Cairngorms

Yesterday I went up to the Braemar area for a run around the foot of the Southern Cairgorms, an area I know very well, but where I had not been for a while.

I parked at Invereye and ran down past Mar Lodge following the Dee on its north bank for a few miles then head north towards the Sluggan. I can see that the snow is lying to quite a low level, uncharacteristically for this late in April, but I don't plan to go too high. However as I approach the Sluggan I see that on leeward slopes the snow is lying and is a couple of feet deep.















Looking back down the Sluggan.

As I crest the top I see that there is way more snow than I anticipated - this is going to be slow torturous going ! I wade through the snow taking an hour to cover the next 2.5 miles, running's impossible until I'm well down the glen. I'm able to get running through the Clais Fhearnaig then stopped in at Bob Scott's bothy for a quick lunch before heading on to Luibeg.












Climbing up from Luibeg I once again enter the snow which slows me down again. I had planned to turn south and head for White Bridge but the laces on my Salomon trail shoes snapped, if anyone has experienced this they will know what I’m talking about. The lacing system is not straight forward and when not broken works well, but is a nightmare when it breaks.

To cap it off the blue skies disappear and it starts to snow – heavily, so I decide to head for Corrour Bothy to fix the shoe and eat my 2^nd lunch. On my arrival there were 11 people sheltering within but I managed to squeeze into a corner fix the broken shoe and cut the lace on the good shoe and fix that too before it breaks somewhere less convenient.














The path down to White Bridge is a real trackle once I’m out of the snow and my feet have thawed, I have to walk though 5 miles of mud, but I eventually get onto the track and run back to the car through the Linn o’ Dee.

I covered around 31 miles in 7hrs 30 mins, pretty slow, but I take comfort that over 10 of these miles were through snow and mud and slowed me down considerably. This has been a good run and I my legs don’t feel too bad which gives me a bit of confidence for the Highland Fling in a couple of weeks.