Lochaber Blog & Mountain Info

There was a bit more snow that expected last night. As the photo shows there was significant drifting on the lee side of the fences. There was only a very shallow covering of snow here yesterday afternoon.

A section of cornice which had formed behind a snow fence allowed me to preform the generic physics experiment; throw/hit something, with something else, and see what happens. At CERN for example they spent lots of money and energy accelerating particles up almost the speed of light to smash them into another particle to probe the underlying structure of the universe. My aims were more modest, I hit the cornice with the end of my ski pole at a speed a long way short of the speed of light (in fact even by ski pole hitting standards it was a low speed) to see what would happen.

The results of my experiment, the cornice collapsed. Although this result can not be generalised to all cornices on Aonach Mor, it did suggest that at least some cornices were prone to collapse. To be honest, I probably didn’t need to carry out this experiment to predict this, but it was quite satisfying!

Looking down Chancer towards the Braveheart Chair. Although very much in the lee side of the hill, a scoured area can be seen in the foreground of the shot. Local wind effects can sometime scour areas local areas on the lee side of the mountain, and conversely can deposit localised patches of windslab on the windward aspects.

Spindrift coming off the plateau into Coire an Lochan. Two darker streaks can be seen in the scarp slope. This was the old hard neve. It was hard to tell why these areas were exposed, whether it was wind scouring, or the overlying snow had avalanched off.

Looking into Easy Gully. A new crown wall can be seen cutting diagonally up and right in the usual location

Although there were some snow showers through the day, there were also clearer spells. However, visibility was always a bit hazy due the quantity of blowing snow.