The Ptarmigan Blockfield

The approach

The Ptarmigan path leaves the Cairn Gorm car park and climbs north-east onto the ridge, gaining about 350 metres over two kilometres. Most of the climb is on a made path with steps, which is why the terrain rating is not higher; what raises it is everything above the path.

Above 1,000 metres you leave the path and enter the blockfield: a granite plateau scattered with boulders of every size, sitting on a bed of finer shattered rock. There is no trail here beyond the faintest desire line, and in cloud the blockfield looks identical in every direction within about thirty metres. That is worth knowing before you leave the path.

Why the ground is like this

The Cairngorms were not scoured by ice in the way most British mountains were. The ice sheet that covered Scotland sat on top of this plateau without moving fast enough to strip it, so the pre-glacial weathering surface survived. That is why the ground here is rotten: the granite was broken up by repeated freeze-thaw over hundreds of thousands of years, and the products of that breakdown are still lying where they fell.

The white quartz veins cutting through the granite are a later intrusion, and they weather differently from the surrounding rock — harder, so they often stand slightly proud of the surface. That is the feature the hint uses.

The find itself

The final is a small box wrapped in grey tape, sitting in the void beneath the lee side of the largest boulder in the immediate area. From the white quartz vein you cross, walk one pace downslope, and you are at the boulder.

The container is not buried. Nothing on this plateau should be buried: the ground is a scheduled feature of the site and digging disturbs vegetation that takes decades to recover. Lift the loose granite flakes at the base of the boulder and put them back exactly as they were.

Weather and judgement

This is the part of the page that matters most.

• The summit weather station records gale-force gusts on more than a hundred days a year. Wind is the hazard here, not cold alone.
• Cloud can arrive from a clear sky in under twenty minutes on an easterly. If you cannot see the car park, you cannot navigate the blockfield by sight.
• Snow patches persist in the Northern Corries into July, and the blockfield holds snow in shaded voids much later than the surrounding ground. A foot placed on a snow-covered void will go through it.
• Navigation aids: a compass and a paper map, not a phone. There is patchy signal at best and none at all in the corries.

If the forecast is for gusts above 40 mph, do not go up. The cache will still be there.

Terrain and footing

After the find

The Northern Corries viewpoint on the way back gives you the best short walk in the range if the cloud lifts: a twenty-minute detour to a lip above two glacial cirques, with the blockfield you have just crossed laid out below.