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Three friends, my son and I had planned this walk for several weeks. We started off at 2:30pm from the car park at the bad bend just below the ski centre at aviemore and headed towards the boulder field at Creag a Chalamain.
We made our way through this to emerge at the North end of the Lairig Ghru
We crossed the burn and headed up to the ridge to the Sron na Lairige at 1180m then followed the ridge West until we caught our first view of the Angels Peak and Cairn Toul
We reached the summit of Braeriach at around 8:00pm and made our way to the Wells of Dee to make camp. This area is very exposed and with the wind chill the temperature was around zero.
We woke on the Saturday morning to very poor visibility and started off at around 7:30am to take in The Angels Peak and Cairn Toul. We were fortunate that we had a clear look at the route on the Friday night as we could only see 10 metres in any direction.
The summit of Cairn Toul below
From the summit of Cairn Toul we planned to follow the ridge down to the Devils Peak but with the visiblity as bad as it was we headed to far SSE and ended up having to clamber back up over a boulder field to get back over to the Devils Peak ( Not much fun with a full pack on and it always amazes me how much harder walking is when you know you shouldn't be climbing that part of the mountain
.).When back on course we reached the path that takes you down to the Lairig Ghru and left the bags to take in The Devils Peak, from here we made our way down into the Glen to have lunch at the Bothy.
After lunch we headed South down the Lairig Ghru then took a SE bearing around the back of Carn na Mhaim towards the Luibeg Bridge. We followed the path and before we reached the bridge headed up Carn na Mhaim in a NW bearing. The weather had improved by this time and we had great views of the Devils Peak from here.
We reached the summit of Carn na Mhaim at around 5:30pm
This was our last munro of the day but not the last ascent as we headed down the ridge towards Ben Macdui and climbed up the path to the broad plateau that leads to the summit.
We kept to the South of the summit and headed down towards Loch Etchachan to make our second camp at 9:30pm. This had been a very long day but the views from our camp of the sunset and Beinn Mheadhoin went some way to easing our aches and pains.
Below the sunset just before we collapsed into our sleeping bags
Before we hit the sack we went on a recce to pick our route to Beinn Mheadhoin and Derry Cairngorm which was just as well because the weather was terrible on the Sunday. There was no visibility, high winds and driving rain but undeterred we started off at 6:30am and climbed Beinn Mheadhoin. As can see from the photo below it wasn't a day for taking photos.
Below our second munro of the day Derry Cairngorm, the weather really was foul at the top so it was a quick photo and head back to camp.
After packing up the tents we headed for the long walk home which allowed us to take in Ben Macdui by only climbing 200 metres. We were hoping that the weather would repeat itself from the Saturday and we would get some clear spells but we had no such luck.
From the summit of Ben Macdui we followed the line of cairns NNW untill we came to the ridge that leads down to the ski centre. In all we took in 8 munros, covered 60km and climbed nearly 4000 metres and finished up with a well earned fish supper in Aviemore.
