Editorial

It is thirty-five years since the club last produced a journal. Does this matter? After all the club still functions, people still go on meets and enjoy the mountains, new members join in healthy numbers, so why bother producing a journal?

In the early years of this century there were relatively few mountaineers and they were usually members of just a few clubs such as the Alpine Club, Climbers Club, the SMC, the Rucksack Club from Manchester and of course, from Merseyside, The Wayfarers' Club. There were few means of exchanging information about new climbs and places to visit so members would write up their exploits in a journal which would be distributed amongst them and sent to other clubs. This function is obviously fulfilled these days by the multitude of guidebooks and magazines.

However another function of a club journal is to record the activities of the members for present and future members and so to act as a repository of the club's history. It is also usually more interesting to read of the ideas and exploits of people you know. This is done to an extent already in the newsletters but a journal is a more permanent record; how many of us keep all the newsletters? Just as a child needs to know about its family and its history for a healthy sense of its own identity future members can discover their ancestry and understand better the club they are becoming part of. A generation of members may have heard about past events by listening to anecdotes but this is a haphazard way of transmitting a history. We owe a debt of gratitude to our predecessors for establishing our club, for acquiring Cae'r Fran and for working to improve it. It is proper that the efforts of these members should be recorded. It is for this reason that Brian Grahl's "Club Origins" has been reprinted from the first journal.

One great change since the club's foundation has been the increased ease and decreased expense of travel. Thus it is now common for newcomers to the sport to go climbing in the Alps and for a sizable number trips to the "Greater Ranges" are feasible. These changes have been reflected in the club's activities. In the last decade members have been to the mountains of South and North America, Greenland, Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and Central Asia. Each year there are groups and individuals making visits to the Alps and Spain to climb, walk and ski. The articles in this thin journal reflect some of this activity.

The club owes a great debt of gratitude to Jim Hunter who has transferred the hut logbooks to computer disc and produced several copies of them for posterity. I should also thank Fred Smith for his great help in producing this journal by his typing up Brian Grahl's article and supplying photographs.