Fresh snow on Aonach Mor.
19th December 2025
Another cloudy day on Aonach Mor today. However, in the current conditions with poor visibility, the avalanche situation evolving day to day, but the area of interest being above 1000 metres, then Aonach Mor is the obvious choice. In current cloudy conditions it would be hard to see into the gullies of Ben Nevis from below, and would be hard work and very time consuming to actually get up into them (I imagine the boulder field in Coire na Cist would be pretty horrible to cross at the moment).
So things had changed a fair bit overnight on Aonach Mor. There had been a lot of fresh snow above about 800 metres. This made for hard going, and was turning wet and sticky at all but the highest levels. It was pretty wind with poor visibility in the blowing snow on the tops. Looks a bit drier tomorrow, with things slowly consolidating.
Walking up through the ski area. This photo is taken at about 900 metres, where the fresh snow was deep heavy and hard going.
Icing on a snow fence at 1100 metres. The wet conditions and varying freezing level has resulted in icing at higher levels.
Approaching the top of the ski area. Conditions were pretty wild at this level with heavy showers of graupel being blown on by 50 mph winds.
Looking down Easy Gully. In the flat light and blowing snow it was hard to tell how much the cornices had grown since yesterday.
A comparison with the top of the crags today (above) with conditions a couple of days ago (below). A fair bit of snow along the top of Coire nan Lochan now.
A photo from a few days ago to compare with todays photo form the same spot.
Wind Direction every minute for the since midnight on the 9th of December from the Met Tower near the summit of Aonach Mor. It is impressive (although not in a good way if you like winter) of how consistent the wind has been from the South-South-West to South-West. Associated with that has been the weather, other than last Friday it has been cloudy, damp and relatively mild. However, a change in weather pattern is forecast early week.
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