Avalanche by moonlight

The ordinary experience on the UK’s mountains can be a predictable one. The weather is either middling, with low cloud, blustery wind and a splutter of rain, or it’s downright terrible–but you lace up your boots anyway, telling yourself you need the exercise. You reach the summit cocooned in your own world of damp Goretex and zero visibility. It’s definitely a hill (look, there’s the cairn so it must be the top!) but the experience is lacking somehow, and deep down you know there have been better days than this.

The goal of the mountaineer is to seek the extraordinary experiences. They are not always comfortable or safe, but they reaffirm what it is to be alive, and they are never forgotten.

In January 2010 I was living at the Clachaig Inn, Glencoe, and regularly getting out into the mountains. We called that season the “Winter of Legends” afterwards, because it kept on giving and never seemed to end: seven months of snow, deep cold, clear days, and the ice encroaching ever deeper into the glens. The river Coe froze to its bed and the Upper Falls of Coire Bheith became a pillar of pure water ice.

It was an extraordinary time, and I was immersed in the romance of it all. I was no longer satisfied by ordinary days on the hill.

Late in that month I began to wander the mountains at night. A landscape is transformed by the onset of darkness, and it becomes a magical realm where space and time distort and the senses are unleashed to roam at will over the land. If the sky is cloudy, the universe narrows to a cone of light projected from the headtorch strapped to your forehead. Navigation becomes a challenge and the most intimate knowledge of a mountain is tested.

It’s when the full moon comes out to play that the fun really begins.

On the 29th of January I found myself rapidly climbing the corrie leading up into the Bidean nam Bian range. I had no specific goal beyond the urge to wander, to immerse myself in the mountain. Eyes adjusted to the light and my crampons crunched on hard snow as I climbed, almost in a dreamlike state that mirrored the watchful silence of the hills. Conditions were so well-frozen and the avalanche forecast so favourable that I expected good conditions wherever I went.

Without knowing why I had come that way, I found myself in the grand corrie beneath Bidean’s northern cliffs. This place had always attracted me; quite why I do not know, but the dark and sinister cliffs seemed to emit a magnetic force that pulled me ever nearer on each visit, fascinated by the vertical grooves that rose, rimmed with ice, to the battlements far above. I would wander the base of the cliffs seeking some feasible route of ascent, each time repelled and yet attracted all the more. In my mind I likened the architecture of that silent place to a cathedral: built by forces beyond comprehension over vast spans of time, yet now crumbling and deserted.

In my awestruck, dreamlike state, I once again prowled the snowslopes, seeking a line of weakness. I found myself cowering in a crevasse beneath the shattered tower of Collie’s Pinnacle which guards the lower entrances of Central Gully. I had not completely abandoned myself to the forces of fate and entropy; a little while ago I had dug an avalanche test pit and concluded that the slope was completely safe, well-frozen, and unlikely to fail.

Now I ventured into the lower left branch of the gully: a cavernous slot of the deepest possible shadow, yet filled with a glittering bed of snow that reflected the radiance of the moon. I seemed to tread on pure light as I swung my axes and heard the smash and echo of my intrusion into the mountain’s silence. Gradually, the angle increased and I felt uncomfortable soloing such ground without a rope.