More wild weather this time with snow
22nd December 2024
(Above) The view SW up Coire Ardair from nr the entrance to Balloon Gully. Snow! Quite a contrast cover-wise to yesterday. Knee deep here in this shallow accumulation zone on the flank of Coire Ardair. 8 to 10cm of snow on the main path this afternoon though it was a getting a wee bit melty below 550m later in the afternoon. Very wintry and windy again, but with fewer ferocious gusts compared to yesterday thankfully.
Both photos received a lot of work post-production in order to induce a little contrast and detail. It was much murkier in reality than portrayed in these two images!
(Above) The photo disguises the steepness of the ground here completely! A view up into the entrance to Balloon Gully, a steep re-entrant carved into the SW-facing flank of Coire Ardair. The accumulated snow in this gully (often a lot) is more or less entirely due to cross-loading from W winds that funnel down Coire Ardair. There’s avalanche debris from a Size 1 event in the foreground but the detail is lost in the sea of whiteness. The avalanche occurred sometime during the morning during persistent snowfall and drifting. This ‘gully’ is a bit of a ‘canary-in-a-coalmine’ for us and often presages avalanche activity elsewhere on similar aspects, in this instance NE to SE-facing aspects.
Noticeably milder on Monday afternoon with instability maintained in recent lee slope areas. Check the report for details.
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