“The fact that our weather is often so bad, that’s actually what makes Scottish winter climbing so good,” says mountaineer Simon Richardson in Ephemeral, an excellent 2023 film that documents a single season in the Scottish Highlands (it’s on Amazon Prime's streaming service and well worth a watch). If something is ephemeral, it means that it only lasts for a very short amount of time. The word perfectly sums up the nature of snow and ice conditions found in many of the world’s mountain regions.
When a prolonged freeze brings a prized ice climbing route into being, climbers flock to the scene like moths to a flame. When half a season of freeze-thaw cycles bring about beautiful neve in the gullies, mountaineers are in heaven. Meanwhile, fresh powder might as well be white gold where skiers and snowboarders are concerned.
