He who issues an rm * command in unix without first double checking which directory he is in can expect a long night….. sigh!

It’s a cracker of a day in the Central Highlands, blue sky, still and frosty. Not a true white Christmas but a definite festive tinge from the frost. Hope Santa was good to you, maybe we should ask him for some snow making next year?

Have a great day and don’t over indulge (too much!)

Firstly a huge thank you to the new Eden Court for making this superb evening possible and to all who came along and packed out Eden Court’s brand new La Scala cinema to bursting point for helping make this such an amazing evening.

A shout must go out to Black Diamond for providing Warren Miller’s Playground, to Craigdon for help promoting the night, selling tickets and additional goodies to give away and finally a huge big shout to the crew in Eden Court’s cinema and marketing departments for their efforts to promote PLAYGROUND and for getting us on the first inside page in the special re-opening edition of the What’s On guide !!

The brand new state of the art cinema provided superb audio and video that truly brought the magic of PLAYGROUND to life, the packed cinema giving the night an extra buzz. Piles of Goodies given out and hope all who won something enjoyed their prizes, hope that amazing 7 in 1 Columbia jacket fitted, damn wish I didn’t have to give it away….

We know some people were disappointed and unable to get tickets on the day, we hope to be back around the same time with even more goodies and another mind blowing film next year, so to be sure not to miss out get your tickets in advance as soon as we announce their on sale. Hope to see everyone who was there on the slopes this winter.

Here we are one year and one week on from last year, it’s opening day on CairnGorm Mountain.

Just gone midnight and at the top it’s -2c and at the Ski Club hut it’s +0.6c, should put the FL about mid-Cas. The dewpoint temp at the SSC hut is -1.5c and this favours snow fall at least to the mid-station, quite possibly below.

BTW Ben from Freeskiing has just loaded up some photos from Fri afternoon, see the forum’s CairnGorm snow thread and Public Reports.

We’re getting deep into Autumn now, anticipation is reaching fever pitch and hopefully the start of the 2008 season is not to far away, so join us in celebrating the arrival of Winter with Warren Miller’s 58th annual snowsports film PLAYGROUND.

Full details and Ticket Information for the Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness shows is available on our PLAYGROUND page.

Is that change that’s in the air or was it the first Icy blast of North wind that really bites tearing through Inverness shortly before the Guy Fawkes night fireworks?

We’re into November and after a very mild couple of days there was a distinct chill this evening, will we see early snow this week though? We might but one thing hasn’t changed, the good old GFS forecast model has been up to it’s old tricks again - promising tantalising ‘Day After Tomorrow’ style charts only to snatch them away a few runs later. That said, the CairnGorm Funicular is closed for annual maintenance and the Nevis Gondola will shortly join it. That should ensure a good dump!

During the course of the winter I’ll blog regularly right here…. a kind of twin track approach, one aspect being a personal mountain blog offering more in depth personal review of days in the hills than is possible in the Snow Reports and Pix from the Slopes. The second aspect is to blog about Winterhighland, to give you the reader an insight into what’s involved, what is happening and news and bits of info about the site and any problems that might crop up during the course of the season. Trust me, when the BBC puts a snow symbol on the map (can they still do that?) and it coincides with a stack of lovely snowy vistas in PixfromtheSlopes - Stuff - happens… Often starting with an email from support wondering what we’re trying to do the UnitedHosting network!

Finally while we await the first real and hopefully lasting falls of the white stuff, get yourself in the mood by looking through your photos. Over the next 3 weeks Winterhighland is running a Photo Competition to select the 12 pix for our first Winterhighland Calendar.

Check out the Photos so far: Photo Comp Entries.

Early this morning Winterhighland made it’s new webcam system which we’re testing on CairnGorm (with the help of the Scottish Ski Club) publicly available. The cameras were installed on Tues 23rd October and I walked to the Ski Club Hut in a T-shirt ! I wonder if there is any truth in the old lore about winters and warm dry Octobers?

CairnGorm Charmer

Today though was not T-shirt weather, walking up the Home Road to the SSC Hut was a serious undertaking against the relentless and strengthening wind, which was howling down Coire Cas with no mercy for those competing in the inaugural CairnGorm Charmer biathlon race. Involving a four mile run from the Daylodge down to Glenmore, a four mile bike ride around the forest before a gruelling four mile run back up to the Daylodge in Coire Cas.

An enormous shout must go out to Paul and Gordon ‘The White Lady’ Duo who were racing to raise money for the ‘Cherished Uplift Fund’ which is collecting money to contribute to the repair of the White Lady Tow and improvements to fences and piste layout to increase the use of this Iconic lift and run. [Edit - they came in an impressive 15th and raised over £400. Very well done indeed.]

Also a big thankyou to Olderalan for the post event hospitality and mouthwatering lamb curry!

Webcams…

Back to the webcams and it should be noted that the camera system is still a work in progress and during the autumn test there will be periods of downtime, while we refine the scripts and hardware configuration. The goal is to have a remote system that can run for a decent period of time unattended and we’re doing it not with expensive network cameras, but with otherwise redundant old P3 computers running linux and USB video class complaint webcams. The hope this will allow us to role out more cameras faster than would be possible utilizing high cost equipment. Losing the occasional £50-80 web camera to the severe operating conditions is somewhat easier to take than losing an £800 one!

This blog will have updates on the cameras filed under ‘webcams’. I hope you find the cameras useful and hopefully we’ll soon be measuring the snow against the balcony deck railing.