Want to know what 2 days of warm weather and some torrential rain do to the snowpack? Then look on… 1 word – AVALANCHE!
We were heading out to Meggy in the hope of checking out some of the avalanche activity from the last 2 days. Knowing there would be some interesting conditions we had already decided on an easy day out and to avoid going onto any snowy sections. This decision was rightly backed up by the view from the carpark, a huge full depth avalanche on the hill above, almost 300m wide.. Plenty more were visible from the road too.
Large full depth just above the farm
We left the Meggy car park amid glorious sunshine, t-shirts and sunglasses were the order of the day, but not for long! To be fair, the weather was a vast improvement on the last couple of days – in that the winspeeds were under 100mph…. Once up in the Coire conditions got, well, pretty grim. People say the Cairngorms are the windiest place in Scotland, well I reckon it’s here! Windspeeds were definitely stronger than forecast, and I cast my mind back to my last visit to Meggy – having to resort to crawling on all fours following a bearing in a white out, the wind intent on not letting me stand…
Anyway, back to today. There were folk out, someone being overly optimistic with some skiis (ski-touring conditions it aint), 4 guys even coming down having been snow-holing – well, they are certainly “braver” men than me, it must have been dire in the thaw in a snow hole!
Have a look at the picture below of a couple walking into the debris zone of a huge, deep wet snow avalanche, from below you could clearly see the fracture lines and hundreds if not thoushands of tonnes of soaking wet soggy snow ready to go… You can see the couple outlined lower left for scale. Sensible decision?
Spot the people bottom left in the snow…..
It was everywhere, every aspect that had snow on and at most altitudes, there had been significant slides. We had it all, huge full-depth avalanches, massive wet snow avalanches, surface sloughs, monumental cornice collapse, smaller point release avalanches, even what looked like crevasses and seracs!
I like to think the fact we have had so little human involvement with avalanches this year is due to more information, better understanding, more people taking a more serious attitude into the hills, and being better equiped, certainly after the terrible winter we had a couple of years ago. It would be horrific if that happened year after year, and fortunately it does not, but there were definitely some people perhaps stepping over that line into the danger zone today. And why? There was nothing to climb, all slush and rubble, skiing would have been rubbish, and the weather on Meggy was at times awful….
Lots of people have been wondering what conditions for climbing would be at the minute, well the pictures below of the Post Face etc give you a bit of an example of how black it all is, and what the cornice collapses have done. The weather took a nose dive whilst in Coire Adhair, so sorry for the blurryness of the photos!
