The Mountain Bothies Association are hoping their new media monitor can clarify the confusion over the Slugain bothy plans. Dave Hewitt also reports back on a reader's "mountain experience" on the Cairn Gorm choo-choo and a marathon challenge for an Edinburgh climber.
Some news and feedback this week - feedback first. Summit Talks has been received an official statement from Andy Mayhew, the Mountain Bothies Association's recently appointed media monitor (as opposed to plain old newsletter editor).
Mayhew was of course commenting on the "Slugain saga", discussed here in depth during January and February. By way of a brief reminder, there had been a sudden move to convert the ruined Slugain Lodge north of Braemar into a habitable bothy. This proposal was not without problems, however, the main one being that the Eastern Highlands section of the MBA had already made it very clear that Slugain should not, in their opinion, be developed. It has remained less than clear whether the subsequent administrative cockup was due to simple miscommunication, or a consequence of the central MBA committee trying to outflank and overrule the district organisers. What was certain however was that considerable embarrassment and awkwardness ensued, especially as the Invercauld Estate and various grant-offering bodies were involved.
Clearly there has been a good deal of internal investigation within the upper echelons of the MBA since the saga was effectively resolved in early February by an announcement that Slugain would remain a ruin and that all plans would be dropped. Mayhew's PR-style position is pivotal in all this and what he has to say is of interest not just in terms of Slugain itself but in the event of any future confusion along similar lines.
"The procedures for determining new MBA projects have been in place for several years now," Mayhew writes. "Whilst all new projects require final approval of the management committee, it is at the area meetings that the initial decision is taken. In the case of Slugain it was unfortunately not explained to the management committee that the area meeting had decided not to proceed with the project at present. This error in communication was further compounded by the belief that opposition to the project arose primarily from a desire by certain persons (not necessarily members of the MBA) to protect the "secret howff". Whilst the presence of other shelter in the vicinity is taken into account when deciding whether to proceed with a project it was generally felt that in this case the "secret howff" did not come into this criteria (it is, after all, "secret" and its location is not commonly known)."
The secret howff should briefly be explained (although not described, for fear of being dragged off into the night by chisel-faced Aberdeenshire bothymongers). Somewhere in the Slugain glen, not a huge quantity of kilometres from Slugain itself, a non-MBA bothy is crammed, camouflaged, into a cleft in the hillside. Stories abound of how, decades ago, the timbers for this were spirited past Invercauld House on the darkest of nights and the precise location of the howff has long been kept out of print. The nearest it has come to being actively "outed" is probably via the reminiscent writings of Ian R Mitchell but Mitchell loves the place too much to ever stray into the terrain of precise grid references and turn-left-turn-right directions. In fact Mitchell was one of those most troubled by the prospect of Slugain being bothyfied, knowing that any increase in doss activity in the glen would inevitably mean increased use for and the ultimate demise of, the secret howff.
Mayhew again, "It should also be noted that whilst previous history of use as a bothy is a major plus factor, many projects take place to renovate (or, in some cases, completely rebuild) buildings which have no such previous use. As foot and mouth disease had prevented the MBA from doing much work in 2001, and with the estate supporting the project (ie Invercauld, although they might dispute the word "support"), it is understandable that the management committee was keen to proceed straight away. To this end measures were taken to obtain funding and a full survey of the building was undertaken. However it should be emphasised that the management committee did not knowingly countermand the decision of the area meeting.
"The true extent and nature of opposition then became known and a special area meeting was held in January (at Blair Atholl, on 19 January), where the original decision not to proceed was upheld. The result of the meeting was conveyed to the management committee at the beginning of February and the project officially abandoned."
Mayhew concludes with a wish to avoid such tangles in the future. "Two lessons have been learnt," he writes. "In the absence of a general secretary, steps must be taken to ensure that the minutes of area meetings are made known to the management committee, and when considering future projects greater emphasis should be given towards the likely long-term environmental impact caused by the bothy and its users."
There are a fair few MBA members among the readership of this site, as well as a great many non-MBAers who nonetheless have an interest and an investment in all aspects of "hill management", bothies included. It would be interesting to hear more thoughts and feedback on all this, not just re Slugain itself - which is now close to being a closed issue - but on the wider debates about bothies and other forms of hill-publicity and development.
There has also been more on-the-ground news from the other side of the Cairngorms, from Funicular City in sunny Strathspey. Graham Benny of Glasgow reports on his experiences after he and his friends bought tickets to ride last Saturday, 16 March. "The early weather was not great," he writes, "but there was a promise of an improvement later. Unfortunately I was outvoted and we went sk**ng." The conditions matched his enthusiasm - despite plenty of midweek snow there was "a half gale blowing" by the time Benny's party reached the car park.
The cloud was also down to 950m and they were surprised to find that much of the expected snow had disappeared. "This was nothing," Benny continues, "compared to the notice proclaiming that the funny colour railway would not be able to run for several hours because of snow! Somewhere in the design process the fact that Coire Cas has a very bad reputation for high winds - and that there might occasionally be some snow on the hill - had been forgotten. Snow had blown into the entrance of the tunnel leading to the top station and had drifted to a depth of about 20 feet. It had to be dug out by hand."
Unsurprisingly, the fare-paying punters became a little restless. "In the ticket queue some people in front of me, not unreasonably, asked if the prices would be reduced due to the limited uplift available and the serious lack of skiable snow. No chance! £21 full whack without any trace of embarrassment on the ticket clerk's face."
Benny's party thus reverted to more traditional means of scaling the hill. "We got up to Coire Cas eventually on the tows with some of the tow tracks only just viable. Conditions were grim for the first hour but around 11am the mist lifted by about 500 feet and the sun threatened to break through. We could at least see some texture on the snow compared with the earlier flat light when it was impossible to differentiate between smooth snow, piles of loose stuff, holes or ice. Round about this time the train started running."
At which point the "fun" started again. "We queued for about 20 minutes at the middle station before being crammed into the carriage. Off we went for about 150 metres before we stopped again for the downhill carriage to load/unload. Why the station was not built at the crossover section, about 70 metres further along the track, defeated everyone's logic.
"The gradient changes frequently and with nothing to hang on to there was a good deal of jolting and jostling to contend with. The only thing in its favour was that it was a short journey and the discomfort was minimised. At the top station they did not seem to have realised that people carrying skis and poles have great difficulty negotiating a spring-loaded door. There was a roller door available but this was firmly shut.
"I also noticed some tourists wearing the kind of clothes you would normally wear on a cold day at sea level. They seemed surprised at the conditions outside the station building - presumably they had been warned it would be cold at the top but not that it would be misty and cold with a 30-40mph wind. There are no facilities open at the top yet, so they would have had to either get back on the same train back down in a couple of minutes or endure 15 minutes of "mountain experience" before escaping on the next train. Oh what fun for £7.50!"
So it looks as though the operation is still pretty rickety - and the earlier concerns about ill-equipped and ill-clad "ski spectators" remain very real. For all that there don't seem to have been any major hypothermia incidents as yet, the bottom station must have seen a lot of chilled and unhappy spectators less than enamoured by the hilltop "facilities".
As to the future, Benny notes, "No sign yet of any control methods to prevent the summer spectators from wandering off into oblivion. I wonder just how far a sweetie paper will travel from the top station given a fair breeze...Anyway, on the Sunday we headed back down via the west coast and had a very enjoyable half-day at Aonach Mor in lovely weather most of the time. Could have done with more snow but at least the people there are friendly and helpful. By the way - the "Ben Nevis" weather station (discussed here a time or two after the big late-January gale) is up at about 1150m close by the summit tow track. At least there is a pylon with weather-type instruments on it there but I'm not sure where the telemetry is housed." Finally, one of last week's more notable press releases came courtesy of Jamie Andrew, an Edinburgh-based mountaineer, now aged 32, who hit the headlines for grim reasons in January 1999 when he lost all his hands and feet to frostbite after becoming stranded high on Les Droites in the French Alps. His friend and climbing partner Jamie Fisher died in the same incident.
Andrew has recovered remarkably, retaining and reclaiming much of his energy and enthusiasm in the process. He didn't initially leave hospital for four months but learned to walk again and returned to work. In just over a year he had reached to the top of Ben Nevis (raising £15,000 in the process), while May 2001 saw a return of an altogether harder kind - to an Alpine peak near where the nightmare had occurred.
He has also taken up swimming, skiing, snowboarding, sailing and running since the incident, as well as getting married. And he has now, for better or for worse, decided to attempt this year's London Marathon - running, note, not in one of those Tour de Docklands-style wheelchairs. He'll be collecting money for a couple of charities - the British Red Cross and Just Athletics, a group that provides resources and training for disabled athletes. Donations - or simple messages of support - are of course welcome.
He's contactable by email at jamiemarathon@blueyonder.co.uk, while cheques and pledges (made payable to the Jamie Andrew Charity Account) should be sent to Jamie Andrew Marathon Appeal, PO Box 28240, Edinburgh, EH9 3YN. The London marathon is on Sunday 14 April.
Dave Hewitt
21/3/2002
You can contact Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
