UKH

A channel I follow on YouTube has just done a video on the incident on the Cairngorm plateau in the 1970s which led to a number of children’s deaths.

No doubt most have some knowledge of it but I thought it might be interesting to some.

youtube.com/watch?v=05T03vfK0-8&

It’s a tragic story and we’ll documented however watching this I got as far as ‘Cairngorm was the highest peak in the national park’ and left it at that before any more examples of poor research arrived.

I got as far as 'we'll documented' in your post and gave up before any other examples of poor spelling or grammar arrived.

It is the highest plateau, which is possibly what they meant.

I blame the phone, I'm back on my laptop.

I watch their channel too, tell myself I shouldn't but my curiosity gets the better of me. 

The amount of absolute tosh on display just in the first two minutes made me push the off button (eg a red deer stag posing as a reindeer).

I remember that tragedy happening.

I hadn't realised that two shelters/bothies involved were subsequently demolished on the basis that if a shelter is known to be on a mountain for use in an emergency it tempts people to press on in conditions where they really should turn back. If it's not there, then a party will turn back rather than try and probably fail to find it in a white out. 

It's an interesting hypothesis, but is it right? I wonder if emergency shelters save more lives than those which are lost through people failing to find them?

There is also the problem that if people know of the existence of an emergency shelter and it gets removed, not everyone will know that, and it's likely that those who haven't heard of it's removal will be at potential risk.

Remember the big controversy when Jean's Hut was demolished? There were still people I met decades afterwards who were unaware that it had gone. 

Really? Cairn Gorm is just one summit in the Cairngorms, and it's not a plateau, more of a rounded top. It's the lowest of the 4,000 footers. If you wanted an actual plateau you'd be talking about Ben Macdui or Beinn a' Bhuird.

Cairngorm itself is not really that much of a plateau. I got pretty lost on the top of Ben Mac in winter white-out.

I remember it well.

Message and tell them they're wrong.

https://cairngorms.co.uk/discover-explore/facts-figures/

Read more carefully, they are talking about the Cairngorm plateau (presumably meaning all the highest parts within the national park) not about the summit of Cairn Gorm which IMO is a bit too pointy to be called a plateau 😁

Actually, reading your 1st post, you might already be aware of this; have you got a spoon out?

It's not my style to stir on here.  I just had in mind the journalist reading what you describe, and the burb from their website too and mistakenly typing peak in the article.

I was being charitable about their mistake.

Yes I realised that might have been what you were doing from your first post.

I can easily see a journalist feeling that explaining about a plateau would need dumbing down to a concept anyone could understand, i.e. a particular mountain, but then failing to realise that certain adjectives were no longer applicable. 

I'm less charitable than you, that's just shoddy journalism.

There's a detailed article in Games Climbers Play about the Cairngorm tragedy, originally from Mountain 20.

Given that a similar incident hasn't happened since, the answer to your question is possibly yes. 

Education and rules also come into the equation. 

And loch is NOT pronounced "lock". Tweet this fact!