31 August: Strong winds at the top of Lochnagar

Friday night we had dinner at home and then drove to Ballater Caravan Park. Lochnagar is only an hours drive from our house, but the boys love sleeping in a tent so we decided to spend the night at Ballater.

A fascinating thing about this caravan park is that it's located almost in the middle of Ballater - we could have walked from our tent to the shops in just five minutes.

Getting ready for the hike

After buying a map in Ballater, we headed off to Lochnagar, which is located in the Cairngorms National Park. 

The nature in this national park, or at least the part we were in, is a bit like Dovrefjell National Park in Norway. The mountains are fairly tall, but before you start climbing the summits you have gained quite a few metres during your hike on soft, gentle paths that are not very steep.

Interesting displays at the Lochnagar Visitor Centre

The Lochnagar Visitor Centre is in Glen Muick (a 'glen' is a valley), approx half an hour by car from Ballater, which is the nearest town. It turned out that the visitor centre had a very interesting display about the area and the animals that live in the area. After studying the displays for a while, we started our hike.

A walk in the park compared to Ben Nevis?

The start of our hike was a flat path across the wide and open glen, before the path took us through a tranquil wood and then gradually got steeper as we started the ascent of the Allt na Guibhsaich. The path was not very steep and easy to follow, so with the fresh memory of the hike up Ben Nevis, I expected this hike to be a walk in the park.

What I had forgotten to take into consideration was the motivation of our kids. There were far fewer people doing this hike and it did not take our boys long to start asking for snacks, drinks and other reasons to stop.

The mental challenge

It turned out that even though the physical challenge was much smaller this time, the parenting/motivational challenge was all the greater. I think the kids were less motivated simply by the fact that there were far fewer people to compete with. For the first half of the hike, both my husband and I had to work hard to motivate the boys and also try to avoid yelling at them in frustration over all the nagging and complaining.

One really good thing about our boys is that even though they may be hard to convince at the beginning of a hike (or a cross country skiing trip for that matter), they're really great once we've been through a few hiccups at the start. And that's what happened this time too, thank goodness.

The boys are such great walkers and in the end we hiked around 19 km in 8 hours, so it was a long day. But the boys were happy and singing by the time we were descending. But first back to our climb up the mountain.

It gets steeper, colder and wetter

The path got gradually steeper and after a sunny start to our hike, we started to get rain spells and gradually more wind. In between the rain spells, the sun was out and it was quite nice, though the wind was getting pretty fierce.

As we started to climb 'The Ladder', a steep boulder field that takes you to the plateau that you need to cross before climbing the summit, we experienced heavy rain and gusts of wind so strong it almost knocked us off our feet. Our youngest son actually fell once and I had to lean hard against the wind to avoid falling. There was no chance I was going to get my camera out in these conditions!

Cold and miserable

It seemed the strong winds were created by the shape of the mountain, because once we were at the top of 'The Ladder', the wind was less fierce and soon it also stopped raining.

By now the boys had become quite cold and were not very keen on taking off their waterproof clothing in order to put on more woolen underwear and fleece clothes. However, once this had been done, they were nice and warm again and their spirits were immediately lifted - it's no fun being cold.

It's true - it's tough at the top!

After we got past 'The Ladder', the next part of the hike was fairly easy, both physically and mentally. The final climb took us up to the windy summit of Lochnagar, the Cac Carn Beag.

At the summit it was almost impossible to stand upright, as you can tell from the picture I've included. We didn't stay long at the peak, but it was good fun leaning against the extremely strong wind. It really makes me humble when I experience the power of  nature like we did here.

A pleasant stroll back

For our hike down from Lochnagar, we chose a slightly different route from the one we took going up. The descent had no steep parts, just a smooth walk down to the lake of Loch Muick. On our way down we once again had to cross the narrow strip of forest, before reaching the lake.

The final part of our hike was along the shores of Loch Muick, where we followed the gravel road to the other end of the lake, where our car was parked.

On this pleasant stroll, where the kids were happily skipping and singing, we came across some fascinating caterpillars on the gravel. We spent some time studying them before proceeding on our idyllic walk back to the car. By now the atmosphere was so harmonic, you could almost hear Julie Andrews sing 'The hills are alive with the sound of music'.