Ben Macdui is the highest mountain in the Cairngorm National Park and the second highest in the UK (after Ben Nevis on the west coast). At an altitude of 1309m, it offers stunning views across the Cairngorms and well beyond. It is therefore slightly surprising that I haven’t been lured there before.
Starting from Coire Cas car park, I cut across the bottom of both Coire an t-Sneachda and Coire an Lochain in order to make a steady ascent of the western flanks of Cairn Lochan. I was interested to come across a couple of people that had chosen to retreat due to the strong winds which, although impeded progress a bit, didn’t seem that bad to me. However, things got a bit more testing when, soon after passing the 1083 spot hight, I was enveloped in a white out which was to last for the next 3 to 4 hours.
For those that have never experienced this phenomenon, it is when there is no distinguishable difference between the white of the snow and the white of the cloud. There is nothing to focus on and it can be very disorientating. If you can imagine being in a pitch black room or in an underground mine with no lights, all you can see is black with nothing to focus on. A white out gives you the same effect, except that you are surrounded with white instead! As you might guess, this makes walking and navigation very difficult and you have to have complete confidence in your compass and mental calculations.
At one point, my route took me between two lochans (small lakes) but I couldn’t see them at all. To be fair, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have been able to see them even without the white out, due to the snow and ice covering them up, but it would have helped to be sure of my exact position. I’ll never know for sure whether I walked over the top of one by accident, but my ears were straining for the sound of cracking ice!
I had read in a guidebook that the top of Ben Macdui has a number of cairns scattered across it, but that the actual summit is marked with a triangulation pillar. Having arrived at what my map, compass and I thought should be the top, I could just make out a white shape 5m to my right. Was this the trig point? It certainly didn’t look like it, but it was so close to where I thought the summit should be that it deserved investigation. It looked like a giant lump of ice, about 4 foot tall (about right for a triangulation pillar) but 6 foot wide (way out!). However, a good hack at the top of this enormous ice cube revealed that this was indeed the top and the concrete pillar had simply gathered an extraordinary amount of ice on its sides.
The route back was theoretically just the same but in reverse. It looked the same as well – white! Interestingly, the white out came to an end at almost the same point as it had started, making the final descent a much more relaxed affair. After all the white that has surrounded me for much of the day, I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me when everything seemed to turn orange as the sun started to drop. However, my camera seems to have seen the same as me so I won’t be rushing to the optician. Looking at the blue sky made it hard to believe how different things had been only 30 minutes before – but that’s UK mountain weather for you!
