Go Mountain Goats

There were two factors that both worried and excited me in equal measure as I set out to attempt the Cairngorm 4000ers record. The first was the weather: it was fairly blustery and a familiar wall of cloud hugged the plateau around Braeriach, as it often does. Cairngorm itself was clear and despite a few very light showers I hoped the cloud would blow off before I got across the Lairig Ghru. The other factor was that I didn’t know exactly what Ally Beaven’s 2017 record was, having been unorganised and then suffered in the morning from the frustrating technological calamity known as “the internet is broken”. So I set off with Paul Raistrick’s split times and the knowledge that Ally had broken this 2007 record by several minutes, exact quantity unknown! I last ran the route in April 2017 when there was a fair bit of spring snow still around. This made several parts slow going, and some sections of whiteout navigation from Cairn Toul onwards had augmented this. Still, I felt pretty p