Scotland varies from day to day. You can get gorgeous snow-ice, when everything's easy, then you get a thaw and it can vanish just like that. I once saw a 50-foot icicle come away from the rock (it was thawing hard and there was water running down the back of it) with a climber attached. He was OK, he just swung out of the way on a peg. Of cource, I was immediately below, traversing across to get to the safer slabs round the corner. We were moving together, I don't know how I managed to stay put, and I finished the climb (Tower Ridge on the Ben) with concussion. Then another time you get half an inch of verglas, nothing grips, and the easy routes become hard. You're dead right about the weather; I was once involved in rescuing a
walker who was blown off her feet and several yards sideways on Bidean nam Bian in Glencoe (God alone knows what they were doing up there; I was hard put to it to keep my feet on the road); she went over the edge into a gully, and fortunately for her, kept a grip of her
axe. She just about managed to stop, with several broken
ribs, just short of the
rocks 500 feet down.