Two men and a dog have been busy on the pistes of Aonach Mor getting ready for the SNOW :) Amidst blue skies tropical sunshine and horizontal hail, on the same day we hasten to add, they’ve been fixing the existing fencing and building new fencing.
There’s been a bit of filming going at Nevis recently and as it was a blue skies day yesterday, I took the opportunity to sneak up in the helichopper to take a couple of (hundred) pics. For the skiers and snowboarders, there’s a shot of the last remaining bit of snow, the hill with no snow (check the gully down the goose) + you can see the new fencing that’s going in right now. For the bikers, you can see the DH and the Nevis Red XC trails pretty clearly. And for the climbers, we went over the back and you can see some routes. Enjoy. I certainly did 
There were plenty of folk about sessioning the park, with blue skies and plenty snow to build a few features it was a great day had by all.
At last, we have had a snowfall which put down serious amounts of packable snow on the summit runs which hopefully means a proper park can start to appear. Up until now, the wind direction has stripped snow off the park area (depositing snow on the traverses) or else it has been so powdery that we could do nothing with it. This is why we resorted to putting some rails in on the Spider run which is far from ideal.
Luckily, on Friday, we took those rails out and stacked all the rails in a ‘safe’ place where they would not be buried, otherwise some of them might have been missing under a metre and a half of snow by now. This is an illustration of a problem we have all the time – the amount of snow increases and decreases really dramatically from day to day making feature building a nightmare.
Anyway, with some proper snow to play with construction is underway again. It is a fact that often conditions don’t come good in the park or the Back Corrie until mid march. That is what happened in 2006 and 2008. Unfortunately the winds look pretty fierce over the next few days with ‘blizzards’ currently forecast for the weekend.
Today, as it was too busy to operate the upper lifts, we’ve put in a blue straight rail at the base of Rabbit run. Enjoy.
With the recent snow dumps, we’re beginning to start shifting snow around to build the park. There’s already a team of Nevis park junkies lined up to help with the shifting n shaping, but if you’re not one of them and want to be, then call the office on 01397 705825. The Nevis leg of the Highlander Slopestyle is planned for Saturday 14 March, so, snow permitting, we’re building. We’ll keep you posted here with pics and videos.
Park Crew
