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We enjoyed our week in Ballater last September, a lovely small town with access to the main cairngorms without being too busy, so we decided to have another week and booked the same little cottage.
With an aborted attempt on An Socach (we were turned away because of some VIP's spending the day around Baddoch Burn) we felt we needed to have another go. We had two munro's to do in the area, An Socach and Carn Bhac, I had a route planned to do them both in the same day from Inverey but when I'd had a good look at the route it looked like a long day so decided to do them as singles and take our time, we had plans for the week (weather permitting) so didn't want to burn ourselves out, creaky knees and hips, we're getting old
The plan was to do An Socach the walkhighlands way to see how our fitness levels were and just enjoy the day.
We were away early to get parked in the layby on the A93 near the start of the track to Baddoch, we had it all to ourselves on arrival
It was a bit on the cool side when we were getting ready to go, the forecast was for the odd shower with sunny intervals and light winds, it was the "light wind" that made it feel more like early spring than summer, t'was a bit nippy
The track is a nice way to get the legs working, the views were ok too.
As we neared the farm building a large yellow fwd vehicle, like a giant pickup passed us with bee hives on the back of it, this was the third one of these we'd seen today so we assumed they were moving the bees to secluded spots in the glens to take advantage of the heather which is just about ready to flower.
Over the stile and a warning sign for our canine friends
I think that's Sgor Mor
About 3km along the track you reach a ford, this is where the hill path for An Socach starts, it's on the far side of the ford not before it, we started up the path on the near side and soon realised there's not many places to cross the burn higher up, especially when there's a lot of water in it, we retraced our steps and started uphill, again
The hill path is very obvious from the ford, steep to start with, we passed the cairn marked on the map,
The Cairnwell munros were showing themselves
The path levels off here, this little fella kept us company for some of the way
Further on there's another steep climb, you can see it from the cairn,
Once up that it levels off again and undulates all the way to the summit travelling over stones for a lot of the way. The wind was fairly strong so it felt pretty cool, luckily, the showers were looking less likely. On the way it's a bit difficult to pick out the top of An Socach, I kept thinking it looked a long way off until I realised I was looking at Beinn Lutharn Mhor, it wasn't until we'd got half way along the ridge that we could see the summit cairn.
On the summit the views were not too bad, the light was not showing the surrounding mountains at their best but at least we were seeing them, we could see most of the munro's we'd done in the area.
Back along the ridge
We stayed on the top for a while my main interest was how far Carn Bhac looked, the temptation was there to have a go but it seemed silly to go further away from the car just to come back so it was going to remain a single for later on in the week. We set off from the summit and retraced our steps back to Glen Clunie.
On the way down I kept looking at Creag nan Gabhar and thought that might be do-able today.
Happy mountain walker
We had enough time, so, out with the map. I noticed a path marked running up alongside Allt a'Mhaide, did a quick guestimate on the time needed and suggested to Denise we could do it if we fancied, she agreed so, instead of going to the car and have lunch, I knew if we did that we'd not get out again
we crossed the road and set off for Creag nan Gabhar.
We needed to be on the south side of the burn, there's the trace of a path so we followed it as it twists and turns through some fenced off sections, it looks like tree planting so these little fenced areas will keep the sheep and deer off the saplings.
The path becomes a lot clearer a little further on but it's narrow, very narrow as it climbs above the burn. it's quite a sheer drop down to the water, probably 20' or more
It's easy going all the way to the ford crossing the burn, then it disappears shortly after the crossing so it's a case of aiming slightly left and heading for the bealach, I took this of the path on the other side of the burn just for reference
Towards the road
We kept finding traces of the path on the way, then, all of a sudden, we found it again and it remained clear up to the bealach where it joined the track coming up from Glen Callater.
We turned left up a quad track and followed it to the cairn marked on the map at NO163838, from there it heads across a smaller bealach and cuts across a peaty boggy section and then remains a solid path all the way to the summit.
The summit has three cairns, we visited them all but the largest tumbledown one is the summit so we claimed that
We had a few minutes looking at the views and taking photos,
The plan was to go over the summit and straight down to the road, looking at how steep that appeared whilst on the way up, we decided to re-trace our steps and go down that way, better the devil you know and all that
We set off down. I noticed, on the way up, there was a fork in the path that appeared to skirt around the little bump with the cairn on it so we took it on the way down and lost the path completely, we ended up travelling over peat hags so beat a hasty retreat to the hump and regained our path, phew
Once back on the path it was an easy plod back down to the road, the surprising thing was we kept to the path all the way to the ford, how did we lose it on the way up
Back at the car our little diversion only took three hours so it was worth the extra effort for a Corbett I'd planned to do on it's own.
We had a super day, no rain, just a coolish breeze a bit of sun
and views in abundance, brilliant!!!
