Douglas, Avalanche, Wet Pants
Posted by Max Hunter on 17th March, 2014
Bollard
Gary and the debris
Sunday was day 2 of the BMC Winter Skills weekend coordinated by Adele Pennington. I was again with Gary and James. They wanted to thoroughly learn the construction and use of snow anchors in relation to winter climbing and possible retreat, followed by multi-pitch stance management for swinging leads or not.
We headed up past the CIC on Ben Nevis to the snow slopes below the Douglas Boulder. We had to keep left to avoid the landing zone of rock missiles from the height of the Boulder (2 as big as my rucksac!), but also keep right away from the Observatory gully avalanche runout zone. So in the end we were about 15m from that runout. It was about 12-1pm when Observatory gully avalanched – there was then a huge wide, but slow wave of wet snow and huge blocks streaming past us. The runout stopped about 300-350m from CIC. Impressive and scary.
By this time I was on my third pair of gloves. By the end of the day it had been raining non stop, I was on gloves 4, and everything was wet. Time to go.
The avalanche contained some enormous blocks, which I surmised had come from a cornice somewhere, up on the gully rim.