A stumble up in to Easy Gully
4th March 2019
(Above) Rather unwisely, as it turned out, decided on an excursion up Easy Gully. Plenty of spindrift swirling around within the gully itself and at higher altitudes.
(Above) A rock and boulder fest in the lower reaches of Easy Gully. Just to add spice to the day, the normally wet rocks – covered with greasy lichen – had beefed up their defences against human incursion with a thin layer of wet snow. Ice axe, you say! About as much use as a one-legged man at an arse kicking competition. (Hold that thought! It’s a particularly apposite way of describing my attempts to progress up and down this stretch of the gully.) Can you sense a temporary sense of humour failure before I reached firm snow just below South Post?
(Above)Â A photo stop + an opportunity to regain my mental equilibrium and repair my tattered dignity. Looking back down Easy Gully toward Coire Ardair and Lochan a Choire. I can say without fear of contradiction that descending this section is waaaay harder than coming up. Way harder.
(Above) The top of the Post Face showing (l to r) the exits ramps of South Post, Centre Post and North Post. Was drifting all day at plateau level with W or WSW winds putting new windslab onto lee areas such as these. Most affected places are above 1000m where instability tends to be localised. New fragile cornices building too, but at the time of reporting are only quite small. A little recent cornice debris noted below some SE aspects in Coire Chriochairein this morning.
(Above) The top end of Raeburn’s Gully, Coire Ardair. Some new windslab had blown in here as well but there were also signs of local scouring on part of the left side – looking up. A thin band of windslab extends down Raeburn’s towards the start of Smith’s Gully and below that it was pretty much old – but very narrow and broken – moist snow today.
Colder and less windy on Tuesday.
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Aviemoron
5th March 2019 12:24 pm
To fully complete the Creag Meagaidh experience an descent of Sron a Ghoire and a boot full of bog water would have done it!!
meagaidhadmin
5th March 2019 2:11 pm
Ah, a response from someone well-versed in ‘Meggie’s unalloyed pleasures! A fellow masochist; I salute you, sir.
Oh, how I abhor Sron a Ghoire! The only hill that’s better when walking away from it. It is surely an unloved, bastard love child, the progeny of a hasty coupling by the lowly, pudding-like Monadhliaths and the proud, pointy peaks of the The Grey Corries. Lacking a feature like Creag Meagaidh’s dramatic Post Face crags, its USP is a view of the traffic on a nearby arterial ‘A’ road. Without the cachet of Munro designation it becomes a featureless hill that just gets in the way of going to somewhere more interesting.
Heresy to this audience, maybe. But it is possible to hate a mountain.
(I have reached for and donned my flame suit! I fear I may need it.)