Saturday 15th March 2008 - Dates in your diary now folks!

At the start of the week, I built and put live the website for the inaugural White Lady Challenge. The premise of the event is simple, to raise money for Disability Snowsport UK and/or the Cherished Uplift Fund’s White Lady Appeal by completing as many descents of the White Lady (or alternative ski run) as you can in one day.

Participants can choose whether to split their sponsorship money between the causes or donate to one or the other, and while the challenge its self should be great fun (if hard work for those taking it really seriously and aiming for an ‘Everest’ on the White Lady) there is a huge amount going off on CairnGorm Mountain on the day in Question - Saturday 15th March.

Up top in the Ptarmigan Bowl the Highlander Skier/Boarder freestyle event hits the ‘Gorms terrain park, meanwhile the Ski ‘n’ Boardroom has teamed up with numerous gear companies to bring in several boarding and ski manufactures to demo new 2009 boards and skis - and we’re working on getting more kit up the Gorm!

So you can undertake the White Lady Challenge while checking out the latest toys and if you want a break from bashing the White Lady, Ripcurl will have pro riders and instructors on hand to offer tips and advice on all things park!

In short it’s going to be one big fun day with stacks going on,  full details and to sign up for the White Lady Challenge visit the website at http://whiteladychallenge.org.uk .

The webcam system in the Ski Club Hut was restarted and all three webcams and the Weather Station were functioning as normal again as off early afternoon on Sunday.

The earlier mist eventually cleared, though it continued to come in over higher runs at times, but by dusk the skies were clear above Strathspey.

A couple of photos from the Club Hut Balcony looking out over Coire Cas and up the White Lady.

Looking out from the Hut Balcony over towards the Fiacaill.

The webcams and weather station at the Ski Club Hut on CairnGorm have been experiencing communication difficulties and the system appears to have gone down as a result.

Increased visitor numbers in the area could be contributing to less network availability. A site visit to check on the system will be undertaken on Sunday morning and if neccessary refresh rates will be turned down to try and help get regular images through.

This will be updated from CairnGorm on Sunday morning with further info.

Initial fears that the AWS at the SSC Hut had been damaged by the wind (it was recording wind speeds of 88mph shortly before loss of data - and the wind had been gusting to 165mph at the Summit) proved unfounded and the data feed restored shortly after 4pm on Saturday.

The AWS sensors are wired together but not currently hard-wired to the console/computer and thus the sensors are running on battery power. It looks as if the wild weather was shaking the temperature sensor so much that the batteries were failing to make contact all the time and after a certain number of drop outs the Console gives up attempts to communicate to preserve it’s own batteries.

Hard wiring the set-up will give more frequent wind measurements (thus we expect more accurate as the AWS stands a better chance of recording higher gusts) but as the system was primarily installed for temperature and humidity data an element of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ makes me wary of changing the set-up at this stage.

Following a rather damp and misty afternoon slide up top on CairnGorm, the walk from the bottom back up to the Ski Club Hut at 2500ft was undertaken to check up on the webcams and make some modifications.

The changes included renaming the images from the additional third camera to mid.jpeg and setting the existing two cameras to upload short video clips each hour.

The latest images from the three cameras can be found at www.winterhighland.info/testcam

Video Clips can be accessed by clicking the video icon/link at the top of each image and each camera also stores 6 images from the past hour.

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.

After opening weekend it’s back to the weather Roller Coaster this week as the Atlantic really roars in to life unleashing a bought of zonality that comes with one of those dreaded full on South Westerly assaults on Tuesday.

Whether our recently formed early season base is either consolidated or robust enough for the top at CairnGorm to come through remains to be seen, we will just have to wait and see.

However don’t be too despondent to have had a base at all is actually quite good for this stage of the game as early season turns are often on baseless snow and the early part of December is traditionally a mild, wet and often stormy time.

Graphs of the average 850hpa (approx 4500ft) temperature actually show a rising trend for early December as we climb out of a marked November dip, before average temps start to drop off again later in the month as the decline towards thermal mid-winter in the second part of February begins. (see below)

Tuesday looks to be the worst day with winds exceeding 100mph in stronger gusts on the tops and Munro Level temperatures nudging painfully close to double figures for a time.

There will however be some snow preceding and following the warm sectors this week, much will depend on timing and exact tracks of the storms. The further North they track unfortunately the wider the mild sector we’re exposed to.

It doesn’t provide much comfort to skiers and boarders but it’s not uncommon to see the Scottish Mountains stripped completely in the first half of December, indeed even in bumper winters like 2001 the big snows of November 2000 were almost completely obliterated in the mild, wet and stormy first half of December. On the Gorm anyway only limited snow in the Top Basin and where it had been packed down by funicular construction traffic on the Traverse held out.

It’s also contrary to increasingly popular belief not a new phenomenon. V A Firsoff wrote in his 1949 book ‘The Cairngorms on foot and ski’: “In November and December there may be considerable precipitation at higher levels, as a rule accompanied by high winds, but Old Yule is more often black than white and the heavy snows do not come till the second half of January, sometimes not even then.”

That was very true of the 2001 season as well, January was cold, but largely dry, surface conditions were often decent, but the runs were very narrow, it wasn’t till the tail end of the month and first days of February that the first big snow storms since late November arrived.

Any sliding done in Scotland before Hogmanay is a bonus, snow often comes between Christmas and New Years Day, but even January historically is still early season in Scotland. Spring is King and the best snows often don’t come till March or even into early April. So please don’t put the toys back in the loft at Christmas!

After a flat calm blue sky Friday with sub-zero temps from the higher Glens upwards, a low pressure system is marching in, the wind’s already picking up at low levels in the Central Highlands, and blowing a hoolly further North and West. The low is off course complete with the obligatory Friday night warm sector!

While the forecast is not good for anyone wanting to get out on Saturday, depending what happens early next week, the situation weatherwise this weekend might longer term be in our favour, at least for the higher parts of CairnGorm which is where the most snow has stuck this week.

Overnight the FL looks to peak about 4500ft (but this could vary depending on exact track), so we’ll get a period of increasingly wet snow preceding a period of rain at most if not all levels before the precipitation gradually turns back to snow. The layer of wet snow, combined with rain will wet and soften the existing snow pack, consolidating it down a bit. A subsequent layer of  wet will be laid down as temps begin to fall and then this freezing up as temperatures gradually fall back during Saturday.

It’s these kind of cycles that are classic base building conditions, it all comes down to the thaw being sufficient to consolidate the snow pack, but short enough to not do too much damage. What comes through the next 24 hours will thus be in better shape to stand up to the coming weeks roller coaster, but we’ll just have to wait and see how much mild and probably more importantly how much rain we get next week.

Sunday looks set to have a Freezing Level between 1500 and 2000ft with a mix of sunny spells and snow showers, but overnight milder air will be sucked in as it gets pushed up and around the area of high pressure to our SW.  We then look set to enter a period of ‘roller coaster’ zonality, the track of the lows will be all important, a bit more to the South and we’ll get re-freezes between the less severe thaws, bit further North and we’ll end up with raging zonality sweeping band of rain after rain across with near double digit Munro level temperatures.

Should we get the latter, we can at least console ourselves that it’s better to have a bout of screaming zonality now than mid Feb.  One last thing, the models have been really struggling with fairly significant ensemble scatter only 2 to 3 days out on some runs, and some of those ensemble members were fairly tasty.  The best solution for Scottish Snowsports isn’t as one might expect long periods of blocked cold conditions, but the Holy Grail of cold Zonality. We managed to get to cool Zonality last winter at times, can we improve up on it?

With a cold spell looming and possibly the first meaningful snow fall further down the mountain the walk up to the Ski Club Hut was undertaken to install an Automatic Weather Station and return the Webcam set up to the hut.

At this time the weather station is not permanently installed, the temperatuere/humidity sensors are, but the wind sensor is just temporarily mounted while the basic system is tested out.

Wet and blowy late afternoon, by dusk it was absolutely pouring, streams were raging and there was a full blown torrent running down the path from the hut. On the drive down the Allt Mor looked a bit scary!