Alistair Bell’s open letter published on 2nd January (see here) was fascinating as an insider’s tale of what has happened to downhill skiing on Cairn Gorm. But I disagree with his final conclusion. Basically, he tackles the old issue “Cock-up or Conspiracy” and decides it was a conspiracy along the lines of the Gas Lighting Tale. I recall the comments of two experienced MPs on this question. “Ninety percent of the time it’s a Cock-up” said one. “Yes” said the older, “but until proven otherwise, always suspect a conspiracy!”

I have been deeply involved over years in conflicts over developments on Cairn Gorm. Hence my fascination for Alistair’s story.  I was founding chairman of the North East Mountain Trust which was a main opponent of the Lurchers Gully developments there, initiated the Cairngorms Campaign as a membership organisation and was founding chairman of Scottish Wildlife and Countryside Link (now Scottish Environment Link). This last created and published, at my instigation, the first policy framework for the development of downhill skiing in the Scottish uplands. It recognised its social and economic importance. I attended the entire six week public inquiry into the proposed developments into the Northern Corries and the so-called Lurcher’s Gully, listening to some 45 witnesses. These included six I had to brief to give evidence on the North East Mountain Trust’s behalf opposing the development

What I offer therefore, as comment on Alistair’s very well-informed letter and the entire development, is an outsider’s tale.

I can assure him it was a COCK-UP, not a Conspiracy.

There is a widely held misconception, on Speyside particularly, that the “environmental lobby”, as Alistair refers to it, opposed all ski development on Cairn Gorm. In fact I know of no objections to the developments in Coire Cas and Coire na Ciste which were hugely successful in bringing economic and recreational benefits to Speyside and more widely.

Globally, in mountain development, downhill skiing is widely acknowledged as a difficult issue. Most land-uses in mountains, such as the preservation of biodiversity, recreation on foot and water catchment are accepted as compatible with judicious management, but downhill ski development is not. It is very intensive and incompatible with most other land-uses (sometimes described as basically an extension of the suburbs into the hills) and takes place in highly sensitive environments.

What generated environmental opposition, however, was mismanagement of the site and thoroughly badly planned expansion!

 

Design and environmental impacts of the original development

Engineering experience may have helped the late Bob Clyde in handling the building of ski tows etc, although Alistair Bell’s own description does not go into how, but that did not equip him to operate in a vulnerable mountain environment. Mismanagement of the ground and subsequent soil erosion had serious environmental and other impacts. Adam Watson for example, charted the frequency of flash flooding on the Feshie, the Nethy and the Allt Mor draining Cairn Gorm between 1950 and 1980.  He showed the frequency remained constant on the Feshie and the Nethy but doubled every ten years on the Allt Mor. Twice, in 1981 and at an earlier date, these flash floods from the Allt Mor were so major they took out the road bridge. On the earlier occasion, Ian Hudson, who ran a local business Highland Guides, told me, grim faced, how he had a minibus of clients on the Cairngorms that day and decided to bale out when a downpour developed. As he drove down approaching the bridge something, he had no idea what, made him glance upstream and saw a ten foot high or higher wall of water and rocks descending onto the bridge. He just managed to swerve off the road as it took out the bridge right in front of his vehicle. In short, that flash flood came within seconds of causing multiple fatalities.

Another impact of the ski development was anticipated by nobody. Mountaineers and hillwalkers started to use the chairlift to gain rapid access to the high tops. Counts made of people on the Cairngorm-Macdui plateau over many years by, guess who, Adam Watson showed that numbers increased a hundred times (No – not 100% – 100 times!) when the chairlift opened. Soil plant systems at that altitude on infertile granitic soils just can’t withstand much foot traffic and bare ground vulnerable to erosion spread rapidly.

Basic design of roads was poor from the start. The first road line went through the “Sugar Bowl” a low lying beginners area that held snow well. For that same reason the road snow-blocked so it had to be realigned. Even the realigned route was misdesigned (see Roads in Hills and Mountains by D Stewart, outstanding Road Safety Engineer). It also had problems with snow  blockage creating dangerous situations. I well remember the deep anxiety and indeed anger of the then warden at the Glenmore Youth Hostel over a busload of school children who had come to ski and were staying at his hostel. They started out at 6.00 pm from the Coire Cas car park but did not reach his hostel until 2.00 am and then only I believe because Molly Porter and crew crawled up the road on hands and knees in places and dug the bus out.

 

Enter HIDB/HIE and the Lurcher’s Gully Inquiry

The big change, however, that changed the situation from a solvable problem to a developing irredeemable cock-up was the transfer of the ownership of the upper half of Glenmore from the Forestry Commission to the then Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) who had grandiose ill-thought-through plans for major development of the area i.e. into the Northern Corries and Lurchers Gully. This attracted opposition from both environmental and diverse outdoor recreational groups and others at a national and international level! Nine Non-Governmental Organisations and three government agencies opposed it, bringing 25 expert witnesses to give evidence which ncluded major studies of the development area by Adam Watson.

Professor Kai Curry Lindahl, Senior Ecological Adviser on Protected Areas to UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme) and probably the foremost expert in his field testified. On behalf of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) he had surveyed National Parks and Nature Reserves in North-west Europe. He was asked to assess the international standing of Britain’s National Parks and Nature Reserves and ranked the Cairngorms as Britain’s foremost conservation area. He also reported how they were being damaged and gravely threatened by unwise developments. He was quite clear this development was internationally unacceptable!

While the reporter to the public inquiry rejected the development on the grounds that the damage to a valuable area for conservation and recreation etc outweighed “the undoubted benefits”, there were no “undoubted benefits”. The whole proposal was another cock-up. “The development will double the size of the skiing area and hence half overcrowding at peak demand times” said the HIDB. What rubbish! Anyone acquainted with alpine studies on ski development or the basic predictions of queuing theory would have told them the oscillations between low and high demand simply scale up and not just arithmetically. Double the size of a ski development and demand at peak times QUADRUPLES!  [Ed. the converse of this is if you remove all the ski tows, as HIE has done, demand plummets].

Among key witnesses was Dr Fritz Schwartzenbach a director of a Swiss Alpine Research Institute. The Swiss had decided that they could not afford the medical bills arising from downhill skiing injuries and carried out intensive studies on ski development design and its relationship to injuries. Schwartzenbach emerged from these as probably the foremost expert internationally on ski development . Although in demand from the Himalayas to the Andes and commanding high consultancy fees he came for free (North East Mountain Trust paid his airfares and accommodation) as he regarded the case as being of international significance- a classical case that involved all the problems the Swiss had been dealing with for the last 20 years.

I took him up Coire Cas.

“How many ski developments have you examined Friz?”

“I think this is about the 500^th”

“What do you think of it?”

“Well you know, there are many mistakes you can make in ski development but this is the first one where they have made all of them!”

You stand there as the foremost expert in this field tells you this is probably the world’s worst designed ski development!

In his evidence he pointed out that the uplift in the current ski development was twice the piste capacity and the car park capacity was similarly excessive (in the Alps, ski developments have a legally enforced capacity and overcrowding is avoided by simply limiting the size of the car parks). There were also too many crossings between pistes and ski tows and too many bottle necks in the pistes. All these lead to increased frequency of injury of skiers through collisions etc. He also concluded that well known techniques for preventing erosion had been so inadequately used it was probably already too late to prevent irreversible denudation of the developed area of Coire Cas.

Fritz thereafter took Adam Watson and I on a two week study tour of Alpine developments (see Tourism, Land Use and Mountain Communities – The Swiss Approach and its Relevance for Scotland). I also toured ski developments in the Colorado Rockies learning from the US Forest Service how they oversaw them (Vail, Beaver Creek, Aspen and Arapaho). I realised that in the Alps or the Colorado Rockies, this development would have been closed immediately and the operators could have been on serious charges!

Regarding the proposed development, Lurcher’s Gully undoubtedly held good snow. The proponents, as the reporter pointed out, had no data to show snow-lie in the rest of the Northern Corries was adequate. The opponents produced the results of a three year full time study of factors influencing snow-lie in the Cairngorms that clearly showed the resultant poor snow lie there. There followed photographic evidence over 20 years, a survey of snow-lie vegetation that demonstrated the lack of it, detailed assessment of the scale of boulders distribution that made skiing even more difficult, and on it went. Fritz assessed the area and more or less said don’t be silly!

Regarding road access, the foundation soils under the roads had been misidentified, the proposed car park sited on a kettle hole – a peat filled hollow that would have doubled the cost of building it. The car carrying capacity of the ski road had been badly over estimated and had not allowed for the fact that its traffic would have to exit onto the Coire Cas road when that was already at capacity, and the road, cutting across the slope and the line of prevailing snow bearing winds could rapidly block. The nightmare scenario of 2000 people marooned in cars at the proposed car park at Lurchers Gully with no sheltering buildings emerged.

This was another COCKUP!

It was later tacitly admitted the Lurcher’s development could have bankrupted the company. Later too Bob Clyde informed Adam Watson he had not wanted to expand west. He wanted to expand east but was overruled by the then HIDB in the form of Admiral Dunbar-Naismith, who arrived and told him he was going west.

 

Enter the funicular

But it was the Funicular that is the final grandiose COCKUP. This, said Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), would provide a WORLD CLASS mountain experience that visitors would flock to in such numbers it would make Cairngorm a profitable enterprise! This was self-deluding HYPE!  Whatever the environmental objections, it was clear to me and others it would be economically unsustainable. A prominent local businessman in Speyside cast huge doubt on the predicted visitor numbers. Staff of the local enterprise company who raised similar strong reservations were told to be quiet.

Costs of construction soared from about £14 million to over £19 million but other costs came in. A visitor centre at the top was financed by a loan of £1 million from Highland Regional Council. To give the chairlift company some working capital, HIE purchased the Day Lodge from it for £3.6 million.

Whatever else might have been wrong with the development in Coire Cas and Coire na Ciste, it was financially viable. In 1979-80 it cost £900,000 to run but revenue was £1,100,000! Under the funicular regime, it lost £1.9 million in 2001-2002 alone! At the end of eight years under an effective manager, Bob Kinnaird, despite the rent being lowered from £500,000 to £100,000, the £3.6 million was gone.  The business owed £400.000 in rent, had drawn down £250,000 from its superior Board and was about £5 million in debt to the Bank of Scotland. Other costs emerged. HIE had spent £150,000 managing the situation including payment of £75,000 to economic consultants on what could be done to run the operation more cheaply. Not much was the conclusion. The £1 million loan to create the visitor centre had to be written off bar for about £30,000 and there was a backlog of £1.7 million repairs and maintenance to be carried out on Cairn Gorm.

Now that’s what I call a real COCK-UP!

HIE then took over the company to prevent it going bankrupt, so the taxpayer acquired its debts. Natural Retreats, which took over the operation, never got that complicated. They just went bankrupt.

Now the funicular requires major, very major, repairs.

No Alistair, your conspiracy theory attributes the plotters with skills and cunning they simply don’t have.

Where to now?

Without some form of uplift to the top, where is skiing? And are the Ptarmigan Restaurant and visitor centre at the top redundant? But it is also clear that the funicular cannot operate without continuous major public funding, hardly acceptable at a time when schools, hospitals, you name it, are desperately short of funding from, ultimately, the same taxpayer.

A revealing part of Alistair’s letter is how various parties involved in downhill skiing sat at the dinner at Clive Freshwater’s were as astonished as the objectors at the funicular proposal. The idea he describes that “the environmental lobby” as he calls it, was working to remove all downhill ski development from Cairn Gorm is a tragic misunderstanding. What it all shows is that if the diverse parties apparently opposed to one another had come together and pooled their knowledge and clout, this tragic mess could have been avoided.

If there is any hope for some sort of workable future for the sake of people on Speyside it would need these parties to come together and one clear condition – GET HIE OFF OF CAIRN GORM!  Let it happen!