AVALANCHE AWARENESS DAY

Hasty pit and windslab

Ian climbing on well scoured craggy areas

Plenty of good frozen ground

Graupel in some areas

We found a layer of ice between two soft windslab layers

....which sheared very easily

Ian was out with me today on a one day avalanche awareness course. There has been some interesting snow and weather recently so an ideal period for it today. We headed first into Coire an t-sneachda and up toward Windy Col. Much of the day was looking around the hills, watching what we were walking on, talking about previous days and finally digging a variety of snow pits to analyse the various layers of snow and ice. In one area we found  plenty of graupel lying about. We had a look around the corrie then after assessing the various slopes we went up The Goat Track which was perfectly safe having been well scoured and all the old frozen snow was exposed. Poor vis much of the day with the cloud right down. We headed over the summit of Cairn Lochan to have a look at the cornices and tops of gullies but couldn't see a lot. Down in Coire an Lochan we found quite a different story, in one area there was a thin icy layer trapped between two wind slab layers which sheared very easily. There are many areas of well exposed and scoured snow and equally some areas of fresh, soft wind slab. There were snow showers through out the day and a strong northerly across the plateau.