Damp in the Forest: First Camp of the Year

Tony Hobbs on the day walk 

Following Storm Eowyn’s high winds and snow the weather calmed down. Rather too much in fact as a thick, grey, wet cloud settled over the Cairngorms and refused to move for several days. I had my first camp of 2025 during this period, as Tony Hobbs had arranged a few weeks earlier to come up from down south for a few days out and couldn’t easily change his plans. A day earlier and Eowyn might have stopped him anyway.

View over Rothiemurchus Forest to the Lairig Ghru

Given that the forecast suggested it could be windy high up and due to a late start we decided to camp deep in the shelter of the forest and not push on uphill into the dark. An initial view of the great gash of the Lairig Ghru with snowy hills rising into the clouds either side didn’t make the heights seem very appealing either. The snow in the forest was soft and slushy and slowly thawing and it was a sloshy, boggy walk to our campsite.  

Forest camp

The night was quiet, the air still and damp. The overnight low was 2°C.  The forecast had changed – the next two days were now meant to be showery with thick cloud down on the hills. This turned out to be accurate, unfortunately. Rather than move location we decided we’d stay here for a second night and spend the day walking up the path towards the Lairig Ghru pass with the idea that if the clouds lifted a little we might go up the hills above the mouth of the pass, Creag a’ Chalamain and Castle Hill. At 787 and 728 metres respectively maybe they’d be below the cloud.

Carn Eilrig, 742 metres

They weren’t. The cloud base was around 500 metres, maybe 600 at times. The path into the Lairig Ghru was wet and increasingly snowy. There was a slow thaw. Drizzle and thin rain fell. The air was saturated. It wasn’t cold though. 6°C according to my thermometer. With no wind blowing walking soon made me warm. I’d set off in base layer, fleece, and windshirt. The middle layer soon came off. Hat and gloves never went on.

Forest, hills, snow, cloud

The forest was green and dripping, the pines magnificent. As we started to leave the trees behind the wild winter hills appeared, the snow bringing out the complex lines of moraines, stream gullies, and scree slopes. The high mountains were hidden in the clouds so this lower landscape stood out.

Tony near our high point

Eventually we decided to return down the path so we’d reach camp before dark. I remembered other occasions when I’d turned back on this approach to the Lairig Ghru in winter, both times due to savage weather, and camped in the forest. The first time, back in the 1990s, two of us had retreated in the face of a ferocious wind we could barely walk into, a wind that had ripped the foam pad off the back of my companion Chris Ainsworth’s pack. Amazingly we found it further down the path.

The crags of Creag an Leth-choin rise into the clouds

The second occasion was twelve years ago when I was making the Cairngorms In Winter film with Terry Abraham. The snow was deeper than today and the wind again ferocious and again we retreated to camp in the forest, though on that occasion the storm followed us into the woods. I wrote about the trip in this post.

Another hot drink on the way.

Today we weren’t escaping a storm, just sloshing back down the path in the drizzle to our comfortable camp. The rain meant we were soon ensconced in our tents. I wiled away the long hours of darkness (about fifteen at this time of year), making hot drinks, reading, writing my journal, listening to the slow spots of rain hitting the flysheet, and sleeping.

Is it still raining?

There was no change at dawn. Except that it was slightly warmer, speeding up the thaw. We packed up and walked out, pausing to give advice to a lost walker, one of the few people we met. We first saw him talking to a mountain biker. The cyclist having peddled off he then asked us for directions. On first sight I’d thought he was someone from the Rothiemuchus estate as he was dressed in ‘country’ clothing – brogues, knee-length socks, breeches, Barbour jacket, and carrying a traditional wooden walking stick. He had no pack and didn’t look like a typical walker. He told us he was a countryman from the Borders and didn’t know this area.

Lochan Deo on the walk out, still some ice.

He was out for a circular walk he’d been told would take him past the loch (I guess Loch Morlich) and then back to Coylumbridge. He didn’t have a map and was confused by the different path junctions, not all of them signposted. He was in fact on a path that would take him back to the road in almost a straight line but he didn’t feel confident to continue and decided to return the way he’d come, even though it was longer.

The day before we’d only seen one other person, a backpacker heading into the Lairig Ghru. This day we met a pair of walkers as well as the lost countryman and the mountain biker. Five people in total and we were on popular paths. I guess the weather had discouraged others.

Back in Aviemore we had lunch in the Explorers Café and watched the now heavier rain falling. It had been a quiet gentle first camping trip of the year. It was good to be out.