Lochnagar

It proved difficult to agree a date for all of us to tackle what would be the first official Munro for most of us - Lochnagar. In the end, 5 of us left Banchory just after 7:30 am on Thursday to drive out to the car park in Glen Muick - me, John McW, Colin, Steve and Dave.

The first obstacle was buying a parking ticket - only John had any coins and he could only rustle up a total of £3.90 - tantalisingly just 10 p. short. The option of paying via PayPal was thwarted by a lack of any mobile phone signal, but eventually John managed to beg/borrow the required amount from a fellow walker and feed the machine with the correct amount:

So we set off on our epic adventure at 8:40 am. Steve, who was the only one of us who had done the walk before, recommended we do the full loop - straight up via the right hand hand route and back down past the Glas Allt Falls.

Conditions were pretty good at the start and the initial part of the walk was on fairly good quality trails:

Time for the first full team photo then:

We passed by Meikle Pap, which had been climbed by a few of our group a couple of years ago:

John recalled looking up at Lochnagar from the top of Meikle Pap on that occasion, thinking this is more than enough - there's no way I would ever go up there - and here he was doing it now!

The next viewpoint was Lochan na Gaire (wee loch of the noisy sound). By now the weather was getting pretty changeable with clouds and mist rolling in - and then rolling out again just as quickly:

Now came the first real challenge - the boulder field. Finding the path was the first problem. Rob Pollard had advised us to keep right to find it but some of us took this too far and had to clamber a bit more than we needed to:

As you can see, by now, I was assuming my customary role at the back of the pack. Steve and Colin waited patiently:

Thankfully, that was the worst over with. From there, the rest of the climb was fairly straight forward and soon we reached the top:

We sat and had a bite of lunch in the shelter of the rocks at the summit, but by the time we got round to taking the team photo, another squall had closed in:

Despite the ever-changing weather, there were still superb views from the top, with a series of rainbows coming and going:

The walk down should have been easier but we somehow took a wrong turn and had to backtrack up the hill a bit again. The loop back is a fair bit longer than the direct route up, but there are several steepish stretches of large boulder steps which needed careful negotiation, particularly for those of us with dodgy joints:

We caught a brief glimpse of Dubh Loch, then, eventually, Loch Muick itself:

The gorge leading down to the loch soon revealed the wonderful Glas Allt Falls:

It was a long, narrow zig-zag path down and we stopped a couple of times to take in our surroundings:

Once we did get back down lochside, we still had a fair old hike to do to get back to the car park - albeit at least it was flat and on good quality trails. When we did eventually get into the car, there was a collective sigh of relief - most of us commented that this walk was right on the limits of our abilities. The stats reveal all:

21 kms and 900 metres of climbing combined to make it our longest and highest walk. The total elapsed time was almost seven and a half hours, although the stats above show the actual moving time was almost two hours less than this. It took us three and a quarter hours (including stops) to get to the summit, but one hour longer to get back.

I took the South Deeside road home and, as we neared Aboyne, I offered my passengers a brief pitstop at the Boat Inn. Dave accepted with some alacrity, but Steve had to get home promptly, so we bypassed any form of refreshment. I think everyone was really looking forward to a bath or shower.