Mountain Diary and Conditions

Blue skies, sunshine, plenty of snow, firm snow, useful ice, route and summit to ourselves, I'm not sure that it gets much better! After an ascent of Gutless on the Douglas Boulder yesterday, Derek and I climbed Shelf Route on Buachaille Etive Mor today, which was nothing short of brilliant and well worthy of its 3 stars. Whilst North Buttress saw plenty of action today, Shelf Route was empty. Conditions on the route were generally very good and despite quite a bit of soft snow in places, there was plenty of useful neve and ice. The turf was completely frozen.

The climbing takes in a number of short but steep steps, created by chockstones, before a fairly direct finish onto Crowberry Ridge can be made at about V,5/6.

We then continued up Crowberry Tower, before making our way to the summit of Stob Dearg, from where we had some of the finest views Scotland has to offer!

All change tomorrow, but the good news is that it's going to remain cold for the foreseeable future, it's finally shaping up to be a pretty reasonable winter!

Today Dave was out teaching Euan and Fiona the magic of winter leading and sharing our passion for the Scottish mountains.

The biggest risk today was the amount of teams all heading to the same location, Dorsal Arete, we arrived first stayed on the harder line and kept out of all the ropes charging for the top.

Today we've been exploring the amphitheatre of the North Coire of Sgurr a Mhadiadh on the Isle of Skye.

Unfortunately the wind and poorly bonded snow ment we didn't explore the upper rake onto the summit. But we now have a better idea of conditions for tomorrow, It's always worth planning in an orientation day when visiting somewhere to get an idea of conditions.

Great to be hear part of Skye Winter Festival which is a brillaint event put on by the Skye Guru Mike Lates.

I was back on Ben Nevis today, this time with Neil and James and we climbed No. 3 Gully Buttress, which despite the thaw, was holding on to snow and ice quite well. The first pitch still has a short step of ice, just watch out for the bergshrund at the foot of it.

The freezing level was at about 1100m and the rocks from the base of the route upwards were covered with verglas and starting to rime up towards the top. The snow on the route was also firming up quite quickly. The crux and subsequent steps are quite bare in places, but well frozen and this will change as we see snow coming through early tomorrow morning.

We descended No. 4 Gully, which was still quite friendly, although, again, starting to firm up towards the top. Plenty of other teams heading up to No. 2 Gully. The first pitch of Green Gully has gone, but should reform fairly quickly and I think that routes like Thomson's and the Central Gullies on Creag Coire na Ciste will also come back in fairly quickly.

With a bit of a thaw in progress, picking have been a bit slim over the past couple of days, but there are still some excellent adventures to be had, particularly on Ben Nevis.

I've been out with Peter, who has come over from the Netherlands to get stuck into a bit of Scottish winter climbing, so to kick things off, we made an ascent of Thompson's Route yesterday, which was quite lean but frozen enough to give solid axe and crampon placements. We finished off by continuing up the direct finish to No. 3 Gully Buttress and descended the Red Burn, which is in excellent condition at the moment.

Today, we climbed Tower Ridge, which was in 'alpine nick', with quite a bit of bare rock. We put on crampons at the start of the Eastern Traverse, where the snow was noticeably firmer and kept them on for the rest of the ridge. We reached the summit in good time, so went over to the exit of Indicator Wall, where I lowered Peter down a pitch, so he could climb a bit of steeper ice (which we had spied earlier in the day). We then swapped over so I could also climb the ice pitch, which gave a nice 15-20m of grade IV. We then descended No. 4 Gully, which is cornice free and would give an excellent bum-slide! We were very lucky to be above the cloud inversion that Fort William was sitting in.

In terms of conditions, Point 5, Smith's Route and Green Gully will all come into condition fairly quickly once the temperatures drop, which they will this weekend. Hadrian's Wall is a bit too broken and will take a wee while. The main pitches of Indicator Wall are getting there. There is a good amount of snow about, so still everything to play for this season!