The router and comms equipment in the SSC hut was shutdown and reset on Thursday afternoon and the Ski Club Hut cameras on CairnGorm Mountain are back on-line and functioning normally.

A replacement webcam box has been installed in Mountain Spirit in Aviemore and we now once again have a low level view looking along Grampian Road in the direction of the Ski Road Roundabout to distant hills. This camera is useful for gauging low level snow events and also early morning check-ups on non-trunk road conditions in wintry weather. The Mountain Spirit webcam is online 24/7 due to it viewing a street lit area.

An additional view looking over the Strath to the Northern Cairngorms will be available shortly, also from Mountain Spirit.

Winterhighland’s Webcam and AWS system at the Scottish Ski Club Hut has been down since late on Monday (5th Jan) due to a communications failure. The exact nature of the problem can not be determiend remotely and a site visit is planned for Thursday 8th Jan.

Providing the issue is not a hardware issue with the router or network equipment it should be possible to restore the webcam and aws feed at some point on Thursday.

In the meantime here’s the final images from Monday afternoon which captured the pefect if chilly weather very nicely:

Wishing all readers of Winterhighland all the best for 2009 and hope you had a good one whatever you were up to on Hogmanay.

New Year’s Day brought a flurry or two to the mountains, nothing very significant by any stretch however it was enough to take the edge of the hard base on CairnGorm and the continued cold weather with light winds has allowed the Lecht and Glenshee to fire up their old fan guns to enable all the Eastern areas to offer some riding over the New year period.

The snow making equipment at the Lecht and Glenshee certainly isn’t state of the art and being entirely manual - someone has to go and turn on each hydrant at the required flow and set up the gun - means it’s very cold and wet work, so a big shout for the guys who spent the New Year Holiday getting cold and wet so we could have some more runs to play on !

The success with limited old manual equipment does raise the question of just what might be achievable with a modern, more extensive and at least to some extent automated system. Winterhighland’s AWS (Automatic Weather Station) at the SSC Hut at 2500ft on CairnGorm Mountain has logged over 760hours where the wet-bulb temperature has been cold enough for modern Ratnik Sky Giant air/water guns since the end of October. (Not all these hours would have been suitable due to wind,  but the data also shows the degree to which the foot of the White Lady can be sheltered in certain wind directions. This has implications elsewhere on the mountain in that there will in some wind directions be part of the mountain where snow can be made even when high winds are plaguing much of the mountain.)

Winterhighland into 2009

Well for one thing the blog admin which had problems following an upgrade to the software is fixed! More importantly the site has been widened, partly to accommodate additional advertising, some from Google Adsense, some shared snowsports adverts with Fall Line Media. The really important bit is why these adverts are needed - they are contributing to the substantial cost of a brand new dedicated server for Winterhighland which should significantly improve site load times and stability despite the volatile traffic spikes that inevitably hit whenever snow is forecast and so far it has coped admarilly with some early surges in traffic that October’s excitement caused.

The wider format is gradually being rolled out and it also allows for a summary lift report on the general situation page, wider thumbnails for Pix from the Slopes on the GS and area report pages, plus much larger thumbnails on the front page.

The UK Ice Conditions Server now links into the GS page with the latest photos, several small improvements will be rolled out across the site to provide more cross links to the various member supplied photo galleries on the reports servers, particularly the public reports so they better integrate and compliment the Pix from the Slopes.

Here’s to a snowy 2009.

After some computer troubles with my admittedly ageing desktop PC, the main machine for updating Winterhighland has been replaced by an EeeBox, a slimline micro PC desktop follow up to the EeePC netbooks that has an astonishingly small power consumption of just 20watts! Yet still has a 1.6GHz processor, 1GB of Ram and a 160GB hard drive on board, built in WiFi and a 10/100/1000mb ethernet port and without any fans, it’s as good as silent.

Anyone who doesn’t have big CPU munching tasks or is looking for a second PC, this is a little gem worth considering. It comes in at under £200 for the base unit and is proving more than able to deal with a 21inch monitor with a 1680 by 1050 resolution.

All the development work is done on Linuxbeast - not such a modest consumer of power when it’s on (which as a network server is most of the time), but with no need for a powerful windows machine and a desire to avoid the unrequired bloat of vista and the uneccessary extra processing juice to handle it, the price tag, the power consumption, the sleek little box that sits on the shelf and the virtually silent computing it brings seemed worth a shot and so far so good.

Also, a new PC with XP is a good PC imho, XP was light years ahead of win 98, it’s also light years ahead of Vista in terms of usability and relability!

Every office across the land that has at least one skier or boarder will no doubt have seen productivity drop and bandwidth use rocket today! Snow falling on the webcams at the start of the first significant cold snap of the autumn, yes there was some snow last week and at the start of the Month, but this week things are ramping up another level!

There are weather warnings out from the Met Office for Tuesday, lots of chatter in the weather forums and a real buzz is building. Fellow skiers and boarders… winter is getting closer and for the fist time this new season, the slats on the Ski Club hut’s decks have vanished beneath fresh fluffy snow!

SSC Hut Balcony slats vanish under the snow for the first time this season!

Don’t miss out on your chance to get yourself a brand new Navy or Black Winterhighland Beanie. These beanies feature the Winterhighland* snowflake logo on a single layer style (no turn up this time), so great to use on the hill or for more everyday use.

Beanies will be available for dispatch in the second half of November, but get your order in as numbers are limited, we also have Karabiner Keyrings, various Winterhighland T-shirts and Baseball caps, some potential stocking fillers for Christmas.

www.winterhighland.info/shop

Winterhighland’s blog has been upgraded to the latest version of Word Press after a few tears this evening, and more importantly only registered Winterhighland members who are logged in to the site can post comments. This should hopefully reduce the amount of spam posts (was in the region of 100s every week though many caught caught in the Wordpress moderation net) but without the inconvenience of using a different (ie Wordpress’ own) login system for the blog.

It’s sounding pretty damn wild outside even in Inverness, it’s gusting to 50 at the relatively sheltered ski club hut location on CairnGorm, while at the tunnel mouth its rattling in at a steady 80 with higher gusts! It’s currently dry, but the FL is above the summit now and it wont stay dry for too much longer.

The snow on Friday is going to get a shift as this weeks autumnal roller coaster continues, but a longer cold spell will sweep in behind this depression with more snow on Sunday, possibly to quite low levels later in the day. Winter’s coming….

October has marked it’s arrival with the first Snows of the upcoming winter, as a Northerly Plunge sends temperatures diving. Thursday saw the first reasonable covering of snow on the higher tops of the Cairngorms, and there’s also a smattering on the tops in the West.

It all add’s to the excitement and anticipation at the season ahead, but don’t get too carried away just yet - winter proper is officially 11 weeks away yet, that said it’s another sign of the seasons unstoppable march back to winter.

The past two seasons started the last weekend of November (2006/07) and first weekend of December (2007/08) on CairnGorm Mountain with lasting snow, though cover became more limited in the run up and around Christmas both years.

You can now watch how things are shaping up this autumn with our mid-mountain webcams and live weather real-time weather station on CairnGorm Mountain which are now back online following completion of the reinstatement works to flood damage on the hill road (which necessitated the switch off of the power supply for safety). Our cams and AWS are situated in the Scottish Ski Club Hut at 2500ft near the foot of the White Lady.

CairnGorm Mountain has also installed an automatic weather station and two new webcams for the new season, these can be viewed at www.cairngormmountain.com/web-cam and the AWS is located just under 1000ft above the SSC one at the Tunnel Mouth.

The First Snow at the Mid-Station:

See also Pix from the Slopes for a couple of photos from up top on Thursday 2nd October.

With potentially much cooler air due to sink southwards during the coming week we could well see the first sprinkling of new snow on the peaks.

As of Friday 26th Sept our Aviemore web cam hosted by Mountain Spirit (The place for all your backcountry and telemark gear) is back in place providing a 24hour a day view of the Southern end of Aviemore looking down Grampian Road in the direction of the Ski Road Roundabout.

Unfortunately our mid-mountain cameras on CairnGorm Mountain remain off-line for the time being as the Ski Club Hut is without power during the ground works to repair washout/flood damage to and in the vicinity of the Hill Road just below the mid-station level.

The Summer Solstice is fast approaching once again, so it’s time to dust down the planks (they shouldn’t have gathered to much dust with the last day of lift served sliding being 5th May this year) for the mid-summer snow pilgrimage.

Since the 21st of June is a Saturday, the plan is Saturday on CairnGorm Mountain. We’re keeping an eye on Meall a’ Bhuiridh but the Main Basin has sadly had a bit of a shift with a return to less settled and wetter conditions. Final details and day will depend on the weather, if the Sunday is looking better then we may Switch, keep an eye on this blog and the Forum.

The intention at this stage is to meet in the Daylodge Bar on CairnGorm Mountain between 10 and 10.30am.

However the actual Summer Solstice is at 23.59hrs BST on Friday 20th.  If the weather is good a mid night slide and a camp or snow hole night may be in order, if interested drop a comment below or in the forum thread.

At least 200ft of vertical is still possible on the SE snow patches so enough to get a very respectable run in and build a good kicker.