Five survive night in storm-hit Cairngorms

The experienced climbers, who had been reported missing after they failed to make contact on Thursday night, were found safe and well by mountain rescue teams after camping for the night in the shelter of the tree line as winds of up to 165mph swept across the mountain range.

The group, who insisted they had never been in any danger, were airlifted to safety by a Royal Navy search and rescue helicopter from Prestwick.

The five – Thomas Ardern, 29, Joe Turner, 31, Chris Anderson, 29, Rob Courage, 40, all from Aberdeen, and Tim Bridger, 30, from Bristol – had set out on Wednesday from Glen Muick on Royal Deeside and walked into Glen Doll but got caught out in the atrocious conditions as they tried to head for the safety of the mountain bothy at Glas-alt-Shiel.

Mr Ardern said high winds had blown the group off course as they battled against the “horrendous” conditions. But he insisted: “There was no problem.

“The wind kind of blew us back quite a bit, so our walking pace was quite slow. We ended up not getting over the top of the hill to the Glen Muick bothy we were intending to. If we’d tried to go over the top, I think we’d have been blown back down again.

“We got to the nearest patch of trees and just set up camp and shelter. It was pretty windy. The tent was going crazy and there was a lot of snow as well.”

Mr Ardern, whose girlfriend raised the alarm, said the group had been having a cup of tea yesterday morning when they spotted a rescue helicopter flying overhead. He said: “When the helicopter went over, we thought it was just doing a general pass of the glens. I was stood there drinking a cup of tea and waving at them. We had a wee giggle to ourselves thinking ‘Is that for us? No it can’t be for us’. But it was. Then we went walking up and met five mountain rescue guys from Tayside.”

He said he would “learn quite a lot of lessons” from the group’s ordeal, particularly paying attention to weather forecasts before heading out to the hills.

Inspector Andy Todd, leader of the Grampian Police mountain rescue team, praised the actions of the five climbers.

He said: “They stayed out of the bad weather and stayed low, which is what we expected them to do and where we hoped to find them. The concern had been that, if they had gone up and been high in the hills when that weather came through, they would have been really, really vulnerable and at quite a high risk.”

He said concerns had been mounting as members of the Grampian Police, Braemar and Tayside mountain rescue teams, together with search and rescue dogs, scoured the Glen Muick and Glen Doll areas for the missing climbers.

He said: “The difficulty was that we were searching the low areas and not finding them and getting more and more concerned as we cleared the areas. But they were effectively found in the last place we looked.”