The last 5 days has seen some really mixed weather. On Saturday we had milder weather with some spindrifts. Because of this the snow gates to Cairn Gorm Mountain were not open. Therefore we went to Drumochter, which had some really good snow conditions. The snow was a bit soft, but really good for doing the sliding skills like ice axe arrest. Sunday looked like much the same but according to other people there were some inversions.
Monday we managed to go high and saw some impressive inversions from 1000m. This meant that we managed to see all the higher tops, while the glens were foggy. When we walked up for the snow-holing on Tuesday the weather was great with some hillfog. However, when we started digging it all cleared up. The snow was in part very easy to dig and we had our snowholes ready after 2 hours. This called for a beer, opened with an ice axe (number one mountaineering tool). We started to do some navigation to get to the summit of Cairn Gorm. The visibility was very poor and you could stand 20m away from a big feature like the weather station on the summit or a ski tow and not see it. We then bailed out early in the morning as there were SSE winds gusting up to 60 mph forecast.
