Cairngorms resident David Lintern gets the chills when winter comes around. Here he shares a selection of a decade of images from Britain’s largest (and coldest) National Park
WINTER CAN MAKE YOU STRANGE; it can change your priorities. You may find yourself creeping out of the house whilst others sleep, a pre-dawn, blue-gold glow low on the horizon, a deep and sticky frost adorning everything. An aching cold may creep in via exposed fingers and the moisture on the inside of your nose start to prickle as you fight to prise open a frozen car door. You may find yourself arriving home many hours later, when all are tucked up in bed again, waddling around on clumsy ankles that ache not from the cold but from walking in crampons all day.
Before: your winter may begin in autumn – extra running, cycling and swimming to build fitness for the coming challenges. During: you may find yourself obsessing on conditions and weather reports, poring over guidebooks and online forums, and there is such a wealth of resource that this may take many fevered hours, and even become a source of paralysis, an excuse not to go instead of a reason to. And after: you may spend more time daydreaming about the days you missed, days you saw others enjoy – ultra-rare, bluebird days of alpine high pressure sitting over a white desert draped in crunchy, grippy névé, days that are generally only countable on the fingers of two hands each year, but whose experiences are so rich that they are extended in the remembering to become timeless.
ABLUEBIRD BYNACK MORE
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Late in the season, the weather is often more stable. This was my second attempt at reaching the summit of Bynack More, and a bluebird Easter bank holiday with crisp, crunchy snow blanketing the boulder-strewn ridge all the way up. Despite perfect conditions on the mountain itself, the walk out via Strath Nethy was treacherous and exhausting, with softer snow covering foot-snagging heather and bog. Scottish winter is never simple!
HALF MOON O’ THE BACK OF MACDUI
[LEFT]
March, deep in the heart of the range, and a beautifully benign night overlooking the back of Ben Macdui, camped on the upper slopes of Beinn Mheadhoin (middle hill). A deep and penetrating silence abides. In our otherwise noisy and chaotic world, just that, in and of itself, is a genuinely awesome thing to be in the presence of.
NARNIA COMES TO KINGUSSIE
[ABOVE]
There’s the first snow on the hill – and then there’s the first snow to glen level! If I don’t catch the former, I always try to make it out quickly for the latter, especially if there’s no wind and the branches have kept their cover of white. This is a view of the Inshriach hills (on the western side of the Mhoine Mhor) from a little path above Kingussie that I know intimately,
