UKC

As one of the two mega's for winter climbing in the UK, the demise of Cairngorm mountain and its impact on Aviemore as a centre of services continues to be a concern. Interesting thought piece here

http://parkswatchscotland.co.uk/2020/01/02/corporate-gaslighting-why-we-did...

The loss of the chair to climbers; and an attitude of indifference to them, always seemed a silly loss of potential revenue to me. Not least as many climbers skied and vice versa.

Interesting article. It's always easy to promote the conspiracy theory and it's not until you reach the replies by Gordon Ritchie and Richard Webster that some balance begins to creep in. I'm more inclined to believe that the demise of skiing at Cairngorm is simply a consequence of the great British culture of managerial incompetence and nothing more. 

Yeah, I think it's important to bear in mind Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence".

I found the history quite interesting - particularly that development of Coire an t'Sneachda and Lurcher's Gully had been planned in the 80s. Imagine the impact that would have had.

Unfortunately the incompetence within HIE dates back >20 years. I remember meetings with Keith Bryers back in the 1990s & am amazed he still has any responsibility for Cairngorm. But his bosses don't seem much better.

Disclosure: I don't ski.

It seemed to me that what did for the ski lift was cheap travel to destinations with better snow/weather and infrastructure for skiers, combined with less predictable snow/weather in the Cairngorms and limited interest from non-skier tourists.

As for the funicular, there just doesn't seem to have been enough people interested in using it multiple times. What was probably once a novel concept up to the 70s (Go up a mountain! On a train! Eat food in a cafe! There might be a view!) seems a bit meh now in the era of instagram-driven tourism.

So I don't believe the conspiracy theories presented in the article. I get that a relatively small subset of skiers liked the place, and it provided valuable local employment, but these things don't have a right to exist forever. I think its time to accept that things change, its a national park now, and leaving a load of defunct infrastructure in-place is inappropriate. Remove it and let the mountain revert to a wilder state. Create businesses and employment that work in sympathy with that.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Good point. There's a romance associated with skiing in Scotland thanks to the adversity of the  weather and the crap tourist infrastructure (which is no crappier than the rest of Britain) so people who did brave the place tend to go a bit misty-eyed about it. However air travel has become cheaper and cheaper and poxy British resorts have had their day so in this respect Aviemore is no different to Blackpool or any other decaying former holiday town. On top of that we British have a ridiculous nostalgia for anything that's old; I reckon that most rural dwellers are living in very poor conditions - just drive around a county like Shropshire and see the numbers of run down red brick Victorian farmhouses where people are struggling in cold, damp, ill-designed accommodation, which ought to be knocked down and replaced with an efficient modern building.  

Any conspiracy theory that requires Margaret Thatcher to be some sort of super-radical conservationist is always going to struggle to be accepted

With the often poor weather & snow cover, Scottish skiing never made much sense for anyone living more than a few hours drive away but for those living in Scotland, especially places like Aberdeen, Perth  & Inverness it made a lot of sense. But Aviemore tried to target a wider market & has suffered - I saw some figures in the late 90s which showed that Aviemore had the lowest percentage of return visitors with many visiting once & never again. Its always seemed a scandal that the other Scottish ski areas seem to succeed but Cairngorm, with much more state aid, keeps failing

I think the weather is what really killed it.

We visited a lot in the early 90s. Staying in Aviemore we'd joke that if the tops of the trees were moving in town the mountain would be stormbound and closed.

In 1997 we went on our first foreign ski holiday and only skied in Scotland once more after then and only because we were in the area for other reasons.

One positive thing to take from it is that if you can ski in Scotland you can probably ski anywhere.