Wild Camp, Wild Weather

After a week of dreich weather the forecast suggested there might be a short window in the storms with an afternoon mostly free of clouds followed by a frosty night. Not having been camping since my return from the Pacific Northwest Trail a month ago I was keen to spend a night in the wilds and this seemed a good opportunity. For my first wild camp back in the Highlands I wanted to be somewhere special. The image that came immediately to mind was that of the magnificent cliff-ringed bowl at the head of Loch Avon in the Cairngorms so it was there I would go.

I set off in drizzle with the hills draped in thick mist hoping the forecast was accurate. Soon I was in the clouds but being on familiar ground I didn’t need map or compass. The ground was sodden from recent rain and the burns were racing down the hillsides. A steep, rough, eroded path led down out of Coire Domhain and out of the mist. Below me boulder-strewn slopes stretched out to long Loch Avon. The Feith Buidhe and Garbh Uisge burns roared down the ragged hillside between the big cliffs to merge into a whitewater stream that raced through the little meadows and heathery knolls of the corrie floor to the loch.

Down by the stream I sought a dry camp site but everywhere flat oozed water at every step. Choosing the least squelchy spot I could find I pitched the tent. Thin but wetting drizzle filled the air. Soon I was inside and dry and warm in thick clothing and sleeping bag with water heating on the stove for a mug of hot chocolate. The temperature was +4ºC. Heavier rain and an increasingly gusty wind kept me in the tent reading all evening. So far the weather forecast was looking badly wrong.

During the night I was woken several times by blasts of wind shaking the tent and by drips of condensation shaken off the fabric onto my face. At 4.30 a.m. I noticed that the ground round the edge of the tent porch was white. The rain had turned to snow. The wind was also waning and I didn’t wake again until 7.30, when the eastern sky was glowing with the dawn and there were stars high above. Only a few thin clouds remained. A light splattering of wet snow covered the ground, the edges of the tent were frozen and there was ice in my water bottles. The temperature was -1ºC and the air was crisp instead of soggy. Watching the wild landscape come to life as the light strengthened was the highlight of this short trip, the time when I was glad to be out there, glad to be a witness to a new day in the mountains. By the time I left, after a few hours of scenery watching and photography, the sky was clouding over and the brightness had died away. The break in the stormy weather had arrived in the early hours of the morning and was slipping away by midday. By the time I had climbed back up to the Cairngorm Plateau I was in clouds again. By early afternoon the rain had returned – and I was in a café in Aviemore looking out at the busy streets.

Photo Info: Early morning at the camp in the Loch Avon basin. Sony NEX-5, Sony 18-55 lens@22mm, 1/125@f8, ISO 250, raw file processed in Lightroom 3.