Sunday was Lara’s turn to go out and play while Dave played with Ellis for the day.

Richard was keen to put his new equipment to the test so he and I headed up to Glen Shee to meet up with Scott and Helen. Unfortunately Scott was tom dick but Richard and I headed up to the ski station in the hope of finding something to ski on.

Given the lack of snow and it being Richard’s first tour we decided to stick near to the resort in order to benefit from the easy bail out if necessary.

We climbed up the Cairnwell side towards Aosda where there were some good patches of snow. Unfortunately the shallow layer of powder was covered with a couple of centimeters of crust. It was quite amazing considering it didn’t drop below zero! Based upon this information we decided it was not worth skiing down on and opted for a pisted descent.

Upon reaching Aosda we took the obligatory ‘skiier atop a munroe’ pics before traversing towards the summit of Cairnwell. While we were ascending from the ski station the cloud had been rolling in resulting in a white out and accompanying flat light. We couldn’t see any contours which led to some amusing skiing.

By this point Richard’s feet were in agony from his new boots. We also couldn’t see more than 20 feet in front of us. We chose to head back down from the top of the Cairnwell teebar, starting down the Bunny run and finishing down a red towards the cairnwell café.

The piste was in great condition and we had a fun ski down! Next stop Braemar mountain sports for some boot enlargement for Rich!!