Monday 9 February 2009

Plastered





Day 1 of an intro to winter climbing course in the Cairngorms and today we were reviewing basic skills and looking at a few new ones. We headed in to Sneachda tightrope walking the trench to the moraines stamped out over the weekend. If you steped off of the trail you were straight in to the knees, hips or even waist. There is still a huge volume of snow out there. We talked about the snow pack and started our week long theme of assessing the snowpack and avalanche likliehood before moving onto constructing bucket seats and backing them up with snow anchors. We also built a large snow bollard to abseil off of. We headed further into the Coire to the area of the flat ice to look at footwork with crampons on before completing our loop back out. I saw a party on Invernookie and it looked like the Seam had also been climbed (possibly the by the same party). The climbers had approached from above. No-one was risking the heavily loaded slopes beneath the crags today and it was a little odd to see the crags plastered in so much snow and no climbers on them. Today I was working for Glenmore Lodge.

2 comments:

Derek said...

That was me on Invernookie Al. The route was pretty scoured, from above looked like just a few pockets of fresh stuff in the area below the buttress? Just didn't fancy the slog into the corrie!

Derek

Alan said...

Hi Derek, from below I dont know what would have been worse- the armpit deep wade or the avalanche hazard! The lower part of the coire is deep in loose snow. We could see a little scouring round .5 in places but below Fiacaill Buttress looked pretty loaded.