Dry, bright and snow belays on Cairngorm...

After the wet weather, high avalanche and cornice collapse risk of yesterday, today we found a sheltered location outside to practise yesterdays indoor ropework. Looking at the amount of avalanche debris from cornice collapse yesterday, we'd certainly made the right choice to stay low and out the rain and firing line!!
In comparison to yesterday, today was surprisingly dry and bright. We had good snow for digging bucket seats, constructing snow belays and practising dynamic fall arrests on the Coire headwall on our last day of the Winter Mountaineering course!
We normally have the climbing day on the last day after a day of ropework and a day of snow belays. However the weather rules not the calender or clock and to get the safest snow conditions we had an alpine start and climbed on day 3 before anyone had done any ropework! 
The guys were thrown in at the deep end and did really well, Josef's headcam video of Jacob's Ladder from day can now be viewed here - I wish I knew what they were saying! More photos from today and yesterday are on the Facebook photo album here.

On the other side of the coire Fi was out teaching Winter Skills to staff and trainee instructors from Hindleap Warren today, on their annual Scottish winter trip. More details can be found on Fi's Blog here.