We had planned to go climbing, but a late night celebrating Scott’s engagement to Anna  made this a bit more difficult, with fuzzy heads it was decided that just a ski would be best, I am not the best of climbers without a hangover so with a hangover I would have been useless.  We still wanted to go to the same area Coire Kander and have a go at skiing ‘Y Gully’.

With a late start we had some good scottish ski conditions

Non of this full cover, powder snow stuff that you get in the alps, we are talking rock hard snow and that is only in patches as well!  🙂

It is not a real Scottish ski if you haven’t skied on heather and grass along the way.  Above is Scott on the way up Cairn and Tuirc, half way up we had to put the old crampons on as the slope got quite steep and a slip would have meant sliding all the way to the bottom and having to start again.

Once at the top,. in true Scottish fashion the cloud came in and gave us problems seeing our hands in front of our face!  Map and compass out and moving on bearings.  Haven’t had to navigate in a while and we had a few moments where our man compasses did not tally with the real compass and we had to be good and fight the urge to not believe the compass even though it was completely against my internal sense of direction which is usually pretty good.

As we find the edge of the Coire and the Gully the cloud lifted ( which was nice) and gave us a great view of Y Gully in all of it completely rock hard snow glory making it a no no to ski.  Never mind, was nice being up there any way and practicing our navigation skills again.

The way down was an entertaining affair – god skiing down ice is loud!  A nasty scrapping sound is still ringing in my ears!  Apart from the noise it was a surprisingly enjoyable decent.

When it softens up it is going to be great, looking at the amount of snow up there, I think it is going to be a good gully season this year.  Lets hope I can make the most of it before we leave for Gap next month.

It was ending as a rather nice day which was not expected at all.  One of those days that looked like it was going to be rubbish but actually turned out great fun.