tamsin.moye.me.uk

Following the christening of crampons in a white out to summit the UK’s highest mountain last March, we headed out for the UK’s 2nd highest, Ben Macdui in the Cairngorms, Eastern Highlands, Scotland. We staying at Aviemore SYHA, which is one of the best Youth Hostels I’ve stayed at, and headed out from Cairn Gorm ski centre car park at 9am in the sunshine with a forecast of 70% chance of cloud free summits, to ascend into thick cloud, cold temperatures, an increasing wind, soaking rain, and poorer and poorer visibility until we could no longer even make out the footprints at our feet that we were following. We made it there and back though – in fact we made it all the way out without even digging out the GPS, and just walking blindly into the white on a compass bearing. 3.5 hours each way if you fancy it.

Ste, Adie and I went up to the Lakes for a weekend to make the most of a rare heavy snowfall in England, and to test out the crampons and axes. Had some technical car issues on the way up meaning we arrived at lunchtime on Saturday and hence just went for a short stroll up to Angle Tarn for lunch just in summer boots (to find it spectacularly frozen, and not a patch on the place we’ve paddled/swum in previous years!), before returning to Patterdale for beers. Sunday we managed a nice loop over Hart Crag and Fairfield (suggestion in March’s Trail magazine). No real snow below 500m, but well worth the trudge in winter boots as we found some decent deep stuff on the tops (see sunken axe pics!), and pretty hard in places, so we were grateful of the crampons and the boots to put them on. On the descent off Fairfield we could look down on Grizedale Tarn, and across up Dollywaggon Pike onto Helvellyn – a stark contrast to such views on previous visits. An exhausting but awesome weekend.