Two airheads walk up Meall a Bhuachaille!

[tibo]

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Away for the weekend with my fellow airhead Kate. Husbands busy and the plan for the weekend was to drop off my youngest with her 3 friends to the Aviemore Stopover Festival, hang around if we were needed for the weekend and take them back 2 days later!

A beautiful walk planned with military precision to avoid the rain planned for the afternoon! Apart from my planning/timing skills I am embarrassed to say I am short on map reading skills! I wanted to show how independent and able i am without my better half being about and taking over in a "manly" way!

We start out as the directions suggest walking to the left of the visitor centre. Within 3 minutes we become confused!!! The path up the hill has only an orange marker on it when it should have an orange and blue marker! We decide that it looks correct!

Very soon none of the directions match the walk! However it is beautifully sunny and warm at this stage so we are happy!

We ascend very steeply and find ourselves at the summit of Meall a Bhuchaille within 1 hour! Between the 2 of us we can't understand what has happened!

We meet 2 families at the top whilst we have lunch and soon it becomes clear that we are doing the walk back to front from the directions printed!

The next 2 hours we descend down and enjoy beautiful and spectacular views. Passing a bothy and a lochan on route.

We definitely think this is the better direction to take for a more scenic walk! It takes a while to get back to the start of the route and we look out for the original orange and blue marked post but can't find it anywhere. A bit of head scratching- never mind we have had a fabulous day and we will never work out where we went wrong!!! More importantly we have just avoided the deluge of rain that has started and smile smugly to ourselves whilst enjoying our tea and cake!

.....................all becomes clear when writing up this report and mapping our route in comparison with the route on walk highlands. We have taken a slightly longer route around Glenmore Lodge

[Fife Flyer]

Great stuff, brought a smile to my face
I won't make any navigational comment, we have all had the occasional disagreement with the map

[Alteknacker]

I can only second what Fifeflyer says; and anyone who says otherwise is likely to be telling porkies...

[jmarkb]

The directions for the start of the walk are a bit odd: I think you need to actually head downhill for a bit to get on the right track. It's easier to find if you start by going up past the Reindeer Centre instead. Even so, this route gains about 70m of height before dropping down again to An Lochan Uaine - you may as well just go straight along past Glenmore Lodge.

[KatTai]

I got confused by that bit as well, I did find the markers though (having picked up a map with the waymarked routes in the carpark).

[RocksRock]

I also did some head-scratching on this - couldn't find the marker right at the bottom Then when I got to the downhill bit turned left one too soon . After that, I really enjoyed it - a nice bimble through some pretty woods along a narrow path, joining the main track after a while, rather than the walk along the main hard track all the way to the lochan

[Holly Harlow]

A great report and gorgeous photos. Well done Girl Power!
PS when I did this hill, I went to the lochan first, then up to the summit of the Meall. Routefinding was was easypeasy going that way - plus, I was able to sneak in a cheeky early-morning skinny-dip in the lochan...
Holly

[tibo]

Thanks all for your comments

jmarkb - you are absolutely correct about going past the Reindeer Centre initially as we walked past this on our way back. Ideally this would have helped us if it was noted on the route guide.

KatTai - We should have picked up a map at the car park like you. Lesson leant!

Holly Harlow - Lochan skinny dipping in solitude sounds fun. The place was so busy in the early afternoon- not a chance!