Well, it looks as if the snow that has fallen in the last couple of days has done the trick. At least, for Ben Nevis (and I strongly suspect, Aonach Beag) it has.
RJ, Blair Fyffe and I ventured up into Observatory Gully today to try and locate the remaining snow that we strongly suspected was there. We hit snow just above the CIC hut, and by the time we arrived at the foot of Point 5 Gully we had waded through some pretty sizable drifts, some waist deep.
On the way up there I had a discussion with Blair on the likelihood of Point 5 still being there. He reckoned he was '70% sure' it was still there. I reckoned the mild weather had dealt it a deadly blow. As we approached it Blair looked less confident with every step. There was little sign of any old snow, but fortunately Blair had brought an avalanche probe and a shovel. We banged the probe in and... it didn't feel hard enough to be ground, but too hard to be new snow. A quick dig down with the shovel exposed a brick-hard bit of old snow, which we traced out the edge of. 7 metres x 6 metres x 1.2 metres deep.
Blair breathing a sigh of relief his confident prediction was right
Stuart probing the edges of Point 5 Gully
From there we walked across to the upper reaches of Observatory Gully, again through deep drifts. Where we expected to find the old snow was, again, covered with new stuff. This is where the experience comes in of slogging up there time-after-time. Trying to find the snow would have been a needle in a haystack job, but we settled on where we thought the snow would be, and banged the probe down. Bang! First time! A test pit was dug to make sure we had found our quarry.
Old, rock-hard snow at Observatory Gully
Again, we traced out the snow and found there actually to be two patches. The larger of these was 8m x 7m x 1.2 metres. The other was harder to measure, but no more than a couple of metres across and wide. Maybe half a metre deep.
All told, 3 patches found, and a fantastically rewarding day. The highlight was finding Point 5.
The snow that has fallen is lasting, almost without doubt. The forecast is for cool weather, and the extent of the cover on the old snow is such that even a prolonged period of melt will not seriously affect the final sizes.
I'll do a final summing up of the season in the next couple of days. Looks like a total of 6 patches survived. Confirmation to follow.
The boys doing their thing...
Full set of pictures (and a good video) here: [
www.flickr.com]