Out with an Adventure Edinburgh group today in the Drummochter area. We used the col west of the Sow of Atholl to look at the snow pack following on from a snowpack and avalanche awareness classroom session on Thursday. We then worked on crampon and axe technique on the way up to the summit of the Sow and ice axe arrest on the descent.
There’s patchy snow cover from the road level with exposed turf still frozen. The surronding hills above 800m seemed to have pretty full snow cover on most aspects. The majority of the snow encountered had stabilised well, with just a thin covering of wet soft snow on top. North through east aspects have some sizable cornices waiting to collapse and gully exits on these aspects would potentially be pretty dangerous. Most of the west facing cornices seemed to have collapsed. Above freezing at summit height (803m), some very light rain in the afternoon.
