Skiers: Punx/Lil Punk
Date: February 18th 2009
Route: Garbh Choire
Aspect: North West
Vertical Drop: 758 Meters
Distance: 11 Kilometres
Time: 5 Hours, 45 Minutes
After waiting for good weather and the snowpack to stabilize
for about the last month, we finally managed ski gardh choire on wedensday 18th.
There has been significant snow loss at low altitudes, with just enough at
higher elevations for a good descent. The freezing level is due to drop to 800
metres tonight (Thursday) then rise to about 900 metres on friday. The
weather into next week isn’t looking to great still with more mild northerly air
blowing in.
The plan was to skin into allt coire fionn, then up the south
west face of sron na gaoithe onto the ridge. Because of significant snow loos
since friday, we had to go the long way via meal odhar and glas moal. The weather
in the morning was overcast with low clouds on the summits and light rain. By 12.00pm
the clouds cleared to give blue skys and some high clouds. The temperature at the
car park (649 meters) was +4 for most of the day, but the temperature did droped back down a couple of degress later on.
From the park park we skinned up sunnyside and down into the
meal odhar valley, then onto the M.O ridge to the summit of glas moal. From the
summit we headed north east to cairn of claise (1064 meters). There wasn’t much
snow on the high flats. So we had to bootpack the last 2 kilometres across a mix
of grass, rocks and snow to the summit. The hike wasn’t to bad, due to it been pretty
much flat, until the last kilometre.
On the summit of C.O.C we had some food, water and a smoke
before we dropped into gardh choire. Before i go any further, cairn of claise
is our 4th munro we’ve bagged this winter, plus a couple of corbetts
as well.
The snow conditions in the top section of gardh choire, was actually
pretty good spring like snow, but a wee bit wet what made for tough skiing.
Lower down the snow got really sticky and patchy for the last 200 meters. We
then skinned up the north east face of sron na gaoithe onto the ridge and back
into the ski area. From the bottom of
the glas moal poma we decided to skin around a short north facing slope above
the allt coire fionn and back onto the meal odhar ridge, then descended down to
the tom dearg poma. By this point we were pretty beat, so instead of skinning
up the T.D trail. We sneaked on to the lift instead to save some time to get
back to the car park.
