New skiing & snowboarding guide captures ‘the magic of the ’Gorms’

In this year’s edition of The Scotsman’s annual snowsports supplement, Scottish Ski & Board, we carried a feature by backcountry ski guide Blair Aitken in which he introduced the new guidebook he’d been working on with a group of like-minded friends. Along with fellow enthusiasts Katie Henderson, Scott Muir and Jamie Johnston, he set out to offer a comprehensive picture of all the worthwhile snow-sliding to be had in the Cairngorms National Park – all 4,520 square kilometres of it.

The result, unassumingly titled Skiing & Snowboarding in the Cairngorms National Park, has now been released, and with almost 350 routes described and illustrated in just under 450 pages, it’s a monumental achievement. Think that sounds like an exaggeration? Then consider some of the very snow-specific challenges the authors had to overcome.

In order to grasp the full magnitude of the task they set themselves, it’s helpful to compare their book to a traditional hiking guide. In certain, superficial ways, writing a guide to ski and snowboard routes is similar to writing a guide to hiking routes: “Here’s a map, start at point A, follow the squiggly line, arrive at point B, then return to point A again.” However, when you add snow-sliding to the mix, you also add several additional layers of complexity.

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher Aitken and his team had to contend with is the way in which the snowline can move up and down by hundreds of metres during the ski season – or indeed, in Scotland, in the space of 48 hours. This makes things particularly difficult when describing long-distance ski tours. Low-lying approach routes could be under three feet of snow in February, making for rapid skinning on skis, but by April they could be energy sapping bogs or tricky boulder-fields, requiring skis to be carried on backpacks and significantly increasing travel times.

Kevin McHugh skiing Central Buttress Gully on Braeriach | Blair Aitken

Secondly, and much more seriously from a safety point of view, there’s the inconvenient truth that snow quality can have a huge impact on the difficulty of a descent. A 40-degree line in soft, forgiving spring snow can feel wonderful; the same slope with bulletproof névé under your skis or snowboard? Not so much.

Thirdly, when it comes to certain descents, particularly gullies, the actual physical shape of the slope can change depending on the conditions in which the snow has fallen and/or been subsequently blown around. For example, following a period of strong winds from one direction, there may be significant amounts of snow banked up on one side of a gully; if the wind has been blowing hard from another direction, a cornice may have built up at the entry point. And then, of course, there’s the small matter of avalanches to consider – which slopes are likely to slide and under which conditions?

Long story short: hiking guides describe a landscape that is mostly static, the odd rockfall or washed-out bridge notwithstanding; a guide to ski routes, by contrast, must somehow attempt to do all the things hiking guides do while also describing a snowscape that is in a state of constant flux. It sounds like an impossible task, but in spite of the space constraints they’re up against, Aitken and Co somehow manage to pull it off.

Take, for example, their guide to skiing Coire Raibert off the back of Cairn Gorm. Not only do they give instructions on how to locate it, along with a clearly annotated map and photograph, they also offer guidance on some of the snow-related variations to look out for: “Snow often banks up steeply above the burn on [the coire’s] west side,” they write, “and the upper section could be [steeper] depending on how it has been built by the wind.”

This kind of triple-layered thinking underpins everything: “Here’s where we are on the map; here’s a photo of what it looked like on a certain day, in certain conditions; and here are some of the key ways in which the snow you’ll encounter here might vary.”

If this book had only succeeded as a functional guide that would have been impressive enough, but it goes further. Right at the back, there’s a Lord of the Rings-style map of the area with a little Gandalf-like ski tourer in one corner, puffing away at a large pipe. Inside the clouds of smoke surrounding him are the words “Enjoy the magic of the ’Gorms”; and, for all that this book is primarily intended to convey practical information, there’s also a nicely judged thread of that magic running through it, from the brief history of skiing in the area in the introduction, with a nod to some of Scotland’s early steep skiing pioneers, to the section on Midsummer skiing traditions at the end, via countless brief, italicised asides which offer insights into the human history of these hills: the remains of the ill-fated Mar Lodge Ski Centre on Creag Bhalg; the story of how the steep ‘Profanisorus’ gully line on Sgoran Dubh Mor got its name. As Maya Angelou said, you can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, and this book is helpful in both respects.

Skiing & Snowboarding in the Cairngorms National Park is published by British Backcountry, price £25, see www.british-backcountry.co.uk/guide-book/cairngorms