Hill of Wirren, Glenesk, a tale of two mountains

The Weather around here has been pretty bad for the last wee while and has passed from torrential rain, to snowfall, to intense cold.  It's hard to know what road and mountain conditions would be like,  the ski areas are looking very very good so nothing too high or remote seemed a good idea.  So we chose Hill of Wirren between Glen Esk and Glen Lethnot at the south east edge of the main grampian mountain range.  It looked like we had chosen well!  Sorry for the glut of pictures in this one, it was just so pretty!

The road was pretty good and clear,we came in from Edzell and although there was a lot of large ice patches at the sides of the road not much on it.  We did encounter one tricky section of about 100m of ice and slush covering the road on a bit of a hill but made it ok to the top with a couple of slips.

I'd put in a spade in case we had difficulty getting any off road parking, but there was no snow at road level, 200M asl! 
The start of the track was clear but the view of the summit promised some snow walking!  The car was reporting -2C in the sunny Glen and it was clear it had been pretty cold, wherever there had been water flows down fields these were large sheets of ice, tricky!

The local natives seemed reasonably friendly but never let us out of their sight

As we ascended we started to get better views of the summit

 

With cracking views down Glen Lethnot to the sea

At around the 400m ASL mark  after 2 or 3km of walking we started to see increasing amounts of snow around us, the advantage of this walk is that there is a track for a good proportion of it.

But it wasn't long before we said pretty much goodbye to our last view of solid ground.

What followed was a bit of a challenge, I expected soft new snow, this was anything but and crampons would have been useful!

You can see we hadn't been the only visitors up here, it look like the farmer had been here too on some type of offroad thing,  it had done a good job to get up here!  The track carries on around the ridge and takes you up towards the summit.

we just couldn't stop taking photos as we continued on up, so here's a collection just of photos until we get in sight of the trig point:

In the view above, Glen Esk is behind me.

And at last the trig point hove into view

Eagle eyed readers will have spotted the fence posts vanishing into the snow above, in fact the handy post I attached the aerial too is twice the height we can see.  And between the trig point and where I set up, the 4ft fence vanished entirely.

It's interesting to compare the view above with this one from the beginning of December:


and to compare this one


With what we had now:

Anyway, we'd gone up here to do a bit of radio (who am i kidding,  we'd gone up here to..  well.. go up there!  The radio was incidental).   So the aerial (new for this trip, the previous link dipole had fallen to bits) was set up and some 15 minutes ahead of schedule I started out on 7.118mhz which I'd pre-announced  but no SOTA chasers were there!  I did have a really nice chat with Angus mm3bca who was a cracking 59 from South Uist (where they weren't enjoying our lovely weather, how unusual..).  After finishing with Angus I tried a few more calls - no-one so I went to the WAB net on 7.160 which was very productive as usual including a sota-wwff with Carl 2e0hip/p down on the Northumberland coast 59 both ways and some other cracking strong signals of S9 or more including g7bga, g0fex, g6lkb, g4blh, m6rug and more.  After satiating the WABers with NO57 and Trig Point 3915 I went back to 7.118, I had a chat with a couple of folks (Hull and Glasgow) and then suddenly the SOTA tap opened with Mick m0mda and then 18 in the log in 10 minutes,  5 logged at the minute of 12:58!  Quite a few other regulars including on5swa, on5vt, gm4wha, g0hrt, Ken and Christine, gm0axy and gm4ymm,  booming in from Edinburgh and then the not so small voice of Karl M3FEH putting in a nice 57 from Cornwall on 10watts.

 After 40m quietened I went up to 20m but that was hard going with strange conditions,  I had a nice long chat with oh1ebl, Markus in Turku, where we agreed that -10c is a far more pleasant temperature than claggy +5...  But despite putting a 57 into Finland there were no other callers,  I did then find EC2AG/P on EA2/BI057 for an s2s but then no-one else.   By this time the coffee was gone, the daylight at 1400z was starting to look wan, the cloud was building and the temperature was starting to feel,  wintery.  We did have a visit from a passing paramotor!

It was starting to look and feel like we had stayed quite long enough up here, time to pack up





And get out of here!

As we headed down the sun came out for a last watery visit and bathed the summit in a lovely pink alpine glow!

Well, that was a hell of a nice trip.  12km walking with a total height gained a bit over 500m.  The bottom part seemed almost summery in its dryness but the top part was full on winter! What a way to spend a Saturday, well we could always pop in to the Caledonian Hotel in Brechin..

Cheers