Braeriach

The Scottish walking holiday of 2005 continues:

Wednesday 27th July 2005 

The weather for this walk was not as good as I had enjoyed during my previous walks: it was overcast and drizzly, but that didn’t stop me going out for a potentially very long walk over the third highest mountain in Britain. I set off walking alongside the Allt Mòr burn and took the path that crosses the heather moorland in front of the Cairngorm corries, through the Chalamain Gap and into the Lairig Ghru. That sentence may have been easy to write, but it took me ages to complete due to a lack of energy that was preventing me from walking very quickly (and besides, the heavily, over-engineered footpaths were depressing me). After crossing the Allt Druidh, at the foot of the awe-inspiring wedge through the mountains that is the Lairig Ghru, I started my slow ascent up the ridge opposite. With drizzly rain continuing off and on all day, the cloud base crept closer and closer to me with every step. Eventually I arrived at a wide grassy plain, which my map declared, despite my optimism, was not the Munro, but merely a top, Sròn na Lairige. With the aid of my compass I passed over the plateau and resumed my climb in the clouds, and through increasingly heavy rain, up to a cliff edge and along it to the summit of Braeriach, the third highest mountain in Britain.

[Picture taken in 2009 from the summit of Braeriach of the scene across Allt Garbh Choire towards Cairn Toul] 

There I had my lunch and contemplated the situation: it was cloudy and it was chucking it down with rain. Eventually I decided that a walk over the plateau around the huge corries of An Garbh Coire to Cairn Toul in this weather would be crazy, and besides, it had taken me five hours just to get to this point; I could only imagine how long it would take me to get to Cairn Toul before I had to turn around and come all the way back. With my decision made I set off back down the hill secure in the knowledge that at least I had climbed one Munro on this walk. I returned down the ridge over Sròn na Lairige eventually arriving back down at the northern end of the Lairig Ghru where I decided that I would take a different route back to the youth hostel. Rather than climbing into the Chalamain Gap again, I followed the path beside the Allt Druidh all the way down into the Rothiemurchus woods where I had a very pleasant woodland walk slowly making my way towards Loch Morlich, circling around the loch to return to Glenmore. For a walk in such poor weather this was fabulous, and gave me a great sense of achievement on reaching the summit. The fact that I went no further did nothing to ruin the walk for me.