: What rubbish. Two points: Firstly the casualty may not be able to wave things about and secondly I have just bought a nice new orange anorak!
Lt Col (Ret’d) John Muston
(Hon) Vice President
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