The cold, snowy start to the Winter season was a good opportunity to head back up to Scotland early. Although often cloudy, the wind was light and the snow deep (Munros Completed : Ben Lomond (33)).
A trip up to Scotland in December is a bit of a gamble with the weather and requires careful planning because of the limited availability of light with darkness descending around 4pm. However, it’s still possible to enjoy the Mountains at all times, particularly at this time of year when often you may have the whole area to yourself.
I headed up by car on Christmas day meaning the roads were quiet. Scotland had received one of the coldest starts to Winter for many years, with a lot of snow so I was looking forward to the conditions. Although, fairly cloudy for the first few days the rain and wind were absent for the week so it was another good trip and six munros added to the list.
Climbing Ben Lomond on Boxing Day…the whole mountain to myself.
2010/Dec/26 : The track starts to the right about 200 m beyond the lodge just past the Y.H., and there is a well defined path to follow. Although there wasn’t a great deal of snow on the lower ground there was a large amount of solid ice on the paths making them treacherous. Even crampons wouldn’t have helped in some places as it was solid blue verglas. Visibility was good to about 700m, where there was the traditional band of cloud where it reduced to about 30m and less the higher I ascended. As forecast there was not a breath of wind though & it was quite mild. It became a bit more breezy near the top and visibility reduced to about 10m for the final 250m.
The walk is pleasant and not steep and snow was fairly light. Reached the summit at 11:30 and didn’t stay long other than to take a photograph.
Descended via the Ptarmigan ridge and not long after the Ptarmigan summit dropped below the cloud base.
I think it’s a preferable route to descend this way as it would have been a hard slog up this steeper ridge. The distance travelled was 12km and took just under 4 hours.
