Bennachie

Best laid plans etc. The weather behaved - much better than forecast earlier in the week - but you would have thought that 3 of us would have managed to plan and co-ordinate sufficiently well for our assault on Bennachie. Not so - first of all, I forgot the printed route plans and maps and had to dash back home again after picking John up, thus adding to our lateness in meeting up with Stewart - supposedly at 10:30 am.

As for Stewart, just one week in to his retirement, it seemed the old grey cells had stopped working already. The emails said meet at the Back of Bennachie Car Park, but he went to the main car park - i.e. the front of Bennachie - and with some road closures around there, he couldn't get round to where John and I were heading in reasonable time.

Allied to which, we didn't have each other's mobile phone numbers - point to remember when in Arran next week. We did eventually manage to communicate vie email and Messenger and it was agreed that John and I would go ahead with the planned walk up Oxen Craig and Mither Tap and Stewart would head up Mither Tap from the other side and hopefully meet up with us on top, albeit with us all setting off half an hour later than originally planned.

Anyway, here's some of the photos I took - on the top of Oxen Craig first of all:

John looking over at Mither Tap - our next target

Oxen Craig is actually higher than Mither Tap

 Stewart was fed up waiting for us at the top of Mither Tap and it was by sheer chance that I spotted him making his way down as John and I clambered up an off-piste route to the top, but we managed to get the team photo eventually:

We had a chat and some lunch and then bade our farewells, with John and I heading for another small peak on our way back to the car:

We tried to get a selfie from this peak looking back at Mither Tap, but kept blocking it out:

John eventually tried a selfie with his phone:

I then tried the same thing with my camera - just as John was checking out his own photo:

Finally, our stats:

This was our 10th recorded walk of 2018 - and the first one under 10 kms, although it was rated 3rd in climbing stats, with all the hard work at the beginning.