Chris Looking All Winter-Like and Brave!
Chris was looking for a short ‘winter adventure’ to get away from the flatlands of Suffolk. This very snowy Scottish winter of 2014 duly obliged!
Aonach Mor
Day 1 saw us hopping on
the Nevis Range gondola and Quad chairlift to get high up the mountain quickly
and make the most of the snow. Whilst
the near-absence of wind made for relatively comfortable conditions (for a
change), thick cloud enveloped the mountain.
The combination of cloud and snow resulted in classic ‘white-out’
conditions all day and maximum visibility away from the gondola top station was
only 5m! This did, however, give us
excellent conditions for practising winter navigation and I even had to resort
to throwing snowballs at times just to see where the ground was!
Frozen, Half-Buried Ski Hut on Aonach Mor
The calm conditions
allowed me to demonstrate some winter belays in relative comfort, but the soft
snow made the ice axe arrest demonstration extremely challenging! I’d love to have some more photos to show
you, but you might as well look at some blank sheets of white paper if you want
to see what it was really like!
Great stuff though, and a
memorable experience bumbling around all day with absolutely nothing to see
except our feet!
Ben Nevis – Allt a’ Mhuilinn Path
Rather than repeat the
previous day’s white-out wanderings, we elected to stay low and see
something! The NE Face of Ben Nevis is
looking particularly impressive just now so we decided to take a close – but
safe - look at this impressive piece of UK mountain architecture.
We parked at the
helpfully-placed North Face car park at Torlundy and climbed up the excellent
path through the trees, breaking out into open ground at 270m. Here, the path meets the Allt a’ Mhuilinn and
follows the course of this swift-flowing mountain burn all the way up into
Coire Leis. On our right, there was much
evidence of recent avalanche activity on the flanks of Carn Dearg and in the
usual avalanche traps below The Castle.
On the left, uniformly steep snow slopes led up onto a cloud-covered Carn
Mor Dearg.
We met the snow at just
over 300m, a deal lower than the previous day, and it got progressively thicker
as we climbed towards the CIC hut. We
picked up an uncomfortably cold katabatic headwind just below the hut and quickly
sought refuge below a sheltering rock at about 720m from which to survey the
wintery scene.
From here we were able to
see high up into Coire na Ciste and observe a number of climbing parties
tackling the various cliffs and gulleys that lead up on to the summit plateau. It can’t have been much fun for those
awaiting their turn to climb with that cold, biting wind scything down the
cliff face! No such heroics for us
though. We admired their fortitude, had
some lunch and promptly returned back the way we had come! This path is well worth taking if you want to
get up close and personal to Ben Nevis’ pre-eminent feature and see another
side of the mountain than that offered by the more traditional Tourist route.
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