Glencoe, March 2006.
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The 05/06 season was drawing to a close and I was beginning to worry that I’d seen my last powder of the season. While I was desperate to hit the slopes, my previous trips had left me short of money and *very* short of vacation time. What I needed was a cheap weekend break. Fortunately, a spell of snowy weather meant that for the first time this season, all the Scottish resorts were open for business.
As all of the Scottish resorts were reporting good snow conditions, I went for the closest, Glencoe Mountain. To keep the cost down, my accomplice Kev and I planned an ‘iron-man’ travel itinerary, heading north from Lancaster at 2AM on Friday night, spending a full day boarding before traveling back to Lancaster at 7PM the following night. This meant we could sleep on the coach and thus save money on a hotel room. It worked well. Armed with a travel pillow, ear-plugs and with my hat pulled way down over my eyes, I slept like a baby all the way to the resort. We traveled with National Express to Glasgow and Scottish City Link to Glencoe. The total cost of our journey was £39 per person and a day-pass for Glencoe cost £24, making this easily my cheapest boarding trip yet. City Link do stop at the access road to the resort, though you can’t book this stop over the phone, so remember to ask your driver who will know the resort by its old name ‘White Corries’. Oh and if you’re traveling back after dark, take a torch with you to signal the coach as the bus stop is unmarked and on an unlit road.
We arrived around 9AM and hiked the 2KM up the access road to the resort. The snow-line was at around 400M, about 100M above the car park, which meant that getting to the open slopes was only possible via the ‘access’ chair-lift. Glencoe has a respectable 700M vertical drop and a good variety of terrain on 16 slopes. Despite these reassuring stats, however, the experience is *very* different to European resorts. By 10AM, I was standing at the top of the ‘plateau’ poma-tow looking down over a rocky snow field and trying to work out how the hell I was supposed to make my way over to the ‘cliff hanger’ chair. If you go to Scotland expecting acres of broad and well groomed pistes then you’ll be disappointed. A discrete sign on the ‘cliff-hanger’ lift warns “All slopes may have exposed rocks” and indeed they do! We found that most of Glencoe’s slopes were more like well-trod off-piste routes. They were also poorly signposted and the on-slope hazards, of which there were many, were poorly marked. Similarly, the lift-system is antiquated although it does get the job done. If you’re on a board, take my advice and avoid the ‘Rannoch’ button-tow. Instead, take the ‘Main Basin’ T-bar, which is much more comfortable and gets you to the same place. We found that, despite the recent snow falls, most of the runs were *very* icy, the exceptions being ‘The Low Road’, ‘Plateau’, ‘Main Basin’ and ‘Happy Valley’ all of which retained some powder. In particular, blasting down ‘Happy Valley’ through the deep powder was as much fun as I’ve ever had on a board. By the end of the day I was having fun weaving through the rocks on the icy ‘Mugs Alley’ run and I even tried a little off-piste. A trip to Glencoe may not be a substitute for boarding in the Alps, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun :-)
We finished boarding by five and made our way back down to the log-cabin bar for a few beers. Unfortunately the bar closes by six and so, evicted into the freezing Scottish evening, we hiked 4KM or so along the West Highland Way to the Kingshouse Hotel. Neither of us had a torch, but a fresh dusting of snow and a bright moon made it fairly easy to follow the path across the moor to the Kingshouse, where we warmed ourselves up with tomato soup and chips in the ‘climbing bar’. At 7 we hiked back across the dark moor beneath the magnificent snow-capped Munros towards the bus-stop and awaited our warm coach back to Lancaster. I hope it snows next weekend, I still have four more Scottish resorts to try…