Another Overdue update!

CIC Hut!

Last Sunday and Monday Isi, Graham and myself managed to book ourselves into the CIC hut at the last minute. This is the first time any of us have stayed in the hut. Isi and i walked into the hut on Sunday morning, grumbling about the weight of our packs the whole way! We dumped our overnight kit at the hut, stopped for a quick breather and then headed into Corie na Ciste. We were planning to do Green Gully but with heavy cloud cover and perhaps a little less attention being paid to where we were that was wise we ended up climbing North Gully after finding the base of Green then foolishly paying attention to others around us telling us we were in the wrong place! It still turned out to be a nice route however and we took an alternative finish to it which went at about grade III.
Graham walked in and joined us for Sunday night and on Morning we headed back up in to the Corie 1st thing. Once again we headed for Green Gully but were beaten to it by another team who were also staying in the hut and a rather rude chap who rushed past us about 100m from the base of the route, muttering about having a train to catch, and began rigging a belay while his partner (a good few hundred meters behind us) caught up with him. Feeling a little put out by this we decided that rather than wait below him we would climb No. 3 Gully Buttress and come back to Green Gully if we had time. This is a route that i had done earlier in the season but we did an alternate finish to it so i was yet to experience the true final pitch! This involves an exposed traverse, which in the thin conditions we found involved some rather technical dry tooling which we all agreed felt far harder than grade III! Good effort to Graham on the lead!
Tuesday turned out to be a write off with a heavy dump of frash snow overnight and extremely strong winds so we packed our bags and walked out in the morning.

Cairngorm Snow Holing
Yesterday and today i have been over in the Cairngorms shadowing Mike Arkley running a snow holing expedition. It was meant to be a 3 day trip but due to a massive dump of snow (1 foot in 24hrs in the Fort and even more in Aviemore!) day 1 was scrapped with the group having a days cross country skiing instead. I joined them for day 2 and 3. We walked up to the Plateau via the Fiacailli Ridge and headed for Corie Domhain. While the wind wasn't too strong the cloud was thick and we were in white-out condition the entire time we were on the Plateau. This gave an excellent opportunity for teaching and practicing some micro navigation to find the bivi site. Here we excavated an existing snow hole and settled in for the night. The next morning the conditions were very similar to the day before although the visibility was a little better. We looked at some basic movement skills on snow covered ground, axe arrests and basic rope work skills for steeper ground before making to long slog out of the Corie, breaking trail in knee deep powder. Some more nav practice on the way out and we were soon heading down through the ski slopes.
Another excellent 2 days which i learned a lot from.

Tomorrow i'm out paddling with the college.