Janey and Keith: Meall Ghaordaidh and some epic driving conditions!

On Friday morning after a few days of cold weather we thought we would go and have a look at Eas Anie before the weekend of thaw. We didn't want to waste the day walking in and out for it to not be in condition so we thought it would be a good idea to try and drive our people carrier along the snow covered land rover track. It certainly was not. We made it about 1km out of the 4 before this happened...

woops!

A couple of hours later we managed to free ourselves and made it back to the main road! Snow chains snapped in half, and the poor car being through quite an ordeal. Lesson number one: People carriers are not meant for offroading!

By this point it was around 11.30am so a bit late in the day to do much else so we headed over to Glencoe mountain to see what condition the piste skiing was in. The weather wasn't looking good though so we opted not to waste the money for them to then decide to close. We had a nap and headed back down to Tyndrum for some food in the real food cafe and mobile signal to check conditions for Saturday.

As the snow was really wet and slushy (and it was raining) the next morning, we headed back down the road to see if conditions for skiing were better anywhere else. We tried to go and have a look at Sgiath Chuil and its neighbour but once again got the car stuck in the snow. Now that we had no snow chains it was even more epic having to scrape all the slush off to road to free ourselves. Lesson number two was learnt: people carriers are not good in slushy snow without chains. By this point I was sick of spending a large proportion of my weekend digging so driving down any dodgy looking roads was out of the question.

So eventually at 11am we arrived at the car park for Meall Ghaordaidh - success! The snow was quite wet below 400m and water logged our skins, but above there conditions were pretty awesome, just a bit thin in places. We started off having a really nice day, but of course Scotland being Scotland, the bad weather made its way towards us. We made it to about 800m in fairly nice weather, then the wind picked up and the whiteout arrived, making the top slopes towards the summit very interesting on skis! Quite scary actually, but thats what adds to the fun :)

setting off through the farmers field

<3 the mountains


Traversing around the crags to reach the summit

We kept our skins on for the descent initally until we were back on the plateau as visibility was down to about 10metres so we didnt want to gain too much speed whilst trying to navigate around the crags.

The descent was awesome! So fast compared to walking. Skiing has got to be the best/only way to tick off munros in winter conditions!