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After lots of lurking, I've finally got round to a walk report, so here goes...
Myself, and two friends had a glorious late spring day in the Cairngorms on Saturday. I had wanted to do this pair of hills for a long time, and as the weekend approached, the weather forecast just looked better and better. We were all in agreement that we should head for the tops. After a quick porridge breakfast we headed up to the ski centre car park and headed off up the approach path west of Coire an Lochain.
The Coire an Lochain views were sublime...
We continued across the vast plateau, past Lochan Buidhe, through several snowfields - the novely of snow hadn't quite work off by that point! Our walking companion was really starting to tire by this point, and a lot of stops, sitting down, and eating of rocky road was involved!
The hill was a hive of activity, we passed sets of walkers every five minutes or so, everyone making the most of the glorious weather. We carried on upwards, through more snowfields up to the summit of Ben Macdui until we reached the summit cairn.
The summit views were immense, especially over the Lairig Ghru to Braeriach and Cairntoul. We had some well-earned sandwiches and our walking companion looked like he might fall asleep in one of the shelter cairns.
We pressed on and arrived back at the plateau where a decision had to be made. Onwards to Cairngorm? Our friend said that he didn't think he could manage it, so we started to re-trace our steps back the way we came. As it happens, he had a change of heart and decided to press on to Cairngorm. We crossed over some pretty big snowfields, which makes for hard going sometimes.
By the time we got to the cairn at Stob Coire an t-Sneachda our friend was a broken man! Having to sit down every couple of minutes, we were plying him with M&Ms and hot chocolate just to keep him moving. In the last pull up Cairngorm I had visions of us having to carry him off the hill and became a bit worried that it was a climb too far.
We managed to make it to the summit of Cairngorm
for more sandwiches and hot chocolate and apologised for the 50th time to our companion for breaking him.
We descended down the ranger path to the Ptarmigan restaurant, the fine weather finally beginning to break a little, with the low cloud passing over the summit. By this time it was 6.45pm and I was getting hungry. We walked down by the ski tows and finally got back to the car at 7.30pm, with our broken friend.
On the way down (at about 7pm), we bumped into a couple of lads who seemed to be on completely the wrong path. I think they thought they were on Fiacail ridge so it's probably best they never found it! They were headed to Loch Avon to camp and only had a phone with a murky looking map on it (no paper map!). We told them they were best ascending Cairngorm and told them to follow the cairns up, and look out for them on the path down to the bealach. One of then asked "what's a Cairn?"
I half thought about offering them my map, but, y'know, it was £9. I assume they're not dead though as I'm sure it would have been on the news.
We headed back to Aviemore, where the group of us inhaled bottles of Cobra, and a mountain of curry and sides at the Royal Tandoori
Our friend managed not to slip into a Korma during the meal (sorry). It was a really memorable day, and a fantastic achievement for our friend, who said he didn't regret a moment of it.