AbstractBallantyne et al. (1989) compare Schmidt hammer results from late‐lying snowpatches with adjacent snow‐free control sites and claim that their results lend ‘strong and unequivocal support to the concept of enhanced weathering under late‐lying snowpatches’. However, the data presented from sites of different age but in the same area suggest that the difference in results between snowpatch and control sites is unlikely to reflect differences in degree of boulder surface weathering. Their statistical treatment of the data also lends exaggerated significance to rather small absolute differences and obscures between‐boulder variability within sites.