Skiing: La Grave and Cairngorm

Just back from a long weekend trip to La Grave, a skiing destination with a fearsome reputation and very sparing uplift; a two-stage bubble lift and a single poma.. Pisting is limited to two short blue runs on the glacier at the very top of the mountain, then you're on your own. What follows depends on who you listen to. There is no shortage of sensationalised accounts stressing the danger and the importance of hiring a guide. However, Pete, who had been previously, described it as being rather more friendly. 


The place was rather intimidating at first. The 'piste map' doesn't show much in the way of runs but does show a lot of cliffs and seracs. No obvious ski descent is visible on the mountain, so we were dismayed when Pete fell victim to an underwarm service station tartiflette and was laid low, completely unable to get out of his bed. We primed him with energy drinks and breakfast materials and set off onto the hill in stunning still and sunny alpine conditions. With stable snow and clear visibility Pete's description was spot on. A mellow day with a sensational ommelette for lunch at the Refuge Chancel. Pete had perked up sufficiently to eat some dinner and we were we were all hopeful of exploring more of the mountain in the morning.

The howling wind outside our hotel room left us in no rush to open the curtains. We's heard that anything more than a fart is likely to prevent the lift from running and the wind was clearly gusting at least 50 mph at valley level.  More dismayingly still, Pete was still completely wiped out, seemingly now with a flu. We  headed up to the Col du Lautaret for a short but bracing ski tour before the weather closed in completely. The weather was even worse the next day, meaning that no skiing at all got done. Overall a tremendous trip, but more notable for the banter and the food in the Hotel Edelweiss than for the quality of the skiing or the snow.

Meanwhile it was lashing down snow in Scotland, reviving a winter that had seemed to be on the wane. Keen to take advantage of a still and sunny day with great snow conditions and also partly to redeem the last day of forced inactivity in La Grave, I  skiied at Cairngorm on Wednesday. Strange but true, Cairngorm outperformed La Grave in all but the catering department! What I need to do next year is get back to La Grave in  conditions as perfect as those I found at Cairngorm!

Informal snowholing and a new full length article in pdf

There's been a fair amount of chat this week about the banning of 'informal camping' on the east shore of Loch Lomond. This isn't a term I'd heard before and I suspect it has been coined recently to differentiate car-side, bevvy fuelled,  litter producing camping from the more honourable pedestrian based, zero impact ideal of 'wild camping' that is permitted under the access legislation.

A trip to Cairngorm at the weekend revealed that 'informal snowholing' is a possibility at present! The slopes immediately to the south of the Ciste car park have a two rows of commodious looking snowholes dug into them. If the urge took you you could simply park up and sneak inside for a night's kip.

This discovery inspired me to add a new article to the site, documenting a less than entirely restful night spent stormbound in a snowhole, high on the Cairngorm plateau. Click on the link to the right to access a pdf file containing 'A room without a view: snowholing in the Cairngorms'.

The Electric Pale Ale Acid Test

It's been snowing almost constantly since I took this photo and I'm fast running out of places to put the snow. Everywhere round here is similarly affected and the skiing at Cairngorm is truly excellent. Don't allow yourself to be put off by the weather forecast - we took a chance on a half day yesterday and were amply rewarded; the forecast wind and poor visibility didn't kick in until after the lifts had closed. 

As this is the first post of 2010  I have decided on a beery theme.  Below you will find the results of an Electric Pale Ale Acid Test and an appeal to any more mature readers for their lager taste recollections. This is only my second ale based post - read the first one here.

It is not every day that the pale ale enthusiast is given an opportunity to quaff more than one variety of his chosen beverage on draught in the same pub. I was almost physically excited to find my favourite beer, Caledonian's Deuchar's IPA, rubbing shoulders with two of its peers, Cairngorm's Trade Winds and An Teallach's Crofters, on the bar of Inverness's Castle Tavern.  We were part way through the pale ale showdown that inevitably followed this delightful discovery when I horrified my drinking colleagues by revealing that I wasn't averse to the odd can of Tennents lager.

I surprised myself by mounting a spirited defence of this much maligned brew, quoting the little known fact that Tennents was the first lager beer brewed to be brewed in the UK in 1885 after Hugh Tennent travelled to Germany to learn about their low temperature fermentation techniques. This pedigree surely makes it a cut above other cooking lagers.

Tennents is not by any means the finest lager I have ever drunk but I have a sentimental rather than a taste-based attachment to the stuff. It was the first beer that I ever tasted when my older cousin produced a couple of cans to supplement our new year's cider allowance over 20 years ago. In those days beer was very much a man's drink and was packaged accordingly. On the opposite side of the can from the logo lurked a photo of an 1980s lady, all hairspray and synthetic nightwear.

The burds no longer grace the cans, but the flavour of the bevvy itself is still exactly as I remember it close to a quarter of a century ago. I wonder how much the flavour has changed over the beer's 125 year history? Sadly all those who drank TL is the nineteenth century will be gone by now, but there must be people still alive who can remember how it tasted in the 1920s and 1930s. Are you one of them? If so I'd love to hear your views on the subject.

And the result of the Electric Pale Ale Acid Test? A new favourite beer for me - Cairngorm Brewery's Trade Winds. It's nice to see an independently brewed beer from the Highlands outperforming the mighty Deuchar's.

The Ullapool beer festival page has a good list of Scottish breweries and the ales they produce.

Short review of 'The Wind Farm Scam' and a bit of skiing

Welcome to the Christmas edition of my blog. It certainly feels like Christmas round these parts, we've had lying snow for well over a week now. The photo below is of  snow-laden pine and willow.

I was very pleased that last week's post elicited a response from David Mackay, the author of the book  'Sustainable energy - without the hot air'. I referred to his book in a previous post in which I declared my general opposition to the development of windfarms in upland areas. I have spent the last week reading the recently published 'The Wind Farm Scam' by retired ecologist John Etherington. His fundamental objection to wind energy as currently pursued is that it does little to reduce carbon emissions; because wind is fundamentally unpredictable and intermittent, other sources of power are required to pick up the slack when the wind drops. Wind energy makes a lot of sense if a method of storing the energy generated when the wind was blowing is available; for example as chemical energy in the batteries of electric cars or as potential energy in pumped storage hydro schemes. Feeding the energy into the grid makes much less sense because you need to have backup for when the wind stops blowing. If this backup takes the form of fossil fuel fired power stations then the carbon emission reductions claimed by the wind lobby are drastically reduced; Etherington claims they are reduced to the point that there are no savings.

I agreed with much of what Etherington had to say on the shortcomings of wind energy and found his discussion of the incentives used by government to promote it very illuminating. Unfortunately in the latter portion of the book he devoted a chapter to questioning man made climate change. His central objections were that there is no clear-cut relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global mean temperature in some portions of recent history; that the medival warm period was not preceded by a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and that little ice age ended without a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. His book would have been stronger had he avoided straying from his area of expertise in this manner.

Predicting the future is never easy - all manner of things other than  carbon dioxide concentration affect the climate. This run of cold weather is consistent with the prediction made earlier in the year that an atmospheric effect known as the North Atlantic Oscillation may serve us up a series of colder than average winters in the coming decade. The sporting opportunities have certainly been first rate this week. The photo below was taken from the summit of Cairngorm on Tuesday, looking westwards.

Today I had my first outing on Nordic skis at the excellent but little known Slochd Nordic Ski Centre just south of Inverness on the A9. I'd never tried this lightweight and efficient method of winter travel before but I am now massively inspired to do a bit more. It is far better suited to much of the local terrain - for example  the rolling plateau of the Monadhliath - than heavy alpine touring gear.

All this snow may be great for winter sports enthusiasts, but spare a thought for the animals such as this unfortunate bunny on the trail at Slochd. Before anyone asks I didn't bring it home to eat.  I have enough turkey and chipolatas to keep me going!