Hi first post!
We started in the Spital of Glenmuick car park - me and a guy called Paul driving to Braemar from Aberdeen that morning, Taff and Floyd the two guys we were meeting up with staying at the bunkhouse at the Braemar Lodge overnight after ferrying it across from Northern Ireland the day before.
The day unfortunately had started dull with a fair amount of low level cloud which was a real shame as there had been high pressure and blue skies all week until Saturday morning. Nevertheless we started off from the car park, taking the landrover track past the vistor centre and up through the woodland towards the fords past Alt-na-giubhasaich, picking up the path next to Old Shielings.
As we gained height, it started to rain and it was getting windier too. Rising higher, past the Ptarmigan Butts and passing the Fox Cairn memorial stone, it started snowing fairly heavily and the ground was becoming a mix of snow and ice. Just after the memorial it started to turn into a pretty steep scramble up a boulder field, adjacent to the Corrie of Lochnagar - easyish in normal conditions, but the wind and snow, as well as the icy conditions made this a little hairy at times. Floyd runs for his battalion and was fair flying up ahead of Paul, Taff and me - fairly frequent stops for getting breath back, but keen to press on to stop chilling down to much.
We reached the Lochnagar plateaux fairly quickly but then realised pretty much instantly that we weren't going to see much of the cliff face itself - or the views of the whole area that you'd normally enjoy. The Loch sitting at the bottom of the cliffs itself was invisible - the conditions were pretty bad - the wind was ferocious as soon as we reached the other side of the corrie, and it was a near white out due to low cloud - plenty of pockets of deep snow and ice - a few lethal snow cornices at the edge of the face too - it looked like the kind of place you'd die in to be honest.
We got a bit lost at this stage - having Taff's GPS along with the map was invaluable - but it did take us ten minutes of standing around getting very cold (windchill was probably -10 at this stage easily - the wind gusting a steady 40-50 mph) before we picked up the path, contouring the edge of the the cliff and headed towards the summit - Cac Carn Beag, passing the cairn at Cac Carn Mor on the way.
Another out of breath scramble and we were there - 1155 metres - Cac Carn Beag - Lochnagar - my first Munro! Photos, video etc. ensued - Taff hoisting the Welsh flag and the rest of us realising that it was probably the first time a Jamaican chef from Northern Ireland had climbed Lochnagar!
We stayed for ten minutes or so at the trig point but it was starting to get [censored] freezing cold, so we messed about getting our bearings again before finally picking up the path that took us back down via Falls of the Glasalt - we had planned on contouring around and doing the scramble up The Stuic to get to the other Munro - Carn a' Choire Bhoidheach, but as we couldn't even see it, and it was bound to be quite icy we decided to give it a miss.
So a slippy slidy falling on our [censored] descent down the line of the falls before coming out onto the most beautiful view of Loch Muick, turning back on ourselves slightly to actually get into and under the falls - spectacular!
After that a long weary trudge along the banks of Loch Muick - about 2.30 pm by now and starting to get chilly - 4.30 saw us back at the visitor centre then the car park but not before seeing the totally awesome sight of a stag and three deer up on a ridge, silhouetted in front of a huge (almost) full Winter moon - what I would have given for a decent camera and long range lens! Beautiful!
Brilliant but hard day - 21Kms in total - 6.5 hours moving time. 8-)