Dissapointing day in the Cairngorms!

A quick dash into the Cairngorms at the weekend, saw Davy and I very disappointed once the cloud lifted and dawn was breaking. We could see a very black looking set of buttresses in Coire-an-Lochain, We picked the whitest line we could find, many routes really were as black as you could imagine.

Anything steep had held no snow after the thaw, and the dry air meant nothing was hoaring up. The line we spied from the floor was Ewen Buttress, it really is a short and quite poor route. 2*???

One very easy pitch followed by one or two moves, followed by 60 mts of plodding. We untied at the top put the stuff in the bag and walked off to find we still had a nice looking horizontal arete to complete the route.

As it wasn’t quite mid day, we dropped down the goat track and ran up goat track gully. This as usual had the wee ice pitch which was fun. The turf is like concrete, all over the Northern Cairngorms, this should be good once the snow arrives. Still a quick successful day out.