Cairngorms Bonanza!

It is a rare and splendid thing to look up the mountain weather forecast the night before an expedition and read, "No Rain", and "Chance of cloud-free Munro's: 100%"! It's even better when they get it right - and yesterday was just such a day! With the prospect of clear skies, and the whole of the Cairngorms before me, I packed for a long walk - and cycle, setting off soon after sunrise to make the best of the light. From early on it was clear that it was going to be a good day, the golden-orange morning sun shone through the mist still clinging to the surface of the River Isla near Blairgowrie, while glistening off the dewy grass on each bank; a mysteriously wonderful collision of textures and colours.

My day-proper started at the Linn of Dee carpark - a place from which many Cairngorm expeditions have begun. I have walked the path from here to Derry Lodge many times, but this time I had a bike with me, speeding my passage toward the high tops. Derry Lodge itself is a forlorn sight, once a hunting lodge in the heart of the Cairngorms, at the centre of a minute community where Gaelic persisted until well after WWII; it is now boarded-up and gently crumbling. I remember feeling similarly forlorn on my first visit to Glen Derry, a borrowed mountain bike broke - and as I fiddled with the broken pedal the party I was with cycled into the distance, leaving me to push the wretched machine all the way back to Linn of Dee. This time, however I was on a brand new bike - its inaugural flight in fact, and it did a great job, speedily eating through the miles. Memories of Derry Lodge are not all bad though; as I dismounted and got ready for walking I remembered camping here with the ever affable Percy Cowpat esq. many years ago. The smell of cigar-smoke and Glenmorangie, the gentle hiss of a heather fire, the brilliant blue-black sky bespeckled by millions of bright stars, framed on every side by the vast-black outlines of great mountains. Such reminiscence was quickly countered with the memory that when we broke camp in the morning to head out towards Beinn Bhreac, the wind suddenly dropped and dark columns of midgies rose from the heather like the fiery exhaust of a steam locomotive, eating our skin and even biting the whites of our eyes!

It was Northwards into Glen Derry that I was bound again on this trip, turning eastwards up the Coire Etchachan, the long climb up onto the Cairngorm plateau, past the little bothy known as the Hutchison Memorial Hut.

Loch Etchachan

At the head of Coire Etchachan the scenery changes suddenly and surprisingly. Within seconds, the bleak and bouldery corrie gives way to a pleasant loch, nestling beneath its cliffs -under Ben MacDui's long Eastern flanks. On my visit the delightful scene was made complete by a row of tents nestling on the water's edge, a high level camp-site pitched in pursuit of a Duke of Edinburgh Gold award. From Loch Etchachan, a scratchy path winds its way steeply at first up the side of Beinn Mheadhoin, a great bald whaleback ridge that marks the eastern edge of the central Cairngorm massif. Mheadhoin is noted for its series of absurd granite tors which sit bizarrely along its crown like a row of badly maintained craggy teeth. They do provide some nice scrambling up their sides though - a pleasure not usually associated with the Cairngorms. By the time I stood on the summit tor of Beinn Mheadhoin, a fierce wind was funnelling around the contours of the mountain, so I clambered down and retreated back to the shelter of Etchachan.

Summit Tor - Beinn Mheadhoin

My mind's peculiar tendency to anthropomorphise makes me think of Derry Cairngorm as a particularly happy mountain. I am sure that this is due to a combination of its gentle slopes and smooth lines, and the fact that I have so often seen it in sunshine when mountains all around it have loomed as menacing hulks in dark cloud. Climbing it proved to be a bouldery experience, but the views southwards across Deeside and into Perthshire were breathtaking. Climbing onto its summit, I must have moved within range of a mobile phone mast, as my rucksack started to vibrate and a familiar tune rang out. I stopped, unpacked, found the phone, only to be informed that I was in receipt of 100 free extra texts... lovely, but hardly worth stopping for. I must however change that text ring-tone. At the moment, it plays "Lady Day and John Coltrane" by Gil Scott-Heron; a funky little tune indeed. The problem is that the second lines goes, "Ever feel that somehow, somewhere, you lost your way? And if you don't get a help quick, you won't make it through the day!" This may not be what I want to hear next time I am wrestling with a map and compass in fog, rain, zero visibility whilst trying to navigate some precipitous ridge! In the meantime if you see someone in the Scottish hills screaming "SHUT-UP" at his rucksack, it just means I have received a text!

Distant Lochnagar

There are some guidebooks which talk about 'conquering mountains', to describe ascending them. I think that such talk is foolhardy. To wander up a mountain in summer conditions is not to conquer it, merely to walk with it, to spend time with it. In contrast, I find that to stand in these great mountains and to tremble before their grandeur is more akin to being conquered by them; surrounded and overwhemed by them, to hold them in awe. Of mountains, so of God; perhaps illuminating what a Psalmist once wrote: Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. O LORD. For such granduer can be contemplated, engaged with, even perhaps wrestled with - but never conquered. Such thoughts filled my mind, and seemed to press home with an unusual urgency as I strained hard up a long climb, with a summit ahead of me, and the ground falling away on either side, Glen Derry on one side, Glen Lui on the other.

The Central Cairngorms

From Derry Cairngorm, I made my way back onto the central high ground of the Caringorm plateau, working my way back Northwards until I hit the busy trade route, linking Cairngorm and Ben MacDui. The Duke of Ed party had broken camp and were making their way up the long climb ahead of me, labouring under packs heavier than mine. I might have envied their night in the wild, but I didn't envy the loads they bore. It's seventeen years since I last walked this track, and there were a few things I remembered, the most distinctive of which was gash in the rock, next to the path - a spectacular gully eating into the mountain; a talking point in summer and a death trap when corniced in winter conditions. I remember posing for photos here all those years ago with Big Darren, The Rake and Crazy Jim.... and wondering what became of them all.

If Derry Cairngorm seems like a 'happy' mountain, then Ben MacDui is quite the opposite; large, dark, brutish, mysterious and foreboding. I trudged alone up the path towards its trig point, perched high on a cairn, the second highest point in Scotland - and could quite understand why fevered imaginations have run from the presence of the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDui. The Big Grey Man was not in attendance as I strode over the Ben's rock-strewn summit, yet the melancholy dread of the place was dense as I passed the ruin just short of the top; where the only sound was the howling of an anguished dog, which I heard but never saw. Two things have changed since I last stood on Ben MacDui, this time there was no dead-man lying in the boulders awaiting collection by the mountain rescue services; no helicopter hovering low, engines throbbing, swooping to collect the departed remains. The other difference was that the summit has been absolutely covered in cairns, shelters, seats and all sorts of bouldery creations. To be honest, I don't mind the odd cairn here or there - on a summit, or to mark a junction of paths; but this was grotesque, as if Fred and Barney had hosted a world championship of Jurassic Jenga, but all the contestants had abandoned the game in mid-session. Perhaps like Professor Norman Collie, they hurriedly fled the place in fear of the Big Grey Man!

The descent from Ben MacDui alongside the Allt Clach nan Taillear is awkward, and in mist would require some very canny navigation. It leads to a high col and over a swooping ridge to the ascent of Carn a Mhaim. The hill looks very easy when viewed from the likes of Braeriach, but at the end of a long day, with a brooding headache - it was a long pull. The sun, dipping low, and casting long shadows and orange patterns over the hills made a stunning backdrop to the views over the Lairig Ghru and down into Glen Lui far below. A decent path, drops from this hill, down to the Luibeg Bridge (which I actually found this time!), and then on back to Derry Lodge. After a long, hard strenuous walk, I was delighted to see the bike, leaning against the side of the Glen Derry mountain rescue station. Bringing the bike was a great idea, I have trudged the long miles back to Linn of Dee often enough to be grateful to spin swiftly along it and back to the car, to a rest, a drink and the drive home. Days as good as these are a treat to be savoured, an opportunity to be grasped, and an experience for which to be profoundly thankful.