Cairngorms Camping Trip

Chris Low
6 days ago
4 min read

2-4th July 2025

After receiving initial interest from 5 people this gradually waned to 3 stalwarts when the challenge of the route and carrying heavy packs became clear. Probably not too surprising as Chris’ plan was a self-sufficient 3-day trip with 2 nights camping involving 3 munros. So it was Chris, Ken and Bill who set off from Linn of Dee car park on a coolish day with the usual midges and the prospect of showers ahead.

The first strange thing to happen before even setting off was encountering a young guy in the car park who had just had his rucksack stolen from Bob Scott’s bothy that very morning after leaving it unattended for only an hour. Fortunately, he still had his camera and van keys and was about to set off home to Glasgow without his gear. At the time of writing his rucksack had still not turned up – most unusual for the Scottish Highlands.

With tents, camping gear, water and food for 3 days our packs felts very heavy indeed. Bill seemed pleased with himself for having the lightest rucksack but more on that later.

Our first climb was of Derry Cairngorm (1155m) with its many false summits, but the weather stayed dry and the good path made it easy going.

We encountered several other backpacking groups including a Gold Duke of Edinburgh group (from Cumbria) and a group from Brighton with a guide. We decided to push on ahead of the latter group as they had also expressed interest in visiting the Shelter Stone which was our target for the day.

Although quite spacious, inside the Shelter Stone (740m) there is a low sloping roof so it is not possible to stand up straight resulting in a lot of awkward crawling about with headtorches on. However, there is a large flat sleeping area on which a plastic sheet had been left which quite handily fitted the three of us in a row.

Whilst setting up our sleeping mats and bags suddenly…..disaster! It turned out Bill had forgotten his sleeping bag – how could this happen you ask and we thought? Perhaps maybe this had been the cause of his lighter pack! Very stoically Bill decided he would still stay the night as many of us (myself included) would probably have just turned round and walked back out at this point. There is a silver lining to this story…..quite literally, as Bill always carries a small survival bag which when rolled out we saw had a silver lining! He thought that if he wore all his clothes including down jacket inside the thin plastic bag then he would hopefully be warm enough overnight to sleep at least a few hours.

This wasn’t the end of Bill’s woes though. Since arriving at the Shelter Stone the rain had started and became pretty heavy including hailstones at times. We were well sheltered from it all inside the er... Shelter Stone though…or so we thought.

After a short while we started to hear a constant drip, drip, drip and shining our headtorches in the corner we saw that there was water running down the rocks at the far end of the shelter. As the rain continued the drips got stronger and started splashing the person’s kit who was nearest at the end of the line of 3, which just happened to be poor old Bill. Not a good position to be spending the night in, so Bill decided to move himself to nearer the entrance way and well away from all the water coming in forming a very muddy patch. This seemed to work well but resulted in even more clambering about for Chris and Ken as we inevitably needed to exit the shelter during the night.

In the morning Bill said he had had a good night and wasn’t too cold (I was… in my sleeping bag!). Despite this he decided not to spend another night out without a sleeping bag so he headed off directly back to his car at Linn of Dee car park via the Hutchison hut.

Chris and Ken set of for Ben Macdui (1309m) by ascending from the west end of Loch Avon up the north-westerly steep slope where very handily stone steps have been constructed. Once up on the plateau it was a fairly easy climb to the summit, however visibility was very low in the cloud so the line of cairns was very useful for navigation purposes.

It was a bit tricky finding the best way down in the cloud and across the boulder fields, but the wonderful Carn a Mhaim ridge soon became clear as we dropped down out of the cloud to get great views of the Devils Point, Angel’s Peak and the Lairig Ghru below us.

There are many false summits on the way but it’s well worth it for the 360 degree views from the summit of Carn a Mhaim (1037m) when eventually reached.

Our 2^nd camp was by the Luibeg Burn where we pitched in a small clearing in the trees very close to the burn.

A much warmer night was spent in the relative comfort of a tent when compared with the Shelter Stone. The next morning Ken and Chris completed the short 8 km walk out to Linn of Dee car park with considerably lighter packs due to the consumption of the food rations.

For those interested here is the route plan which covered a Total distance of 39 km and total ascent of 1900 metres over the 3 days. A small detour was made off the summit of Ben Macdui to try and find a memorial to aircrew who were killed in a plane crash. We had thought that this memorial was for the 2 American pilots who died in the double F-15C Eagle crash in March 2001. However, we later found out that the memorial is in fact for 5 aircrew from an Avro Anson plane that crashed in 1942. Unfortunately, we never found the memorial anyway as visibility was so poor and after searching around for a while we became keen to get lower down out of the windy and cold conditions. Something to return for in future.