Desperately Seeking Winter !

Feb half term means the annual pilgrimage to Scotland for a feast of winter climbing & mountaineering ( my other half is a teacher) only this year it's turned out to be an extreme diet :-( MWIS led me to believe that snodoniacmigth be good Saturday so we turned left instead of right and headed off to Cwm Cneiffion confident of some decent conditions higher up - wrong ! A significantly warmer day than forecast on Friday and a warm Saturday meant that we all we got was a battle up tower slabs on rotten ice and sugary snow. The long trip north was tackled Sunday via a shower stop chez nous, to an overnight on the corrie cas car park and waking up to warm, windy and claggy conditions. Feeling less than inspired we decamped to cafe Mambo to plan a long day on Tuesday - a tour of the Meggy 'massif' being the eventual choice with the hope of spotting some 'in' routes for Wednesday. Poor viz and very store winds on the plateau ensured this was a mountain day in the true sense - I had to literally drag Julie through one col. We had a bit of fun checking out he snow holes and igloo at the window before bum sliding down into the corrie and spotting a few climbers and some promising ice. Hope at last ? Not really - a couple of conversations with descending climbers elicited phrases such as soggy, gloopy, variable, rotten, soft snow etc. And a temp in the corrie of 1C didn't offer much hope of improvement. So after a long walk out and Buick conflab we headed to Fort William for a proper campsite with showers, toilets and everything ;-) I'm now sitting in Nevissport along with other climbers 'without a cause' as conditions here seem to be 'challenging' as well, pondering a trip to Kinlochleven to climb in the fridge ... c'est la vie :-(