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Monday 2 February 2015

Skinning up and skiing down Ben Tirran

After two weekends of winter climbing I had planned a no hills weekend. But the skies were blue and a strong North-Easterly is easily ignored. So I jumped into the car at lunchtime to head with my skis for the Angus glens to look for a skiable hill. The foothills such as Cat's Law were not white enough but Clova had collected a lot of snow overnight. So I went to near Rottal lodge planning to skin up and ski down Ben Tirran. Here is my GPS recording of mainly the descent. 
 Clova was surprisingly wintry with the Eastern side being much whiter than the Western side. 
 Sun and February snow. Here some of the dune-like sculptures on the way up. 
 I initially wanted to skin around Loch Wharral which is in the Corrie seen in the distance...
 ... and this is me heading that way (selfie)...
 ... but I spotted a line of continuous snow on a burn which is labelled as 'Gowed Hole' on the OS map. It is clearly visible on the image below. 
 I skinned up, largely out of the wind ...
 ... to reach the summit. 
Actually the real summit is called 'The Goet' and is a rather flat 600 m away from this cairn to the East. But I did not fancy skinning the scoured top in the icy wind as time was limited and as the descent looked like skiing heaven. So after a short stretch of skinning over the scoured heather I reached the compact, soft snow of the burn to experience a few minutes of skiing heaven all the way down to the car. Very much recommended and much of it will survive a thaw.
HW

1 comment:

Sophie Grace said...

"Goet" probably means "wood". Like "coed" in Welsh. There's quite a lot of Brythonic around in Angus.

I need some mountain air, Henning...

:-)