Heavy Rain And Strong Wind

Adventure Peaks

The last day of the course. Today I was with Ian, Barry and Hanne. We wanted to make best use of the day, but the forecast said that there would be an inch of rain falling in a few hours, accompanied by gusting winds of 50-70mph. We decided to take in another summit and practice our navigation up to the top of Aonach Mor.

The weather definitely started to become a little wild ! We were all on our second pair of gloves by the time we got to the summit plateau, and started to combine pacing as well as timings. The photo shows Barry and Hanne getting the Bearing and pacing right with Ian. The next photo shows Barry following the bearing into the mist, carefully avoiding walking off any cornice onto the East or West Face.

We eventually made our way back down to the descent to our start - we even managed to find a snow slide to help us lose 200m of altitude in about 1 minute - an essential part of any day.

An excellent course, and well done to everybody. The Scottish weather was about the worst it's been for all of 2009 - time now to rest and dry those boots out...

Everything is melting fast. The temperature was very high today, even on the summit plateau where the ice was fast melting. There were rivers running through the ice. Let's hope that something survives for the MIC assessments in the next 2 weeks.