Guide books are trusted and used by almost all climbers. It is this trust that can get quite a few into trouble. Often it is best to just leave the guide book and pick a line purely on its appearance, and not its grade or whatever. But this is usually only for those who have the confidence and ability to cope with whatever the rock can throw at them.

Buchille Etive Mor is a massive mountain at the southern entrance to Glencoe. As you drive across Ranoch Mor it appears out of the flat morland as a huge rock face. This is the north face, and is literally a 2000ft face scattered with buttresses.

On one of my first acquaintances with the mountain, we had no climbing guide, just a copy of Ken Wilson's classic rock. It had in it an outing that went straight up the main face on two classic routes. The North Face, VD, and Agag's Groove, VD. As the book is very big we decided to leave it in the car, which meant we had to memorise the map. Adding to this lack of knowledge, there were winds gusting to 60 mph, and heavy fog. We set off over the hill side towards the face, not knowing where to start. After a couple of abortive attempts on various lines, we found one that we thought was VD.

Somehow we did end up on the third pitch, but then it all went pear shaped. After traversing round the corner to a small overhung bay, we kept going round the corner, until reaching a gully. The move into the gully had been very hard, so going back was not really an option. The actual route had veered straight up before the hard move. So we were stuck in this gully surrounded by steep walls. The option of abseiling off down the gully was never going to be used. We were skint and would never consider parting with our gear willingly. So we led up and out on a blank 20m wall. There was no gear on it, but there were quite good holds, and it was not quite vertical. So we eventually came out and found the other route, that was a lot more straight forward. The rest of the outing went without incident. In retrospect the incident doesn't seem so bad. But when the weather is upon you and it's a lot harder than you anticipated everything becomes a bit much.

• Always have some kind of route map / description.
• Big guides like classic rock, are not meant to be used in the same way as normal climbing guides.
• The weather can always get worse, so don't take anything for granted.
• Routes look very different from a distance, than they do close up.
• Check the map yourself, your partner might have misted something vital.
• Read the guide, and usually trust it.