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OK, so welcome to my first walk report! And what I hope will be the first of many, from a baby-bagger
After a bit of a bomb down from Bettyhill on the Sunday morning, we had hoped to arrive at Carin Gorm Ski Centre in time to summit and get back to the van in time to find somewhere to kip for the night. By the time we were ready to go it was just after 2pm. The team for this walk were myself, my partner and our 18 month old Deerhound, Rune(her first mountain!). For the avoidance of her being left out of the story, I have included her review at the end
We had struggled a little to find a lot of information on the internet about what route to take, or how long it would take (especially without particularly good signal up there, and all the information centres etc closed), but having found a TripAdvisor review and a sign for "Windy Ridge" we headed off in high spirits. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining, the sky was clear and it was so warm I actually did the entire ascent in a vest top!
Despite being relatively fit, we hadn't eaten that morning, I wasn't feeling my best, it was very warm and we did set off at quite a pace so I really struggled with how steep the route is at the start! As you go up from the carpark, it is very steep in places and the path is largely made of steps which are so high I had to really lift my leg to get up them! But with some regular breaks and a little sugar kick I soon started feeling better. We reached the Ptarmigan restaurant in just over an hour and had a quick drink ready to head off to the summit. We could see the path ahead of us, but we had read on a TripAdvisor review that there is a different path looping off to the left which is a gentler ascent, so after a bit of mishing about looking for it, we set off that way. I should add that we had found almost no information on how far it was from the restaurant to the summit, so we really didn't know how far we had left to go!
The path we took was much gentler than the first bit up to the restaurant, and after very little exertion, we rounded a corner and were surprised to see the summit cairn ahead of us! There were a few other people who were just arriving at the summit very red faced and puffing, so I was quite glad we took the route we did. The views from the top are lovely, especially with the weather we had too! From the car park to the summit in all took us around 1hr 35 minutes.
We came back down the main path we had seen and quickly understood why everyone at the top looked so exhausted, and were again glad we went the other way. It's steep and those awful little tiny rock steps most of the way! It is considerably shorter than the path we took though. We are very much "walk up run down" sort of people so as we bounded down we were in very high spirits and got to the bottom maybe 50 minutes later.
We had intended to walk Ben Lomond earlier in the week, but the weather was pants that day, so the combination of feeling like we had cheated this one (since the carpark is halfway up haha) and the elation of getting a summit photo, we decided to do Ben Lomond the day after too! I knew Cairn Gorm isn't particularly challenging, but it certainly felt nice to ease us in and still felt like a small achievement
Rune's Review.
Had to wait ages in a carpark while the humans wee'd and ate. Why they cant just wee while walking like I do I'll never know. I don't really like working too hard, so this really wasn't my thing. A couple of times I had to put my foot down and had a little lie in the grass, kicking off a battle of wills because the humans wanted to walk and I wanted to lie. They didn't win per say, I just decided it's in my interest to keep them happy and if I carried on I might get bonios later. I was quite thirsty, being a hot day, but the water they kept giving me out of the bowl was too clean, and the water in the streams on the mountain was too dirty *eye roll*. We finally got to a building, but there was no bonios, noone wanted to pet me, and apparently that wasn't even the end of the walk, so I did a protest ****. The human then had to carry it all the way back and complained how bad it smelt for the rest of the walk so I was quite smug about that.
Anyway, eventually we were going downhill which I don't mind too much, and we did a bit of running which was fun. Got down, got in the van, refused to move for the rest of the day. There was many bonios, and a big bowl of food and meat. I was so tired I feel asleep with my face in it. I hope they don't make me do that again!
