Tuesday, February 20, 2007

I'm in Scotland again now. The weather was good over the weekend and I had a fantastic day doing Ledge Route on Ben Nevis on Sunday with lots of snow and ice, blue skies and sunshine.

There is still plenty of snow about higher up even though we currently have Southerly winds raising temperatures. The current thaw should refreeze over the next few days and bring excellent climbing on good neve.

Out on the Ben for the next few days.

Rob

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Winter in Scotland




First off I apologise for the gap in updating my Blog. For some reason I have not been able to access it for the last 2 weeks.




I have been up in Scotland. The first week was spent with Graham and Sue on 7 days of winter skills training.

When we first arrived the snow was confined to Westerly aspects above about 900m. The photo is taken on Aonach Nid getting used to ice axe and crampons in the sun shine.


We had a mixture of weather, from blue skies and sunshine to heavy rain and wind. Generally the weather was wet and warm and a lot of the snow and ice was stripped off the mountains.


I have then enjoyed 5 days of climbing with friends. The temperatures dropped and the sun came out to play and although we did not have any real snowfall we had a great week of perfect snow ice and neve. The photo on the right shows us frontpointing up Boomerang Gully on Stob Corie Nan Lochain. The highlight of the week was Tower Ridge on Wednesday with perfect views. The lack of snow meant that it felt hard for the grade but we had an awesome day.