Your Memories of Auld Aviemore

It is a pity that your site only starts in the 60s. For many years
before that Glenmore Lodge on Loch Morlich was the centre for
the winter sports activities in the area. I learned, and later
taught, skiing and winter climbing there, in the late 40s and early 50s.

That was before the days of ski-lifts, walkways etc. We travelled
by train to Aviemore then walked with our rucksacks out to the Lodge,
where accommodation was like that in the old mountain youth hostels.
All the skiers were real mountaineers - they had to be as they had to
get uphill as well as down (on old Kandahar bindings!) without any
assistance. Our ski boots were army boots or work boots with
"Commando" soles, stiffened with a metal plate screwed on from the
heel forward and a groove burned in the back of the heel with a poker
to take the binding; no fancy Lycra clothing but ex-army anoraks (or
as a treat we would get a real tough anorak from Blacks of Greenock
-- I still have mine, here in Darwin, Australia!) and trousers soaked in
waterproofing liquid.

I heard and saw Ferla Mor, the "Grey Man of Ben MacDui", while
climbing by map, compass and altimeter on Cairngorm during a
total white-out; heard laughing voices at midnight during a dreadful
blizzard while 3 of us were bivouacked behind a snow wall under the
Shelter Stone, and on returning to the Lodge the following night
met a group who had been bivouacking on Braeriach and had heard
the same thing at the same time. An old man whom we met while
walking back to Aviemore at the end of our stay looked very worried
and told us that "The Voices" were only ever heard when there was
an impending disaster; we politely heard him out and went on for
our respective trains home -- and a week later the national press
headlines were about the old Aviemore hotel being burned down
(c. 1552) with the loss of several lives. We were sometimes called
out on mountain rescue tasks (usually in the middle of the night!)
to search for non-mountaineering people from Aviemore who had
wandered too far and with too much self-confidence in dangerous conditions.

Sometimes we would leave for home via a long walk through the
Lairig Ghru to Braemar, which involved crossing a slack 2-wire "bridge"
over the burn near a deserted shepherd's bothy; the crossing was
easy enough when unladen, but with a full heavy rucksack, one's feet
were liable to shoot forward, the rest back, and it made for a tiring
and difficult crossing to arrive without getting soaked in icy water.

While the social life at the Lodge was nowhere near as sophisticated
as it was to become in Aviemore in the ensuing years, it was great
fun, with exhausted climbers and skiers relaxing and sharing experiences
(and they were mostly very experienced mountain men) after a long
hard day before retiring quite early ready to get up and out before
daylight the following day.

I emigrated to Papua New Guinea in 1964 and have not lived near snow
ever since, though my mountaineering days stood me in good stead in
1965 when with two Papuan men, and without guides and carriers, we
broke John Landy's record for crossing the Kokoda Trail over the
Owen Stanley mountains in 3 and 1/4 days, which stood as the new
record until only a year or two ago.

Now in my 70s I no longer climb, but keep fit, with my wife, teaching
and participating in Scottish Country Dancing. This allows us to get
back to Scotland every 2 years for the big RSCDS School in St Andrews,
and to New Zealand every year for their national Summer School.