Mount Keen, Cock Cairn

This (Cock Cairn) is an obscure little hill in the middle of nowhere to the East of Mount Keen, on these maps: small scale map, intermediate scale map, and large scale map. How we arrived in such a god-awful little hole of a hill is a simple tale: Dave wanted to learn to navigate. Learning to navigate requires learning from one’s mistakes. Learning from mistakes requires being allowed to walk full-face into a mistake. So we let him. Net result:
3 sunburned scalps, 4 burned arms, one educated navigator.

Lesson: you can get just as lost in a wood, full of landrover tracks and tea-supping pensioners, as you can in a white-out. But you do have a better chance of surviving.

More and more pointlessness.

A few months later we were back for another try (after doing various other things). This time, Davie did pay attention to the map and compass and got as far as sunny Mount Keen. We added Kenny to the party. Just as well - he'd got a torch.

Needless to say, the lads did try to throw themselves into the river. While this is not compulsory, it is a popular sub-sport of the genre, if you can find someone foolish enough to fall for your blandishments.
Them rocks is slippy!

But after this little amusement, I decided to go off and do something a little different.

The Degree Confluence Project

A year or two ago, when I first got a GPS, I heard of this piece of sublime idiocy out on the Internet. See http://www.confluence.org . To give you the short version of the story ... technogeeks around the world are trying to visit every point on dry ground where the latitude and longitude are whole numbers of degrees. Now, to my mind this is even more pointless than trying to walk up all the mountains in a country which are taller than 3000ft. That's the Munros to those of you with some familiarity with Scottish hillwalking. Stupid, fundamentally stupid. Doubly stupid when we've got boggle-minding mountains like Suilvan & Canisp to play on which don't make the Munro contour. Or the Donald, Graham or Corbett contours. Awa bile yer heid!, as they say in Dundee.

So, what is the nearest Munro to sub-tropical Aberdeen? Why, it's our wonderful Mt Keen, of course. Now Mt Keen is actually quite a good looking hill from the direction we were doing it. But it's a Munro. And a couple of km to the NW, there's this tempting little blue cross on the map. Oh, go on, it's too tempting. Since there is a program on the radio while I am writing this which celebrates the infamous Belgian "entarteur" Noël Godin (spelling?), you can probably guess the mind-set that I sometimes enjoy getting into.

OK - cut to the chase.

Mountain. It's a lump of rock surrounded by air and damp peat. Go figure why we like walking up the damned things. Probably it's because it feels so good to stop. Sayings of the day were "Remind me why we do this" and "Are we there yet.". You should be able to make out the tracks of the donkey-like hoardes who amble up this hill with regularity.	In the foreground is the GPS sitting (to an accuracy of ±5m) at 3°W 57°N. Below is a picture of Lochnagar to the west of this site. See above for the local maps. If you want to find the place yourself, I'm afraid it's time for fine navigation for you too. There's a peat hag about 20m to the east, and a repulsive slimy green pool about 30m to the NW. These are not exactly uncommon in the area though. The green pool scores quite well on the sliminess and green scales, and I could well envisage alien tentacles coming through it from a dark and nether haunt of the Elder Gods. But that's hardly unique out there too.
And here's a picture of the dreaded device proving that I was there. Well, I'd think the sheer stupidity of the project is a better guarantee that I went there. But the DCP people want this sort of proof, so here you go.
	Here is the tracklog for your downloading pleasure, and over there is a map of it. (Yes, I know it's a placeholder. I can't find my damned full-handshake-null-modem adaptor to read the machine's braincell. So I've got to go and buy another in order to find the old one. You do know how it goes, don't you?) Later - OK, log read. Still evaluating software for this. function. Progress is continuous. The image is a link to another page full of other bits of tracklog.
And heres a waypoint file. I wouldn't bother downloading it, because I'm still looking at software and standards for this sort of thing.	Here is the tracklog file, as plain text. For obscure reasons, the timestamp is completely wrong. It might be because I'm using an evaluation version of a program. Still 3 more programs to look at.

Oh, hillwalking. Well I went and found my silly point. The rest of the crew went up to the top of the hill. I got back after ~28km of walking; they did maybe 30km and arrived back at the car park an hour and a half after it was dark enough to need a torch. Of course, they'd only got a tiny torch and got lost in the woods again. Can't really blame them for that - it was quite dark that night, no moon visible through the clouds. Should have had more torches and better ones in the party. Lesson learned.

And, Yes, you did hear an implicit "single person hill walking" in there. If it makes you feel any better, I was wearing nothing sturdier than a pair of canvas plimsole shoes, and I was mostly flogging through peat bogs. No, I  didn't have a paper map or magnetic compass. I think that that's all the major rules of hill-walking that I broke. My only defence is that I've been walking these hills for 20 years and I do know where my limits are and I ain't dead yet. I might be as mad as a hatter, but I don't intend to let a few lumps of rock and some soggy peat bogs kill me just yet.

Oh dear, it seems that this spot has been "done" already. Oh well.

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