The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Sunday 22 May 2016

Creag Ghiubhais (NO313955; 486m)

Saturday 21 May

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With a need to try to find somewhere selling LPG (Autogas) on my way to take up my seat at TGO Challenge Control, I didn’t have an awful lot of time for a hill on Saturday morning but, rather conveniently, there’s a very little hill not too far away from Ballater.

Initially I was on a nice track through woodland – the same track as Mick and I had used on the TGO Challenge a few years ago when we walked around the back of this hill. It hadn’t occurred to me to go over the top of it back then.

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nice track through nice woodland

Then, after a bit of a yomp through heather (should have turned to face the hill when I was still in the woodland; I came down that way and it was much better going), I made my way towards the rock fields, thinking it would be easier walking up the rocks than through deep heather (these rocks were more car battery sized than car sized, so not really boulder fields). As it turned out, the shoes I’d chosen for this outing (boots, due to a need to re-tape the heels of my usual Terrocs) didn’t create any friction at all on those wet rocks (wet because it was raining quite convincingly on me for this one); it was a bit of a precarious ascent.

A bit more yomping through bilberry and heather got me to a cairn, where there was no more up to be seen…

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…so I went down, after taking the obligatory summit selfie:

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I chose a better line on the way down, largely avoiding the slippery rocks, completing this little outing having covered 1.3 miles with 600 feet of ascent.

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