THAWING

Ice melting fast

Coire an Lochain

Windy

Hell's Lum Cornice

Poor visibility on the plateau

Bare summit, snowy corrie

Soft snow

Snowy fun even in a thaw

Ice lingering in the lochan

Unfortunately the forecasted rapid thaw arrived yesterday afternoon and into today. With sea level temperatures up on the Moray coast reaching +14 C! What a shame, all our lovely cold, snowy, icy conditions here in the Cairngorms took a battering. The lower slopes below 900m are virtually bare of anything white. As always the Cairngorms always hangs on to the snow in it's high, north corries. So this is where we headed today. For day 2 of Alice and Tom's course we headed into Cire an Lochain and some more steep terrain. No crampons needed today. We had a fun route up and around the corrie, making most of the big areas of snow. It was breezy on the tops and Cairn Lochan was bare of snow. For lunch we escaped the winds and got some shelter at the top of Hell's Lum. In the afternoon the guys did some navigation across the plateau. There are sill some large areas of snow lingering around the area between Loch Avon and Ben Macdui. We saw just two folk all day. Lets hope the temperatures start dropping again. It can't get any warmer in December!