Creagan Riabhach

What a great day out! Plan B had to come in to operation yesterday as the orginal idea to walk up Glen Dye was thwarted by the closure of the Cairn o' Mount road.

After multiple emails were exchanged before the event, five of us finally settled on travelling down to Ballater by bus on what promised to be another hot day. We alighted at the start of the Pass of Ballater and walked to the "car park" for the official start of the published walk, which was mostly on good quality Land Rover track.

We were grateful for the shade provided by the trees on the initial climb up:

We were already looking forward to the 4 pubs we planned to slake our thirst in after the walk

The route instructions were very detailed and we had no misadventures this time - unlike our last adventure up Mortlich. There was a brief disagreement when it came to the one option on the route to take the short walk up to the aerial tower, from where we were told there were good views of the Dee Valley. "I'm not interested in good views" came out of the mouth of one of our group, to which the riposte was "then why are we ******* hill-walking at all?" I guess we were a bit hot and bothered at that point. Anyway, we did do this additional leg and there were indeed some good views from there:

Further on up the hill, the trees thinned out, creating superb panoramic views of the valley, with Mount Keen and Lochnagar most prominent:

Eventually we came to the sharp left turn which signalled the start of the descent. We decided it was time to stop for lunch:

The temperature at this altitude was probably only low 20's and there was a light wind, which helped to keep us cool. It got steadily warmer as we descended down past Balmenach Farm and the ruins of Abergairn Castle (which we never saw). Soon we were back down at the Pass of Ballater, turning right this time to walk past the Craigendarroch resort and on to the main A93 road.

Opposite the entrance to the Hilton resort, we turned off the road and slithered down a steep narrow path down to the old railway line - we didn't know there was one past Ballater, but you learn every day. We walked along the trail a bit back towards the town and then went off piste and headed further down to the riverside walk, stopping at a nice little beach:

Who left their fingers on the lens?

We carried on along the riverside walkway and right round the golf course, by which time we were more than ready for our first beer - which we had sitting outside the Alexandra:

The first one barely touched the sides so we quickly had a second one before moving round to the Deeside Inn for a quick one, then on to the Barrel bar at the Glenaden. By now we were getting pretty hungry so we decided to go for a curry at India on the Green, thus passing up the chance to visit the Balmoral Bar which would have been the promised 4th stop.

The curry was good, although we had to hurry them along a bit at the end so that we could make the 19:55 bus back to Banchory:

For the record, our actual walking time was exactly 3 hours, although the elapsed time was a bit more than that. The distance was 13 kms with 392 m of lelevation. Here's the route map etc: