Season ends not with a bang but a whimper.
6th April 2025
The winter. Terrible, wasn’t it?
Anecdotally, one of the leanest I can recall looking back over the past 30+ years doing this job. You can’t fall off the floor – and tempting fate here – so next season has to be better. Surely?
Only 13 recorded avalanches in the Creag Meagaidh core area compared to 50 in the winter of 2023/24 – and that, too, was considered to be a poor winter. Little did we know then!
Anyway, below, a few shots in the glorious sunshine of what snow remains in the environs of Coire Ardair today. A full car park again and not surprisingly lots of happy faces on the Coire Ardair path.
Very many thanks for all your support on this blog and also when out there on the hill. It’s been great bumping into people, offering advice or just exchanging a few words and, when pressed, explaining what I do as an avalanche forecaster. For absence of doubt – because this crops up often – we do get paid for what we do. It’s utterly humbling to be spontaneously thanked for my service by total strangers but it really is paid ‘work’ and not voluntary like mountain rescue. (I use the term ‘work’ loosely here because I was once a wage slave in a terrible city so know what real work is, and it’s really nothing like that. At all!)
Have a great summer, folks. Until next winter, then.
Best wishes from the SAIS Creag Meagaidh team, comprised of: Alison, Heather, James, Keith and Tom, with cameo appearances from Brian, Graham and Mark.
(Above) The money shot. The crags and gullies at the top end of Coire Ardair.
(Above) Coire a Chriochairein
(Above) Part of Raeburn’s Gully, The Pinnacle, Easy Gully and the Post Face of Coire Ardair.
(Above) The Inner Coire of Coire Ardair & The Window
Comments on this post
Got something to say? Leave a comment
Keith Horner
6th April 2025 5:49 pm
Thanks to you all for your efforts throughout one of the leanest winters I can also remember – definitely a ‘snowlack’ season requiring a bit more invention in where you decide to report from each day. Hopefully next season will be a return to more wintry conditions otherwise we’ll be seeing more photos of cairns and you’ll have to change to SCIS – Scottish Cairn Information Service. Perhaps ‘cairn bagging’ might become an alternative to munro bagging…..
Enjoy your summer break.
meagaidhadmin
6th April 2025 6:04 pm
An individual vote of thanks to you, Keith, for your astute and amusing supporting comments.