@DannyTompkins - hi Danny, it was good to meet you tonight briefly at The Castle (we chatted in the auto belay area earlier on).
As I’m not going on this trip, what I’m about to say can of course be instantly over-ridden by anybody who actually is, and you should feel free to ignore me accordingly. However…
Scottish winter is really very serious stuff, where the danger level is high, and experience and knowledge of what to do in a bad situation could be the difference between literally living and dying. I think the standard recommendation would be that one does not get into winter climbing until one has a pretty solid background in trad (for guidance, the winter leading course I’m doing at Glenmore Lodge in three week’s time has as a pre-requisite that participants have good experience of winter walking and are comfortably leading trad multi pitch routes above Severe).
I know that as somebody who is not myself experienced in Scottish Winter, I wouldn’t want to go out with anybody who wasn’t much more experienced than me, who also knew they could rely on me if things go wrong, and with whom I had a high level of trust because we’d climbed together extensively before. Pertinent things here involve: being able to abseil out of a variety of anchors; rescuing your partner if they have a major fall; being able to navigate to safety in white-out conditions, etc. If you haven’t done any trad climbing, are you confident that you could e.g. build an anchor at an improvised location with poor natural protection, under pressure when your partner’s life is hanging in the balance because they fell off the route they were leading, and smashed themselves on a ledge after a 10 meter fall? (This literally happened to my friend Felicity last year; she had to have her partner evacuated by helicopter after securing him.)
My guess is, probably not. So my advice - which, again, can be over-ridden by anyone actually going on this trip - is that this is probably not the best meet for you to start off on. (Not least as you’ll be asking somebody else to effectively guide you, for free, which means that they are responsible for your life, but you can’t really be responsible for theirs, because you lack the necessary knowledge and skills to do that for them.)
I say this not to put you off needlessly, but because I think it’s important we are frank and honest about the very real risks involved. I don’t want people being too bloody English to say what they are really thinking, and next thing we hear there has been some terrible accident and people are dead.
You are, of course, absolutely more than welcome to come out trad climbing with us when the weather warms up. Loads of people in the club started out as trad novices but with a sport background (like me!), and there’s plenty of meets in the calendar and informal trips being organised throughout the year. Once you’ve got more of a trad background, and with a decent chunk of experience operating on real rock in more challenging conditions, then I think Scottish Winter is a next step you can take. But given what you’ve said above, my instinct is to warn you off at this stage.
Then again, I’m going to do my first winter climbing in three weeks’ time, so as I say, I’m no authority. But you asked, and this seemed the most honest and helpful answer.
if there are four of us with packs etc we might be better in an estate, my boot is pretty big, but won’t be as large. I can probably get everyone in if we pack super conservatively/have stuff in the back seats too. Let me know what you want to do and if I need to speak to my insurers to get you on - might be best if we take this offline when we get that far…
(I’m not a qualified instructor so own risk rules apply!)