Season Diary - Day 7

Friday 9th January 2026 - Cairngorm Mountain, Scotland

Will the goal of one day skiing in Scotland finally be fulfilled ... ?

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The sun was barely up as I stepped off the train onto the blisteringly cold platform at Aviemore station.

Aviemore is one of my favourite places in the whole of the UK. Admittedly not much of a looker of a place, it is however the capital of this corner of the highlands. I’ve been here several times before, almost always in the summer, and it was in fact the site of one of first forays into the highlands when, up in Glasgow as a film extra, I used spare days in my schedule to come and have a wonder round the hills and lochs of the Cairngorms.

This was my first time here in winter, however, and I was here for a very good reason; to ski.

I had heard tales of skiing in Scotland from the internet and people I know through work with the Ski Club of Great Britain. Plenty of them talk about skiing on ice. A few of them mention dreamy, seemingly bottomless powder. All of them mention an old adage of skiing in Scotland:

“If you can ski Scotland, you can ski anywhere”

For a very long time I hoped and dreamed that this meant the powder in the Back Corries at Nevis Range offered, on their day, some of the world’s best skiing. That Cairngorm Mountain and Glenshee offered endless opportunities for ski touring on the high alpine Cairngorm Plateau beyond. That The Lecht was the perfect learning environment for the entirety of northwest Scotland, and that Fly Paper, the longest run at Glencoe, was a serious and steep and thigh-burney as I had been told.

But deep down I knew that was not the case. The last good ski day in Scotland is probably rapidly receding from people’s memories, the climate changing here seemingly faster than elsewhere in the UK or Europe. As late as 2010 the ski season could, on occasion, run well into May, and, at the very least, snow cover was consistent enough that it was only the cloud (which there is a lot of in this part of the world) and wind (which there is even more of) that would stop people skiing.

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Scotland’s last good winter was 2020/21, when no-one could ski because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Well they could, they just couldn’t leave their council area and the lifts weren’t turning, so if you lived in the Highland council area and had your own touring set up you had many thousands of square miles to choose from! But for the rest of us mere mortals we were stuck clapping outside our front doors on a Thursday night dreaming of what could have been.

This year, that changed. Consistently cold weather and plenty of snow meant that, for a glorious week in November, Scotland returned to its skiing glory days of the past. And again in December. And again in January.

Looking at my calendar, I saw I had a free weekend immediately following SLIDE in Liverpool – already being halfway up to Scotland, and with the forecast looking more and more favourably with each passing day, I changed my train tickets, grabbed my skis, and set off.

Despite it’s distance and isolation in the heart of the Cairngorms, Aviemore is imminently accessible. I set off by train from Glasgow at 7am and was off the train by 9:45am. Twenty minutes later, the No.30 arrived and was dutifully filled with skiers – normal and cross-country – dog walkers, hikers, and sightseers, all wrapped up against the biting cold, and set off for Cairngorm Mountain Resort.

What awaited was a wintry wonderland, a scene and a pair of days that one more put Scottish skiing on the map …