skifreak

The white on this particular webcam view mid-mountain at Glencoe is almost entirely hoar frost rather than snow. This might be broken down a bit by fairly heavy/wet snow for a time tonight and strong winds, but if it does persist higher up it would create a pretty dubious weakness that will persist at depth on mountains around the surrounding mountains where not much precipitation fell the last few days but everything was in thick cloud for days on end.

Footage from a few days ago of Abergeldie Castle and the A93: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg2IFEAEl04

A93 now passable by cars though still flooded south of Glenshee, earlier was only open to HGVs. I wonder how many people in Braemar need to travel East for work. A number of Glenshee staff are the wrong side for work and I believe some have been directly affected. I've seen the Don flow along the roadway a bit in Seaton Park, but never back along the paths like that. Always able to get through on a bike with dry feet in my time in that part of the world. Guess the Brig o' Balgownie is something of a bottleneck when the river is like me that!

Picked this up from twitter - Abergeldie Castle which is on the opposite bank and downstream meander from where the A93 vanished into the Dee. Was close to 40m+ from the heavily forested river bank on 29th Dec! Google Maps aerial view shows the distance well https://goo.gl/maps/xJ5pQzuVTK72 While the Dee reached the highest level since the Aberdeen gauging station opened in the 1920s, it's been suggested from how high the river got on the Bridge of Dee that it's probably the highest in the almost 500years since the Bridge of Dee was built. Given the Bridge of Dee carries around 40,000 vehicles a day (despite a width restriction to avoid pedestrians being decapitated) just as well it is unscathed!

Hopefully as we go through today and tomorrow the snow level will gradually lower over the Cairngorms, temperature now down to -0.3ºc on the Cairnwell. So hopefully Glenshee will start to accumulate hefty snow fall totals to road level soon - at least get some good economic news for the area because with the festive season done and dusted there's going to be a lot of pent up demand waiting to be unleashed.

Apparently that video that is going around of 4x4s driving past the collapsing A93 shows Hydro Electric vehicles, the lead one is, the silver landrover probably is (they have had quite a few of them recently) and the driver getting into another SSE vehicle to follow on can be seen with other people in high viz gear checking out the partly collapsed bridge on foot in some of the related photos that have been going around. Like much of what these guys have to do in very severe conditions it's a bit of a calculated gamble. [Edit]The un-cropped version from the EE site and photo appears to show just that: https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/fp/news/local/video-watch-driver-passes-section-road-washed-away-raging-river-dee/

A degree or two milder than it looked like being a couple of days ago, currently around +2ºc at the summit of the Cairnwell, which isn't good news for the Dee catchment as it is raining at all but the very highest levels of the Cairngorm Plateau. Also not good news for Glenshee and Lecht Ski Areas, looks like it will be marginal at best for snow down to road level tomorrow, which means more rain into saturated catchments and a lot less snow accumulated. Better from Monday onwards so unless things change for the worse again we will hopefully see the season get up and running for next weekend at several areas after the false dawn at Nevis Range last week.

Not to any significant extent, other than walking on the things is pretty darn awkward - i suppose once you get used to them you'd make better progress. I know a few boarders who've made quite a bit of use of snowshoes for uphill, but they've gradually migrated to splitboards as skinning will always make quicker progress than walking except on icy stuff (and skiers on skins will make better progress than those on split boards). A few of the shops that more specialise in backcountry snowsports will have snow shoes, and the Glenmore Shop & Cafe used to sell them - not sure if it still does as much of the shop is now a bar.

Glenshee gets a bit over 2/3rds of it trade from the South side, so for the Ski Area the North access being cut is not as disastrous as a long closure to the South would be. There is a need to keep the Cairnwell Pass open to provide a lifeline link to Braemar so we will hopefully see a huge effort put into keeping this open - there's been a feeling for a while that P&K simply don't put enough resources into the A93 because they don't see it as going anywhere in terms of their patch. The need to see a through pass like this as a whole is another reason for retrunking the A93 (It lost it's primary status and was de-trunked to make the private trunk road contracts more profitable when they were first franchised in the mid 90s - keeping the Cairnwell Pass open costs ££££).

It's reasonable in terms of length, as it's just the other side of the river and around 3-4miles longer, but the B976 has sections further upstream towards Crathie that are basically single track road minus the passing places, it can't accommodate significant traffic or large vehicles. The A939/B976 option is longer, but somewhat better able to take more traffic though still largely single track the B976 has many more passing places on this section - but it's fairly high, very exposed and notoriously difficult to keep open in drifting snow (such that it's abandoned for weeks at a time). Hopefully the priority of this route will be upped significantly for winter maintenance, though the actual A93 will still need to be dealt with as it will continue to be used for local access each side of the breaks. Is the old military bridge at Invercauld wide enough to take cars?

Freezing rain in central Inverness... if you are going anywhere near here tonight or in the morning take extra care, it's difficult to stand up on my street (and I'm talking about the road conditions not the New Year celebrations)!

Nuts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-35206652 Clearly the A93 can not be reinstated on it's original alignment, the river will continue to try and widen the meander. It took 2 years and the full compulsory purchase procedure to get construction started on the A82 at Glen Cloy after half the road collapsed into the river gorge - this needs realigned way back into the fields and started asap, with whatever usual legal rights of challenge the landowners have removed - hopefully they'll be a lot more cooperative than at Glen Cloy! Can a temporary dirt road be build without any normal procedures? It also adds a different dimension to the case for re-trunking the A93 so this important route for the North East gets the investment it needs.

It's possible to get from Ballater to Crathie via the A939 and B976, but the gates are closed at Braemar - there is flooding to the South of the Cairnwell Pass, but given photos of the River Dee I've seen there could well be problems from the Clunnie Burn further up towards the Ski Centre, it runs very close to the A93 in a few places.

Snow was settling at the base of Glencoe this afternoon, and on the A82 over Rannoch Moor earlier.

Potential for leading edge snow reminds me of a few years ago when I was up in NW Sutherland and late on about 11pm on Christmas Day it started belting down snow, by midnight there was a covering and by 1am boxing day there was several inches lying, but by dawn it had all gone! Looking to Wed into Thursday, GFS keeps throwing up very severe winds - mean speeds over 100mph at Munro Level through the early hours of Thursday, while the Met Office doesn't seem to be buying it to the same extent, gusts briefly reaching triple figures on the summit of CairnGorm. Thoughts?

This will be the BBQ winter the Met Office forecast several years ago...

To join in with this theme the historical evidence is that there is only a 50% likelyehood of skiable snow on CairnGorm Mountain on Christmas Day (ignoring the point it has recently stopped opening on Christmas Day itself) and almost 100% chance of skiable snow on the mountain on New Years Day. The season often kicks off, or at least does so properly with lasting snow between Christmas and New Year. Indeed in the West, getting started before the New Year is the exception and before Christmas at Glencoe is by historical standards actually a real rarity, so it's been unusual to see Glencoe get up and running a few days before Christmas for 2 or the last 3 years and on Boxing Day two years ago. Weather has been teasing us, it's been close to having opened a on a few occasions and had the weather patterns occurred such as weekends were favourable we might have already had a couple of weekends under our belt in the West - but such is the Scottish Mountain weather. Next few days are bleak, but it was like that in 2009 and then a switch just flicked end of November and the snow just piled up over Christmas on CairnGorm.

Mongoose? Did I miss a cybernat memo? Ekkk, that will be a 100 lashes from Nicola then. Meanwhile over at Glencoe:

Got caught in a shower this afternoon in central Inverness walking along the river that was such I might have been drier if I'd jumped in the Ness!

That will be the front having reached Aviemore then: Cam: www.winterhighland.info/cams/aviemore .

Hi, Polar Vortex. *waves*

Plenty of places along the West Coast of the Highlands, but one spot that's used a lot by local fishing boat crews to check out the weather is Droman Pier, a few miles along a dead end road beyond Kinlochbervie, in NW Sutherland. Certain wind directions and tide combinations can make this a spectacular and scary place - I've stopped and reversed at speed back up this particular single track road in the past. https://goo.gl/maps/h36R4hxeZAA2 A view from the hill above the cliffs looking into the wee cove that the pier is in could give some excellent photography / filmography, but waves can break right over the top! Nearby Oldshoremore beach can be looked down on from a few road accessible vantage points as well.

New winter tyres getting fitted just now. You can blame me if it all goes pear shaped now!

14ºc on the Car Thermometer driving into Inverness between 11 and midnight! Bit of a difference from morning and likely to be quite a difference by dawn. Meto Summit forecasts have the temperature at the Summit of Meall a' Bhuiridh going from +7 to -3ºc by dawn with snow falling! Hopefully something of the drifts higher on Glencoe, Nevis and CairnGorm will survive the mild blast, to initiate the base building process that's required to fill in the burns, and deep gullies and hollows that form the natural runs at these areas.

In jan there was a period of really heavy rainfall at all levels after heavy snowfall, on the basis of the model predictions I was expecting something awful to happen in Inverness as the forecast rain totals were well in excess of the 1989 flood that brought down the Ness Viaduct. SEPA never released a full on flood warning for the Ness, and it topped out basically level with it's banks and the odd big puddle on surrounding streets, where drains had backed up. This was despite Loch Ness reaching the highest level ever recorded following the sudden lowering of Loch Oich after a weir collapse on the Caledonian Canal. The wind blowing from the NE at highest water level backed up Loch Ness, rather than in 1989 when a SW wind helped drive water into the River Ness. Clearly the catchment models have advanced hugely over those 26 years and SEPA got that call right for the Ness !