Better in the afternoon
22nd March 2026
It was a wet start to the morning and the summits were in cloud when I was on Ben Nevis in the morning. It got much clearer with some sunshine in the afternoon.
Snowpack stability is good and the temperature was dropping with the snow surface becoming firm at higher elevations.
It wasn’t the most exciting day on the hill so I’ve added some graphs at the end of this blog as readers seem to like them.
Observatory Gully
Zero Gully
Carn Mor Dearg Arete and Coire Leis.
A group below Number 5 Gully.
This is probably the lowest strip of snow on Ben Nevis and sits below the Castle Gullies. It’s mainly made up of avalanche debris.
Carn Mor Dearg and Ben Nevis in much brighter conditions this afternoon.
Aonach Mor in the afternoon sunshine.
I did some analysis of recorded avalanches in the SAIS database at the end of last season and graphs showing a few of the results are below. We’ve got data going back to the 1990/91 season but more information was recorded from the 2010/11 season onwards so some of the graphs are only for this period.
A lot of avalanches, particularly natural ones, go unrecorded so there are definitely more avalanches than shown. Thanks to anyone who has reported an avalanche in the past and if you see an avalanche or fairly recent avalanche debris in the future you can report it at https://www.sais.gov.uk/report_avalanche/. Don’t worry if you can’t fill in all the fields in the form, just do those that you can as any information is useful. Also don’t worry about whether someone else has reported it as reports are verified by a forecaster and hopefully duplicates are avoided.
Total number of avalanches reported by season. There’s no clear trend here and any hint of an increase might well be because of better reporting rather than more avalanches. So far this season there have been 241 recorded avalanches which is more than average but not a record year.
Recorded avalanches by area. I was pleased to see a good number in the ‘Other’ category which is avalanches out with the SAIS forecasting areas. Many thanks to those who reported these.
Looking at the sizes of recorded avalanches each season there’s an increase in the percentage of size 1 avalanches and a decrease in the percentage of size 2 and 3 avalanches. There aren’t enough size 4 avalanches to show any clear trend. While the total number of avalanches doesn’t seem to have decreased over the years there does seem to be a reduction in their size.
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Colin
22nd March 2026 8:11 pm
Interesting data. Thanks for posting.