"Biking" Off More Than We Can Chew: September 13th - 20th, 2023
We turned around from the climb on Lochnagar quickly and repacked the bags for a bikepacking loop without the climbing gear. We are starting to get tired of the constant packing and unpacking at this point in our trip but this packing was a unique puzzle to repack as we figured out how to slim down our load, what can we leave behind and what do we need and what can fit in the bags we decided to limit ourselves to. Thankfully, the hostel was fine with us leaving piles of stuff in their carport which is just one of the many reasons we love Ballater Hostel. Once we got the items figured out we rolled away from Ballater to start our 5 day bikepacking loop of the Cairngorms. We felt still heavy, but comparatively light and free! Who knew getting rid of a rope and a pile of metal could feel so good!
The GPS track we were blindly following took us off the road pretty quickly. We were riding through what looked like farm fields and people's yards but right to roam, I guess? Also we hit some stairs and bridges early on that maybe should have warned us that this wouldn't be no bike in the park. We continued on and off pavement and by royal residences before getting onto some gravel for good, cutting across an area that looked like a whole lot of nothing on the map.
A pair of mountain bikers riding the opposite way warned us "The trail is riding great right now, but it gets technical and corkscrewy, you'll hate it with the heavy bikes" Hahaha you don't know the half of it! (cause half the weight was left behind.) We don't get scared and continue on. We pass some shepherds moving sheep from one pasture to another and stop to enjoy a new treat - a Scotch Egg! The Scots had figured out how to wrap a hard-boiled egg in a breaded pork cutlet - mind blown. How can you get a more perfect bike food?? We were hopeful the way would get easier but the "road" we were on was a lot of big and loose rocks so we had to keep getting off to push the bikes and calculate riding through surprise stream crossings or just getting off and accepting our feet would be wet. Ben of course tried to keep his feet dry and I had long given up and just pushed through the water (which was usually faster anyway). We kept struggling through beautiful land. We scared some sheep off the road along the way and a got to hear some impressive shepherd/sheepdog communication as he got his dogs to bring the sheep back to the road.
And then we hit the single track. Time to push a bike. We double check the map...and prepare to push for a couple kilometers. This was more than we bargained for, thank god we had less weight on the bikes. We made it through the single track and made a surprise, LEGIT river crossing and took a snack break. I noticed my hat, which I had bungeed to the bike, had jostled it's way off at some point...I wasn't going to go back to look for it. Goodbye forever hat! There's no sun to keep out of your eyes in the UK anyway.
Soon after the river crossing we finally hit some smoother gravel, that eventually transitioned into pavement, and we gleefully sailed downhill. We had to pass through what looked like some gates and a ranch compound and appreciated the fact that "trespassing" isn't so much a thing in Scotland. But being on the other side of that meant we were definitely clear to camp, so we called it far enough for the day and made camp beside a river outside of Tomintoul. OK day 1 of 5 was hard.
The second morning as we had breakfast we watched herds of mountain bikers (maybe 30??) headed towards what we had done the day before. Maybe a hint that we were underbiking (a new term we learned that meant taking a bike and seeing how it does on trails that are way too technical for what the bike's designed for; the extreme example would be taking a Walmart huffy up a ski chair lift in the summer and seeing if it was still in one piece at the bottom). We rode the nice pavement to the cute little town of Tomintoul where we checked out a cafe (of course!), their information center (where I bought some earrings and we talked to a cool bikepacker from Virginia with a foldable bike who almost lost her tent in a storm the previous night and reported more sections of hike-a-bike in our future), and the Whiskey Castle tasting room where a very kind Scotsman took us through some various types of whiskey letting us try enough whiskey to get me tipsy for free even though he knew we were only going to get a little shooter as that is all we were willing to haul. This part of Scotland is especially famous for a few kinds of whiskey so what better excuse for a wee bit of day-drinking? Finally, we continued on that day preparing for a rather large hill. I, being a little tipsy, was less concerned than Ben was.
We rode on the highway (the "Snow Roads" scenic route) for a while but still had to push due to steep hills and some zippy boy commented on how much weight we were carrying. "Yeah yeah yeah, will you take one of our bags?". We finally got to go downhill (on the pavement, woohoo!), before following our good ol' GPS track off the road and onto the Speyside Way cycle route. It was a lot like the Deeside Way, but flatter, and the singletrack-ish sections were a lot more enjoyable carrying just a fraction of the weight.
We stopped in Aviemore, the biggest town around Cairngorm National Park (described by one Scot as kind of like a Colorado ski resort town) for groceries, but it was a shockingly stressful town to bike through so we hightailed it out of there quick! The gravel paths out of town gave us really nice views of the Cairngorm range looming in the distance. Although it doesn't really feel right to call it "gravel", since the paths were wide, smooth, even, flat, and gentle. What does "gravel biking" even mean?? Eventually we stumbled on another good campsite with a picnic table outside of Feshiebridge, already feeling chilled from all the humidity in the air that we knew would have our tent and bikes soaked with dew by morning.
The third day we started by taking a tour of the Frank Bruce sculpture garden. It was an interesting outdoor gallery as the artist did a lot of work in Scottish pine wood and he didn't want the work to be preserved. He wanted it to rot and be temporary, because that's how wood works. So a lot of the work had fallen over and was starting to rot away. Very interesting in the context of some of the other art galleries we had been to which spent a lot of time explaining the work that goes into preserving specific paintings.
We got started on our ride and went through Kingussie and checked out an old fort (Ruthven Barracks). We got to listen in on a tour guide in full kilt regalia do some readings from a book we should probably read probably about the Jacobite rebellion as 80% of everything in Scotland is about the Jacobites. It is interesting what history gets romanticized and preserved. We stopped for food and of course coffee in Kingussie and then hopped on a bike path that was nestled between the interstate on our left and train tracks on our right. Not the quietest section of bike path we had been on, but we were happy it existed as it allowed us to not be riding on the side of the interstate and it allowed us to skip another steep technical single track mountain biking section that would have seen us pushing our bikes for a few kilometers again (thank you, Virginian bike-packer, for the warning!). I think the fort referenced a military leader losing some of his troops on that path as it was too steep and he didn't understand what happens to carts and horses at a certain steepness in the mountains. Also sometimes there's snow up there.
We were pretty worried about finding a campsite, because towards the end of the day there were fences or houses (or interstate) on both sides of us for a while, but we ended up finding a fairly good one with a spring where the fence disappeared. As we worked on setting up camp rain spattered off and on. We got a half-decent break to cook and eat, but the world was soggy so we couldn't avoid getting wet. Laying in the tent, sore and tired and damp, we did a little reflecting and realized that out of the last 90-ish days, on about 84 of them we'd either 1) Gone to bed outside, 2) Woken up outside, or 3) Spent at least 4 hours outside - we were tired, it was autumn in the UK, and we made a pact to ourselves to take more inside time without fussing (too much) over the price.
Our night there was pretty decent, though in the morning the midges were really bad so I, being the wonderful wife that I am, abandoned Ben to them as soon as I was ready to go (it's not my fault he's so slow in the mornings). The fourth day started with some cool road biking along a very cool mountain stream. We biked until Blair Atholl where we got some really good pastries and coffee from the mill cafe. We did not go into Blair castle as we felt we needed to get moving as we had a long way to go that day. We rode by some very classy stores that we could never afford and got the chance to make a last stop in Pitlochry for groceries and snacks before heading up to the mountain pass we knew was waiting for us.
But first, even though it was a lot of uphill or rolling terrain, the road riding was beautiful. I think if you asked some AI system "Make me a picture of a totally idyllic Scottish countryside with small cottages, farms, and loads of sheep pastures, shining bright green under a clear sky", it might have got close to that part of the ride. Eventually, we turned our bikes onto a gravel road towards the mountains. Up up up the road we went, through a bunch of gates, as the gravel road got narrower and lousier and then finally became a single track. We knew this was going to be a hike a bike day and we knew it was going to be silly, but we were able to ride a surprising amount of it! There was a nice bothy (free shelter for travelers because Scotland is amazing) right before the steepest portion.
We started up the switchbacks in pretty high spirits. I divided the task up into 10ish bitesized pieces and away we slogged. It was a beautiful slog and we made it to the top without too much trouble, just a lot of panting. Being mentally prepared really helps.
At the top we laughed as we would need to push (pull?) the bikes down as well as that was too steep for us! So down we bounced keeping the brakes engaged as we walked alongside our bikes down the hill until we got to a point where we didn't think we would die if we got on our bikes. We rode down the last bit, squeezing the brakes for dear life, (we now understand why hydraulic brakes exist on some bikes) and finally made it to the stone circle at the Spittal of Glenshee. There I discovered that my tool bag which had been attached to a metal bar on the back of my bike rack had disappeared. Somewhere in the jostling the metal had completely sheared off. I had an evil eye bracelet that my students had given me on that bag...so I think that counts as having broken and it saved me from a worse fate than losing my bike tool bag. I definitely wasn't going back up that pass to look for it. Goodbye forever, tool bag!
We rode a little further down the highway until we got to a gate in a fence that let us into a pasture and a really nice camping spot next to a river. (Again Scotland is amazing and landowners are required to build gates in their fences so people can access land and use it responsibly.)
The final day of our loop started with a big hill, but it was on a road so a titch easier than the day before we were hoping. We slog up the thing. I had to stop and push a little bit, I think Ben made it without pushing. Those Snowroad routes were STEEP. At the top was a chair lift for a ski resort that also operates in the summer to take people up the hill for the views. We didn't need that, but we were grateful there were bathrooms open to anyone. Then we got to go downhill! All that up and we finally got to go WEE WEE WEE all the way down! We stopped in Braemar for some coffee and warmth and time out of the rain. We had been planning to stop at Braemar castle but alas it was closed. I guess we should have stopped at Blair Castle. Oh well. We took some pictures of the outside and rode on. At this point we could have just taken the road to Ballater and be done...but it was the last day so why not keep enjoying the underbiking?
We roll our bikes onto some hiking trails and then onto some roads used by posh folks to go stalking (deer hunting but in jeeps that are overpowered for the quality of the roads and someone else does all the work and I think it is just to show off your wealth and pretend you are helping to keep the deer population under control). We stopped in a lean-to shelter as some rain came in again (random countryside shelters are the best!) and ate a lot of snacks. And it was at this point we wished we could have just hopped back onto the road, but we had made our decisions so now we were on less than stellar gravel and dirt in cold rain and a lot of up and down that just kept going. I was exhausted but the only thing to do was keep going. At one point a deer gate not designed for bikers gave us one last hard puzzle to get through, just to make sure our brains still worked I guess. But we managed it, thankfully. Eventually, we got back on the road outside of Ballater and rolled into the hostel.
Hurray! Let's never underbike again! We crashed and slept and realized we needed to figure out what we were doing next. But first FOOD and SLEEP!
Our planning revealed that we had messed up and would be hitting Edinburgh on a weekend which we learned is bad because according to another guest ever since budget airlines made it cheap to do weekend trips to major cities the lodging prices have gone crazy. Curse you unintended consequences of RyanAir! Our desire to camp less as we were tired of being wet all the time...was looking like an expensive plan.
After 2 days of rest (quite crazy for us) we finally said goodbye to Ballater Hostel and moved to camp one more night at Ballater Pass for a little bit more climbing there. That climbing was nice and uneventful and we got to chat with a group out there training to lead small trips for their university. Ben climbed something a little tough and nothing happened that made him want to quit climbing forever.
Sleeping in the tent was fine, but we couldn't help but wistfully think about how comfy the hostel had been. We will miss you Ballater Hostel! Thank you for making a great base camp for our Scotland adventures!
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