after our scientific adventures of saturday, it seemed only proper to dig out the telemark skis and head up back to Cairngorm and see how the lemonade bottle was faring whilst avoiding the rocks and ice and finding some glorious powder snow...
of course, these things sometimes dont go to plan...
A cautionary tale of backcountry ski navigation featuring MJ and Dr Wiggy
Starring:
MJ (overweight, unfit and obsessed with telemark skiing, Stoke City and Swedish women)
Dr Wiggy (underweight, not unfit and obsessed with kite skiing, climbing and Swedish woman)
Hunky Dunks (overweight, injured and obsessed with climbing, Man U and Peruvian woman)
Hunky dunks gets a role in this story as when we dropped him off i Aviemore he left us a gaseous present in the car so eggy and smelly, we had to drive up to the ski centre with the windows open and yet it still lingered like a makeover show on day time telly...
Dr Wiggy and I eventually set off up the Fiaccill ridge after the usual faffing...at 10.30 - more than a bit late for a day on the winter hills though the plan was to walk up the ridge to the plateau and then skin up to the summit of Cairngorm... then hopefully we'd have a couple of hours to play around telemarking though the fresh snow. Things went pretty much to plan, Wiggy setting a resonable pace, me sort of keeping up, the skis on our rucksacs being a bit of a hinderance with the wind gusting in ever increasing strengths and the cloud closed in
by midday, we reached the plateau and donned our skis - me using the new ebay tua tourers and Wiggy using Steinar's blue skis. Wiggy had left his climbing skins at home so we had to paste blue swix wax to the base of his skis to stop them being bakglatt that's an ace Norwegian adjective describing the tendency of cross country skis to go backwards suddenly when moving forwards uphill. I was using my trusty old climbing skins for that uphill grip - however I've only glued one properly and the other one is missing its clip - so the spirit of mountain emergency improvisation, i used the spare compass to bind it on. That setup worked for about the first 50 meters up the summit slope of caingorm but I managed to step on the loose climbing skins and Wiggy was already bakglatt - it seemd that blue wax (fluuffy powder snow -5 to -12 degrees) was the wrong choice - probably given the usual scottish conditions red wax (slush circa 0 degrees) would have been better - disaster sort of befell me a bit higher up as suudenly my binding broke ... merde! I called over to mon amis francais - however, him being an antarctic veteran and all that realised that it was just the voile release binding releasing itself when not wanted
however after much cursing and avoiding of rocks and zizagging upwards of slopes and fixing of bindings and waxing of skis, we eventually arrived on the summit of cairngorm. The ozone collector was already pasted in a good covering of wind blown rime frost... we were more bothered about wolfing down lunch
the descent from Cairngorm was fookinace! only way to describe fluffy snow, easy angle slopes and a lesser frequency of rocks than on other trips this winter. We even managed a turn ot two. However, this is where the silliness starts...
it was a whiteout - that means it's very hard to discern angle of slope, rock etc. and it's really easy to lose sight of your mates if you fall into that skier's buzz when everything is working, the glide of the skis, the turns, jumping over rocks... On Cairngorm, there's a numpty path directly and due north back to the ski centre which has soem excellent and easy ski terrain just a few degrees eastwards. So when after about 10 minutes of descending without any big wipeouts, we should have been at the top of the ptarmigan tow line in the ski centre, whereas Dr Wiggy and I were looking at a group on a winter skills course learning to snow hole with increasingly steep slopes under us... oops! Ou est le station de ski? Houston nous avons un problem!
We'd not been skiing northwards back to the ski centre like we should have been and it took a few minutes of deduction and an eductaed guess to work out that we were about due east and 1 km from the top of cairngorm - we had to ascend a good 100m and head westwards into worsening whiteout conditions...
it was a long twenty minutes of arguing with the you've got lost demon before the raucous sound of hundreds of kids on their half term hols filtered though the wind and we'd got back on track
After that cray few moments, skiing down to the car park with self-releasing bindings on marginal runs with the usual craters, gravel, boulders and crazy snowboarders was a doddle!
Ace trip - a couple of lessons learnt (note to self - go buy a GPS) and hope to get out there again with Wiggy soon, unlikely of course if he reads this
postscript: I drove our winter skills course back to Edin but rumour has it that Hunky Dunk's fart was still lingering in BAS car though this had been much replenished by the time they reached the motorway at Perth
