After my first Munro on Wednesday with Fraser @MM0EFI on the unpronounceable Carn a’Gheoidh GM/CS-030, I was full of the joys of SOTA. I booked another trip with the tenacious Radio Rover to Carn a’Mhaim GM/ES-013 & Ben Macdui GM/ES-001. Probably just on the edge of “I’ve bitten off more than I can chew”, we set off via MTB from Linn of Dee to about as far as is reasonably practical to cycle when all your cycling experience is racing on roads! Only one off, although reasonably spectacular, I was happy to get off the bike.
It’s a steep climb onto Carn a’Mhaim but we arrived at the summit just after schedule.
Fraser quickly set up the mast with the Slim-G, and after a shakey start, we both made 5x QSOs on 2m, which saved me the faff of putting up the inverted dipole for HF. It was getting cold already which didn’t bode well for Ben Macdui.
Getting to the start of Ben Macdui’s climb meant walking down the ridge to the col, looking up at the monster of Macdui, which was now in the cloud.
The most challenging part of the day for me was looming on the misty horizon. Having already snapped a repaired walking pole, we hit the most extended, steepest boulder field I had ever been on. There are no pictures here, and I couldn’t do anything other than try to keep myself from becoming a casualty while I watched Mountain Goat Fraser bound up the rocks like a cat!
Once on the plateau, we were in pretty much winter conditions, with the temperature considerably below freezing and a good amount of snow.
The obligatory trig point photo was taken (there was no view for us today). Fraser quickly set up for the 145 Alive net while I managed to get the mast up with an inverted V dipole for HF in the lee of the trig point cairn.
After spotting on 40m, I quickly got 8 UK QSOs. Once I had some feeling back in my fingers (thank goodness for Costco Hotties), I reconfigured to 20m and managed 5 European contacts, including a very weak Greek S2S—thank you, Stavros @SV2RUJ/P.
Fraser was still very busy on the 2m net so I packed up and joined him behind his shelter cairn. We were on the summit for some time before the net traffic dissipated by 1445 BST. Time to descend.
We were routing via the Sron Riach ridge. In the cloud, you can see how easy it is to become disorientated but we soon broke into better visibility and joined the steep path back towards Luibeg and the bikes.
Once into the glen, the last few kilometres are reasonably flat, with a mixture of gravel, rocks, bog, and slime.
Finally, back to the bikes for an uneventful ride back to Fraser’s Landy.
It was a challenging but fantastic day—big thanks to Fraser for guiding me to two summits in less-than-ideal conditions. Feeling slightly broken, we totalled 20 miles and 4,500ft of climbing. Where next…? Somewhere without river crossings, please, Fraser - you can guess what happened next.
for effort.
It looks like the wx was on your side throughout the hike, nice images 
thanks for sharing this great outing with us.
