“It’s a very sorry sight,” says Iain Cameron. It is late August and we are standing in front of Scotland’s very own Sphinx. It never had claws, paws, nor a mysterious countenance, but if it once had they would have melted away, just as the rest is about to do. “Grim,” says Cameron with gravel in his tone. “It’s pretty much in its death throes.”

Sphinx – so-called because of the rock climb directly above it – is a fast disappearing patch of snow situated in the most isolated of the corries in the Cairngorms. We have cycled six miles out from Whitewell near Aviemore along Gleann Eanaich trying to ignore scenery and the loudly blooming heather in our hurry to cover the distance to the slopes of Am Bràigh Riabhach – or Braeriach in the southern tongue – Scotland’s third-highest mountain at 1,296 metres (4,252ft). We scoot past the source of the River Dee with only a glance and a hasty slurp. Even lunch waits until we have plunged gravely over the steep side of Garbh Choire Mòr where our diminishing shrine lies.

Scotland does not have glaciers but usually, each year, a number of resilient patches of snow survive through the summer until they are once again covered by the fresh fall with the arrival of winter. Currently there are three patches left and their demise is imminent. Cameron, Scotland’s leading snow patch expert, says he would expect there to be 50-100 patches left at this time. Last year there were 82, and in the exceptional 2015 there were 678. The ground beneath the Sphinx snow patch has probably seen daylight for less than a few months since the start of the little ice age in the 16th-19th centuries.

This is the closest Scotland comes to having a glacier and makes Sphinx the most permanent and closely studied patch of snow in the British Isles. It has disappeared only a total of six times in the last 300 years: 1933, 1953, 1959, 1996, 2003 and 2006, almost always being the last patch to melt. A select trickle of discerning visitors have made the unlikely pilgrimage to this mountaineers’ sanctuary on the side of Braeriach.

The celebrated Scottish naturalist Seton Gordon (1886–1977) came to record and photograph here in October 1910. A few days after our visit, my first and Cameron’s 16th, Cameron intends to bring his tally up to 17 in the company of the stand-up comic Ed Byrne, who happens to be an outdoors enthusiast and respected writer on the topic. When Sphinx disappeared in 1933 it was such an unusual occurrence that a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club wrote a letter to the Times of London to say that such a thing “had never been known before” and that it was well worth “recording in a paper of record” because it was “unlikely to happen again”.

This late in the season, the snow patches sometimes look like dollops of dead dinosaur on the scree. Their skin-like surface is scalloped with ablation hollows formed by the passage of warm air over the snow creating ridges. These become more pronounced and attract pieces of debris that further accentuate the melting in the hollows. As snow of recent years melts it exposes harder, darker older layers. The 11-year-old hard “firn” at the base will be the last to go. Close by, you can also see the virgin pink of the granite. Even lichens and mosses struggle to get a toehold because the growing season is so short, leaving the granite pink in colour compared to the cliffs above where the same granite is greyer and darker, coloured by plant growth.

Even lichens and mosses struggle to get a toehold, leaving the granite pink in colour compared to the darker cliffs

The situation was very different last year when we took a similar September trip to the north face of Ben Nevis. There, at an altitude of 1,130 metres (3,707 ft) in Observatory gully, we found not only an enormous patch of snow but a tortoiseshell mini cathedral beneath it. Warm streams hollow out large snow patches from beneath leaving precarious but sculpturally spectacular caverns. If you find one – do not enter. They are highly unstable and very dangerous.

The Ben Nevis summer snow cathedral in 2016.



Despite being forever in the mountains it is unlikely Cameron will ever complete all of the Munros – the consequence of a childhood and lifelong fascination with summertime snow. “Year after year I go back to the same mountains, not only that but to the same locations on them, so I am getting to see them in all sorts of moods and atmospheres. I very seldom go to the peak in fact, as the snow tends to sit in the little gullies and corries below the peaks. I go straight to the snow.”

Having avoided the dominant culture of ticking off summits, he is well on the way to instituting an off-beat alternative. Going to highly inaccessible places for no other reason than to observe persistent patches of snow has become a minor social media phenomenon. His Snow Patches of Scotland Facebook page has 1,500 followers. “A multitude of people are now aware of what I do. The more ears and eyes that are out there, the easier my job.” A volunteer group has formed under his leadership which has, since 2008, conducted an annual snow patch survey gathering accurate data for the scientific community that monitors these subtleties of change in climate and environment.