Great Scot!: September 8th - 12th, 2023
Waking up in Aberdeen we enjoyed the hotel breakfast for the second time (since that was our dinner), re-organized all our bags after the flight, and got on the bikes probably a little late, as if it was just another day with nothing new. Of course a lot of things *were* different; the culture shock started right away as we had to continually remind ourselves to ride on the left side of the road, adding extra confusion as we tried to interpret intermittent bike lanes and signs directing us on and off the sidewalk. We had a bunch of errands to do and supplies to get in order to be properly situated in a new country (it's hard to cook on the far end when you can't fly with stove gas or a lighter, and Norwegian climbing guidebooks aren't much help in Scotland). Any sense of "same-old same-old" definitely shattered when we arrived at the Asda (supermarket) and had to dodge waves of uniformed adolescents rolling through the snack and take-away sections, since a nearby school had just broken for lunch.
Enough time had passed for us to forget the hectic experience of riding the fully loaded bikes around Trondheim, the biggest city we visited in Norway, so the fact that we jumped right into an even bigger city caused some heartburn. Traffic bustled, the pedestrian signals to cross roads seemed to be only for show, and the city had a three-dimensional aspect that saw us riding around in circles trying to figure out if we needed to be on the street above us or the sidewalk below us. At least in Norway, even in the city, the drivers had a respect for pedestrians and cyclists that bordered on overly-polite. In the UK the motorists must always have the right-of-way (and the moral high ground) because they won't even yield for a mom pushing a stroller, carrying groceries, perched on a two-foot strip of cement while cars whiz on either side.
Also, for the first time, someone warned us about leaving our bikes unattended (even though they were locked), since the homeless people might decide some of our equipment looks nice enough to steal. Yep, we’d left Norway, alright.
As if the craziness of trying to get our wheels under us wasn't enough, the bolt on Susan's front rack, still shiny from the repair in Trondheim, snapped AGAIN while we floundered around (going off-and-on curbs constantly didn't help). So on top of everything else we needed to find a bike mechanic who'd be willing to take a look at Susan's carbon fork; of course the first one was a bust, a teenager who barely understood what Susan was asking but also didn't know to just say "Sorry, can't help you" - Susan managed to escape without him maiming her bike.
The good news was that Aberdeen sports a lot of bike shops, and we found a promising one on the way out of town (conveniently co-located with a cafe!). That meant we had to find our way out of town, though, which ended up being more misadventure... We knew of a bike route, the "Deeside Way", that would theoretically lead us out from the city, into the countryside, and to our next stop of Ballater, a small town adjacent to Cairngorms National Park. We hadn't mapped it out precisely, but knew that generally it followed the River Dee (go figure) up to the mountains. So we got on a bike path in Aberdeen near the river, and figured we could just roll on along. As the bike path slowly diverged from the river, in all our wisdom we thought we better not get too far away, and tried to cut back to some imagined trail by the riverbanks... but really ended up on some ratty single track fighting through weeds in the beating sun. Retreat! We backtracked to the road and I made a comment along the lines of feeling like a large, ungainly animal trying to escape the big city.
Once we got onto the *actual* Deeside Way, we cruised along nicely for a bit, enjoying the flat asphalt, occasional smooth gravel, and abundant shade under leafy maple and oak trees. But one more trial lay in wait - I continued showing off my intelligence by trying to take photos of Susan while riding, then promptly swerved wrong and ran into a bench. Popping my rear fender back into place was easy enough, but then I realized one of my rear panniers had its clips for the bike rack totally shorn off. Panic briefly set in, since now Susan couldn't carry one of her front bags and I couldn't carry one of my back bags, but we regrouped and Voile-strapped my rear pannier back on (Voiles count as essential safety equipment).
That let us limp along to the bike shop, and the guys at Skyline Cycles in Cults (who looked like they enjoyed a challenge) got right to work on Susan's fork. While they appreciated the idea behind the fix from the Trondheim mechanic, they "re-did it right" and beefed it up with a much thicker bolt while we enjoyed milkshakes from the adjacent coffee shop. One of the mechs even gave us a great tip on a fine place to camp not too far down the trail. As we rolled out, a few last bits of single track along the edges of farms made us a little uneasy about this “Deeside Way” route, but we suppressed those doubts, found the Gleeb Park, and happily set up our tent and cooked up dinner on the stove. It had been a long, long, long day getting out of Aberdeen, but we were there with the tent, a hot dinner, able to carry all our bags, and looking forward to spending more time on country roads, trails, and away from heavy city traffic.
Morning had another surprise though - THE DEW. The day before was warm enough to trap a lot of moisture in the air, but the clear, cool night spat it right back out and we awoke to find our bags, shoes, bikes, and the inside of the tent even wetter than if it had just rained. Luckily by 9 AM the sun blazed in a clear sky and everything dried by the time we started out. Pretty quickly we got to a Morrison's in Banchory and played the "figure out a foreign grocery store game"! A really nice Scottish guy with Oakleys, long-but-balding grey hair, and skin that looked impossibly tan for Scotland, out on a bike tour of his own, chatted with us about the conditions and generally what to expect in Scotland. He also gave us some really good recommendations on calorie-dense grocery store snacks to fuel up on, like Scotch Pies. They really like to stick things in pies, but that's perfect for us - portable and in a flaky pastry wrapper!
Quickly, though, we started cursing that really nice sun and beautiful blue sky, as right out of Banchory we hit the big hill of the day. Not a huge hill, but the road up was a mix of gravel and dirt with big, chunky rocks on top. And with gravel roads the designers worry a lot less about how steep they get - straight up is just fine. Add all that together with 110 - 120 pound bikes and you get a lot of pushing, cursing, and doubt about your life choices ("Isn't this exactly the kind of thing we said we *shouldn't* do with the fully loaded bikes?"). During the way down, disc brakes and forearms burning, we understood why people love those hydraulic brake systems.
At the bottom of the hill, thinking we were through the worst, we were further demoralized to find bits of single track, barely appropriate for our bikes even without any weight, that squiggled steeply up, over, and down another ridge. Finally getting back to the highway brought a sweet wave of relief, as at the time getting hit by a car sounded like less suffering than doing more gravel and trail riding. We cruised into Aboyne and did a lot of wondering as to whether we'd actually finish the last 10 miles to Ballater Pass. Also a lot of remarking on how we didn't think a "national cycle route" would be something suited for a mountain bike - just a part of our Scottish education, I guess.
Out of Aboyne was a bit easier at first, and we were reassured by a group of ladies who swore the riding smoothed out (although they were on unladed mountain bikes...). Still a mix of road, gravel, and singletrack, but flat at least. Sometimes a picturesque, archetypal scene of riding through tunnels of greenery in the countryside, and sometimes a massive downed tree that we had to gingerly scoot our bikes beneath. And no matter what, a lot of "wiggle gates" - two staggered arms in the trail that force you to do a tight maneuver between them. Maybe not much of a problem for normal bikes, but constantly losing and re-gaining your momentum with about 85 pounds of baggage gets old fast.
We finally rattled down the last bit of gravel on the Deeside Way and made it to Ballater Pass, where we hemmed and hawed about where to set up the tent. Like Norway, Scotland has the "right to roam" (or more accurately but less sexily "the right to responsible access"), so theoretically we could pitch the tent nearly anywhere we liked, but on your third night in a country you usually don't want to push your luck. Thankfully, Susan checked a little farther down the road and found the super-obvious climbing area we'd been looking for, along with a few super-obvious camping spots, so we settled in there and to my dismay I discovered my bike lock (with bike light attached) had shaken loose during some part of our turbulent ride.
We were beat. The first couple days in Scotland had seen Susan's front rack break (again), me break one of my bags, and now I'd lost the lock and the light. The gravel and dirt left us sore in ways the last 3 months hadn’t. While dinner cooked and the sun went down we could feel the humidity condensing onto ourselves and every nearby object and I knew it would be a soggy morning. The midges were mild by Scottish standards but they still bit my face. Yet I couldn't go to bed too cranky since some hikers leaving the parking lot gave us a couple warm Budweisers and it did take the edge off the day.
The last two days had felt like 5, but surely a little climbing on Sunday would be relaxing, right? We slept in some and had to go into the town of Ballater for groceries, so the climbing didn't actually happen until the afternoon, when the sunny day had finally burned the last of the dew off our tent. Being in the UK meant getting familiar with another new climbing grade scheme, and of course the Brits came up with an especially complicated two-part system, so we started on something nice and easy (actually, I believe it was "very difficult" or "severe", but not the "very severe" variation). All the same, 10 feet off the ground my legs started to shake and I was plugging gear every few feet.
Towards the top I stuck in the #5 cam (a really big one), and could tell right away the spot wasn't great. A different spot a foot higher looked better, but the #5 stuck firmly when I tried to get it out to move it. I'd jammed it into way too small of a crack and the lobes wouldn't pull back even a millimeter. Flustered, I finished the climb and then on the way down tried again to loose it. Frustrated in the hot sun, not really thinking, my approach was "just pull on it harder", and after about 15 minutes I snapped the plastic trigger (a really important bit that lets you pull back the cam lobes). I snapped, too, and quietly asked Susan to let me all the way down, thinking of how I needed to just give up on climbing forever, sell the trad gear to pay for a flight home, and probably get rid of that nice bracelet I'd picked up in Norway. Downcast and dejected, I put Susan on belay and told her I was done for the day.
Susan, who managed not catastrophize everything despite also being kind of exhausted, did the climb and rescued the cam in maybe 10 minutes. I sheepishly thanked my hero and decided maybe I could climb a little more. We managed to do a couple more routes, and the rain politely held off until we had our gear packed up. Susan even came up with a great way to fix the broken cam! I guess life wasn't all that bad.
Our first few days in Scotland had been at the tail end of a heat wave, and no fewer than 4 different people told us the weather would break soon. Well that night it did, as the light showers from the early evening morphed into steady torrents that awoke us several times overnight. Sporadic drizzles continued during the grey morning; most of our stuff was damp or wet, the tent totally soaked as we packed it up. We decided we really needed some time to take it easy, dry out, and sleep in a proper bed, and luckily Ballater had a hostel. We killed time in town until check-in, hanging out and hanging our stuff out to dry in a park, looking probably too grungy for the place the Royal Family takes their summer vacations.
The hostel was more expensive than we expected, check-in wasn't til 5, and we'd gone with beds in an 8-person dorm to be thrifty, so we were a little nervous it wouldn't be a good fit for our run-down state. Turns out, though, Ballater Hostel is probably the nicest hostel in the whole UK! You can tell it's a labor of love; the hosts have thought of the smallest details to make every space comfortable, the whole thing was in excellent repair and squeaky clean, the kitchen commercial-grade and well-stocked, and there was a DRYING ROOM with a dehumidifier, clothes racks, and a space heater! What a wonderful space - our first hostel in the UK thoroughly spoiled us and set the bar way too high for every other lodging (sneak peak - a lot of them were lousy by comparison!).
Taking that rest day and having such nice digs set us up for a big-ish objective on Tuesday - the Eagle Ridge route on the mountain Lochnagar. Located in the southern Cairngorms (technically White Mounth), it promised 250 meters of moderate ("very difficult" to "hard severe" - gotta love those British grades) climbing and scrambling over mostly solid and well-protected granite to nearly the summit of a Munro (a Scottish peak with an elevation of more than 3000 feet). Of course, everything is more of a production on the bicycles, so at 6 AM we headed out into a chilly morning, heavy bags on our backs, to bike the 10 miles and 1000 feet of elevation gain to the trailhead.
The approach hike, though, was brilliant; after floundering around on Norwegian trails, the paths here felt like highways! Well constructed, well engineered, solid underfoot; forget Sherpas, Norway just needs to look across the sea and bring in some Scots to do their dirty work. As we got closer and the impressive cirque beneath Lochnagar came into view, we laughed about the few people who'd said things like "Scotland doesn't have real mountains" - it sure looked like a big ol' peak to us! After our experience on Romsdalshornet I took a chance to preemptively don my wool leggings; we knew climbing a high Scottish peak on a cloudy, mid-September day was going to be a chilly affair. Or I knew, anyway - Susan hadn't brought her own leggings. But she's a little tougher than me so it was OK.
The climbing was unsure at first. A nice corner led into an awkward and kind-of-loose chimney situation, and as I belayed up Susan a few drops of rain fell from the gray clouds that swirled above. Occasionally the breeze would bend our way and send a chill up my jacket sleeves. It never straight-up rained, though, and the forecast was generally good, so we donned our puffy coats and committed to the climb, knowing that from this point forward bailing would be much more complicated.
But the first pitch seemed to get all the bad bits out of the way, and the rest of the climbing went by quickly and with great enjoyment. A steep but juggy face, finding a way out of the Sentry Box, traversing the slab of the Whale's Back, confidently rocking over the top of the first crux, and much more hesitantly thrutching my way through the second, with barely a loose hold - a cold but wonderful afternoon on the side of a mountain. We reached the top of the climb and basked in the long-awaited sunshine before meandering over to the summit and then enjoying the well-maintained trail down. Good thing I hadn't sworn off climbing for the rest of my life.
Our bikes waited patiently where we'd laid them down by the side of the approach (i.e. where it got too obnoxious to keep pedaling on the steep gravel road), and some hikers we passed on the way down caught up to us while we made a pit stop at the bathrooms. It was a couple from England (the part of the isle of Britain that's south of Scotland, east of Wales) who came up to the Cairngorms looking for that most exotic of wild animal - deer. Susan was confused because she'd been seeing deer all day (I hadn't seen quite as many, of course). OK, maybe they shouldn't talk down about their mountains so much, but folks in the UK are right when they say there’s not much left in the way of wilderness.
We rolled back into town as dusk fell, happy to be going mostly downhill even though it made for some chilly fingers, and promptly smashed a couple frozen pizzas. Stress and difficulty aside, it was pretty satisfying to have landed in Scotland, assembled our bikes, and only five days later biked 60+ miles and climbed a mountain. Of course that wasn't quite enough for us, and the following day we were going to set out on another big adventure.
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