Curved Ridge

Last week there was a sad story in the news about a couple of climbers who were killed on the descent from Curved ridge in the Glen Coe area of Scotland. I have linked to the story here.
The scary thing about that story is that we were on the exact same ridge on day two of our winter mountaineering course!

When we were on our way down our guide warned us that you should never take the route we took when there is an avalanche risk. When we were there, it was mainly ice with little loose snow layers luckily.

We slid down on our backsides (I managed this video of Andy). The guys who died were on the ridge to the right trying to avoid the avalanche zone:




A few days later we were emailing our guide and recieved this message:

A big dump of snow again last week has made everything really dangerous. You just can't get into anything. The zig- zags on Gear Aonach that we did on the last day is about it, unless you want to get killed. An instructor and client were killed in the Coe on the Buchaillie on the way down having completed Curved Ridge. The corrie we slid down was correctly avoided, but even on the ridge on the right as you look up, which is considered a safe descent, avalanched. A friend of mine was guiding his own party just a few paces behind the others when it happened. Fractured right in front of him, Just a small slide 4-5m wide and only 150mm deep but enough to carry them all the way down the mountain. A real shock to the mountaineering/guiding comunity.

It just kind of proved to us that you cant mess around with mountaineering. The danger is very real.