Yesterday was day four of our Scottish Hillwalking course with Plas Y Brenin.With a deteriorating forecast we decided to head to Aonach Mor, taking the time to build some emergency snow shelters. After excavating these small holes and building perhaps the biggest "shovel-up" in living history we made our descent to the Gondola Station in torrential rain.
Sadly, this morning dawned with high winds and more heavy rain forecast. This combined with a correspondingly high avalanche risk, forced us below the snowline to do some navigation around the Devil's Staircase.
The recent heavy rain has saturated the snow pack adding to the load and hence increasing the possibility of failure on many aspects. As they say in Scotland "It will be great if it freezes"....
due to the harrowing conditions we were forced to retreat to our low rent snow holes, however, the market value was enhanced by a grand porch feature provided by the ever resourceful James.
ReplyDelete