Dug in and out on the cross-country skis!

I managed to get back home yesterday and spent all last night selecting and uploading a few of our 23Gb of Spanish climbing photos!
As Cairngorm Mountain ski area is out of bounds at the moment and needs dug out Fi and I spent the afternoon trail breaking with our Nordic skis around the upper Slochd forest loop. It was hard work but once the trails gets a bit more traffic it should be great. The lower loop still requires fit and keen trail breakers to piste a good ski track...
It's still only November and snow cover at Slochd is complete and very similar to the cover around the 21st and 23rd of December in 2009 in the two videos here and here. It's pretty deep and does requires a lot of effort but a cracking start to the winter!
Despite the difficult access and high avalanche risk in the Cairngorms all is not lost on the climbing front as many of the south facing and lower drainage venues should be developing ice if the two metre icicle fringe hanging from my gutter and lantern are anything to go by!!!

Winter has definitely arrived

We flew back from Spain yesterday into a wintry Glasgow airport and just managed to beat the worst of the snow on the A9 on our drive up to Aviemore. The snow depth got a lot deeper as we got close to Aviemore! In fact the overall depth in the village was close to half a metre and the roofs spontaneously avalanching ....
This morning was spent digging the cars out at Fi's so that I can try and dig my way back home to Slochd !!!!

Photos later....

Hot Rock Spain

We're just back from a great three weeks sport and trad climbing in the Costa Blanca area in Spain. The weather was superb throughout with plenty of sun and only two days of light rain during the 21 days.

Fi and I spent the first week exploring and acclimatising to the warm rock and sun before we were joined by Chris and his dad Stuart for the second week. Full details and lots more photos can be found on Chris's blog here

Ian joined us in our villa for some more climbing and great photography on the final week before we flew home to dig the cars out in a snowy Scotland!

More photos and videos later...

Winter's a coming....!

It's been pretty wet and wild up here with the daytime freezing level yoyoing around the Cairngorm plateau level. It now looks like more substantial snow is on it's way from this weekend onwards just as we fly off to Spain!
In the meantime why not get inspired by some of the winter videos above.
We're climbing in the Costa Blanca area until the beginning of December so if you fancy joining us for some hot rock climbing we can be contacted on our mobile.
If you want to arrange guided winter climbing or reserve a place on one of our winter courses please text us with the preferred dates.