Nov 22nd, 2015

Author: donich_admin

Fantastic day today

After all the rain recently, the weather today was perfect for late November. Crisp and perfectly clear with snow on the mountains above about 400m.

R and I knew we had to get out and do a mountain after both being confined to base over the last week with the colds we imported from Finland. We havered over which one to do; there are so many we would like to have a go at. R being the sensible one commented that we had neither done a major climb in winter, so it would be best to chose one a) that we were familiar with already b) that had a decent path up it and c) that wasn’t too long a day with darkness coming so early.

So we went up Beinn Donich and had a wonderful day. The views were absolutely superb, with the sun shining on the snow and the mountains reflected in the lochs and sea.

One thing that was a useful eyeopener for both R and myself though, is that these mountains really are different beasts in the winter. Donich is an easy enough climb in the summer, but today there was a lot of ice and it was seriously slippy underfoot. This reduced our speed by quite a lot, and if the snow had been very heavy it could have been pretty challenging. So we will need to think about getting some winter kit (crampons specifically) and learning to use it.

Anyway – we weren’t the only people out on Donich today – we’ve done it a few times before and you hardly see a sole, today there were quite a few (by which I mean about 20 – not the hundreds you would see on the Cobbler or Ben Lomond).