Ten years on, could we be in for a repeat of the Big Freeze of 2010/ 11?
It’s a funny thing, our fixation with round number anniversaries. There’s no logical reason why the tenth anniversary of a particular event should be any more notable than the ninth or the eleventh, yet western civilisation seems endlessly fascinated with marking the 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th anniversaries of stuff. In fact, I’m pretty sure that sometime in the mid- noughties I wrote something for this newspaper on the classical music world’s odd habit, not just of celebrating the centenaries and bicentenaries of composers’ births, but also of marking the anniversaries of their deaths. Any excuse to programme a new cycle of symphonies, I suppose, but if I were the shade of Mozart or Beethoven, wafting around the great concert halls of the world for all eternity, I think I’d prefer people to celebrate my life and work on my birthday rather than my death- day.
Still, the older I get, the more I can see the attraction of measuring the passage of time in decades and – from a snow- sliding point of view – it does seem worth noting that ten years have now elapsed since Scotland experienced one of its snowiest winters of recent times.
Remember how excited everybody got about the so- called "Beast from the East” back in 2018? Well, the beast was a pussy cat compared to the Big Freeze of 2010/ 11. Just to put things in perspective, when the Beast hit there were a couple of pockets of windblown snow worth riding on and around Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh that lasted for about 48 hours; in December 2010, by contrast, it was possible to snowboard down the steep end of Salisbury Crags every day for the best part of a week. And not just possible. “Possible” makes it sound like something you could do if you had to. The crags were blanketed in a good couple of feet of soft, fluffy, honest- to- goodness champagne powder. Just when it seemed as if the snow on this magical urban minimountain was getting tracked out, another few inches would fall and it would revert back to the kind of steep- and- deep ski paradise that rich Americans pay hundreds of dollars a day to be driven to by snowcat in the wilds of Colorado. After several days of heavy snowfall, and without a hint of irony, the rangers in Holyrood Park were warning of avalanches on steeper slopes.
Meanwhile, London Road Park had been taken over by snowboarders who built jumps all over it; backcountry ski guide Paul Easto of Wilderness Scotland charged up his head- torch and became perhaps the first person ever to complete a night- time ski descent of Arthur's Seat; and over in Glasgow, the skate park in Kelvingrove was transformed overnight into a freestyle snowboarder's dream.
Conditions were pretty spectacular up in the mountains too. In February 2011, I remember heading up to Cairngorm and running into Helen Rennie – aka Hilly, the Invernessbased skier who last year set a record for skiing an incredible 125 consecutive months on Scottish snow. Often when you visit Cairngorm, a lot of the runs that appear on the piste map are really only theoretical, as there isn't often enough snow to fill them in from top to bottom. On this day, though, it felt as if we skied every single run on the map, starting off with fresh tracks in the Ciste Gully, finishing off with a sunset swoop down the M1 Race Piste and ticking off a few, like the Fiacaill Ridge, which I'd never skied before and have never skied since.
Statistically- speaking, the winter of 2010/ 11 was actually less good than the winter of 2009/ 10, at least in terms of the overall number of visits to Scotland's five ski centres: between them, the resorts saw 289,995
"skier days” in the winter of 2010/ 11 compared to 374,789 the previous year. What made it memorable, though, was the large quantities of snow falling at lower levels, not just in the cities of the Central Belt but in the Highlands too. There was so much snow that winter I even got some cross- country skiing done in the pine forests around Loch Morlich, puffing through the snow- laden trees wearing all my baggy snowboard gear, looking like the antithesis of the stereotypical Lycra- clad crosscountry racer.
Of course, thanks to the ongoing effects of climate change, with every winter that passes a repeat of the Big Freeze of 2010/ 11 becomes less likely. The cold snap we had between Christmas and New Year, combined with a few dustings of snow in the lowlands, may have felt pleasingly wintry, but on the whole the temperatures haven’t been as low as in 2009/ 10, and the snowfall accumulations – at least in low- lying areas – have been negligible.
At time of writing there's plenty of snow up in the mountains, but due to coronavirus restrictions the only way all the for the skiers and boarders currently confined to the Central Belt are going to get any snow- sliding done over the next few weeks is if we get another proper Big Freeze, with significant snowfall at lower levels to match. Will it happen? Probably not. As always, though, it pays to have all your gear ready to go, just in case.
Backcountry ski guide Paul Easto completed a night- time ski descent of Arthur's Seat