Cairngorm Plateau Disaster

The Cairngorm Plateau Disaster occurred in November 1971 when six fifteen-year-old Edinburgh school students and their two leaders were on a navigational expedition in a remote area of the Scottish mountains. When the weather deteriorated they adopted their emergency plan and headed for the Curran shelter but they failed to reach it and became stranded for two nights on the high plateau in a blizzard. Five children and the leader's assistant died of exposure. A sixth student and the group's leader survived the ordeal with severe hypothermia and frostbite. The tragedy, also often called the Feith Buidhe Disaster, is regarded as Britain's worst mountaineering accident.

A fatal accident inquiry led to formal requirements being placed on leaders for school expeditions. After acrimony in political, mountaineering and police circles, the Curran shelter was demolished in 1975.

The Cairngorms are a mountainous region of Scotland, named after the 1,245-metre (4,085 ft) Cairn Gorm mountain which overlooks Aviemore, the main town in the area. The central region is an area of high granite plateau at about 1,200 metres (3,900 ft), deeply dissected by long glacial valleys running roughly north–south. There are mountain peaks on the individual plateaux between the valleys but these are the eroded stumps of once much higher mountains – they are not much higher now than the plateaux themselves. Between two of these valleys, the Lairig Ghru and the Lairig an Laoigh, extends the Cairngorm Plateau of granite boulders and gravel where Cairn Gorm itself and the 1,309-metre (4,295 ft) Ben Macdui – the highest mountain in the Cairngorms and the second highest in the British Isles – are the main summits. The edges of the plateaux are in places steep cliffs of granite and they are excellent for skiing, rock climbing and ice climbing.

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