Mid November, It won't be too snowy at Glenshee,will it?

After last weekends disastrous bout of cabin fever due to the continuous torrential rain all weekend we were desperate to get out on a hill.  The Met' were forecasting a dramatic cool down following on from "Ab a Gale" (which didn't do much this side of the country) and sure enough I caught a photo of a snow shower on Friday afternoon from the office window.

We were on the edge of where the "bad" weather would be on Saturday but it looked like we would be the right side of that edge.   Nevertheless I planned 3 walks, a high one, a not so high one and a wuss one and we made the decision over the traditional breakfast,  McDonald's outside Forfar at 08:20.

So the high one it is (possibly the last chance for this before proper winter), set course for Glenshee (ski centre).

  

The route was to be fairly straightforward.   Start out from the Cairnwell car park, up the gully below Carn Aosda to the saddle.  Left turn  towards Cairnwell but before that peak break right  to pick up  the ridge (where it says "ski tows") south west around to Carn nan Sac and then due westish to Carn a'Gheoidh  (pronunciation here: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/munros/carn-a-gheoidh).

OK, so there was a bit of snow forecast over night, but it'll be like a dusting, right?

  As we turned upwards at spital of Glenshee we caught the first sight of a "bit" of snow on the tops,  hmm,  looks a bit more than we thought.   And as we headed towards the Ski area:


By the time we got into the car park outside the cafe (try doing that during ski season!) it was looking like we could have got away with bringing skis!




The pylons for the new tiger chair are coming along..



We started out on the gully up towards the saddle below Butcharts and as you can see see from the picture of Ian above, immediately hit a lot more snow than we had expected.   Not a dusting...

I wonder how far this goes??

Once we got up to the saddle between Carn Aosda and The Cairnwell we were beginning to realise that we had a more serious Winter walk on our hands than we expected (damn, where are those gaiters?)



But there's something about walking in snow that just makes you laugh!




We realised very quickly that "we were not alone".  In fact probably by a factor of 10000:1 we were surrounded by Mountain (Arctic?) Hare.   There was quite a colour range from some still brown ones to a growing number of those that had decided that "brown was so last seasons colour" and were nearly all white.




 We were not the only people up there either (just):

But there was plenty of room for all of us






Virgin snow is so nice to look at, but absolutely deadly to walk through,  and we were very grateful for the couple of people ahead of us for making those nice footsteps to walk in,because sometimes, it got a bit hard going!


 

 But it did make for some rather nice scenes:

 

 With a view of our destination in the background,  jings, that's looking a bit hairy!




Onwards and upwards before that, we had to swing around to skirt Carn an Sac,which yielded stunning views south down the Glen.
 










As we passed on from Carn an Sac we saw for another time we weren't alone. In fact we'd already seen some of these critters, but in their summer coat
 


Can you see what it is yet?   Try this one:

Ptarmigan,   this one nearly fully winterised (we saw many many more).   By this time we were in sight of the goal, and the view was slightly concerning.

the plateau continues at about 930m to the foot of that final slope, the top is 975m so to be into the Activation Zone we just had to get ourselves half way up.  But that wavy line off the top plateau is a line of cornices and if you look at the righthand (northerly) edge, they are avalanching!!

Two choices, either swing to the far right and come up from the north edge (off photo) or try to traverse up the (not quite so steep) south east edge.   We did the latter and made it up to about the 959m mark above those rocks at the left side.   What finally stopped us was me sinking in past thigh level.

Enough!  We're high enough lets stop here!
 


It's become a bit of a tradition to take a beer with us to go with the ham and mustard rolls!  In this case a St Peter's organic ale from Suffolk.   Cheers to you Rob, G7LAS who I was talking to at the time!

I started out on 40m with a call into the WAB net, they were as welcoming as always and there were enough takers for NO17 to qualify the summit.   Clearly the jungle drums work well as even though I'd only posted about the possible trips onto the SOTA facebook page the night before my possible activations were known about there.  After that I moved down the band and the fickle mobile data signal allowed a facebook announcement and then a spot (before vanishing for a while).  Mike G6TUH was first in the log followed by quite a few regulars including Don G0RQL without whom an activation seems empty and Mick M0MDA and a few other big signals, Caroline M3ZCB was another easy low power station.  Surprised to be called by HB9AGH and EA2CKX at that time of day, although not sure why I'm surprised because they often appear to me on 40m when the band shouldn't be that open!  I was pleased to catch Rob G7LAS for the first time on the radio who was also putting in a good signal.   A 6 minute break to QSY to 20m  (the jumpers need taking out on the dipole,  I wonder if a trap dipole might be a better idea?) and I started off on 14285.   The data gods weren't smiling so no spot to start with but I wonder if someone else did because it suddenly hotted up 8 minutes in?  Quite  a few good signals with a qrp from Greece, SV2HWH early on, plus another set of frequent regulars.  Manuel, EA2DT was there for us as always!  Summit to Summit QSOs were completed with OE6SWG/P on OE/ST289,  DH1JH/P and DB7MM/P on DM/BM354, OK/SC1SK/P on OK/US002 and  OE/MM0YCJ/P  on OE/TI 746 -   the first time this has been activated and a real serious hill!!   I finished off with another run of regulars including OM1AX and DL3HXX but the cold really started to bite and it was becoming clear it was time to go!  Not bad though,  59 QSOs in just over 50 minutes when 6 of those were lost to a band change.

Not a bad spot for a wee rest though:





While I was on the radio, Ian was busy making friends;

We were fortunate with the weather, just a brief snow shower while on top







 I never did manage to get a decent photo of the avalanche bits,  the light was too far behind, but it was wise to stay well away:

Time passes quickly while you're having such fun and by 1400 it was time to evacuate (sunset at 1600).  Despite trying for a slightly alternate route down it became clear the terrain doesn't permit that, so it was nearly a repeat of the ascent, just taking the north edge around lumps.

Even with a good amount of daylight left, it was becoming very atmospheric

And quite clearly more than a little cold.

On the very top of the ridge, the going wasn't too bad as the snow had skimmed off it,but we still kept hitting patches we had to cross


Sometimes requiring novel techniques due to legs vanishing in beyond crotch height.  Crawling on hands and knees was found to spread the weight sufficiently!

Does anyone remember Vienetta deserts?




The sunset comes a bit earlier here, not somewhere to hang around too late:

As we got back within the ski area, you could see it wouldn't take much more for some runs to be openable:

So with that, I'll say

Goodbye from me

And goodbye from him.

Postscript!

I Just remembered that I didn't say anything about the actual walk, well it was 11km and 372m ascent so not exactly hard in normal conditions.   I knew about it today!