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It should have been a fun, exhilarating school trip; six young teenagers from Edinburgh spending a weekend away from their parents in the Cairngorms.
Instead, it ended in terror and death as the ambitious winter expedition – which would have tested professional climbers – tragically failed.
The children were left to freeze to death under deep snow drifts in the tragic and avoidable incident, which occurred on November 20 and 21, 1971, sometimes referred to as the Feith Buidhe Disaster after the remote mountain location where their bodies were found.
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Five of the six children and an 18-year-old trainee instructor died, freezing to death as weather conditions got gradually worse, and snow piled around and on top of them. One boy miraculously survived, but the rest of the tale is a bleak one.
It all started well enough, as six fifteen-year-old school students from Ainslie Park School in Edinburgh and their two leaders set off from the Lagganlia Outdoor Centre for a challenging and arduous two-day winter navigational exercise to cross the exposed Cairngorm Plateau from Cairn Gorm mountain to Ben Macdui.
They were supplied with specialised mountaineering equipment like Icelandic sleeping bags, ice axes, crampons and cagoules by Laggania, but they had no experience of dealing with the kind of disorientating, atrocious conditions that can come out of nowhere in the high mountains, especially in winter.
The weather forecast was questionable, but the group had an emergency plan in mind: if it deteriorated, they would head for the high-level Curran shelter, a small stone bothy high on the mountaintop.
The RAF helicopter sent to help with the search (Image: RAF Kinloss Archives)
As they climbed higher, a severe blizzard did indeed set in. The group implemented their ‘plan B’ and tried to reach the shelter, but failed to find it in the white out conditions.
Instead, their leader – 21-year-old Catherine Davidson, a final-year student at Dunfermline College of Physical Education in Fife – made the fateful decision to make a forced bivouac (a temporary camp without tents) on an exposed, high plateau just 500 yards away from the hidden shelter, where the party ended up stranded for two nights in truly incomprehensible conditions.
Unknown to Davidson, the spot she’d chosen was known for collecting huge accumulations of snow: it couldn’t have been a worse place to spend the night.
The leader of the Braemar Mountain Rescue Team, John Duff, said that this decision effectively doomed the group, saying “to attempt a winter bivouac, in a storm, on a Cairngorms plateau, is literally a life or death decision, and a last option”.
He also wrote that the major mistake was even to have considered “an appallingly over-ambitious expedition for teenage children.”
The group sheltered in sleeping bags and bivouac sacs in the lee of a snow wall they built and to begin with they kept up good spirits, with Davidson leading the children in song, but as the snow continued to accumulate they became terrified of being buried and suffocating to death.
They were trapped in the same place for the rest of the day. During the following night they saw the light of flares from a search party who had bravely set off into the dangerous blizzard to look for the missing group; they screamed but no one heard them, and their own flares had been lost in the snow.
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The search party soon passed out of sight and they were left alone again, which must have been a soul-destroying experience.
”To be honest they were virtually dead before they set off.”
Their second night in the bivouac location – Sunday – would be fatal. During this night the children started to become delirious and were dying.
Hypothermia causes drowsiness and confusion, and can sometimes lead people to believe they’re too hot, so they climb out of their sleeping bags, speeding the process of freezing to death.
Davidson managed to survive and on Monday morning she crawled away by herself to try to get rescue, although by that point several of the children were already dead.
Davidson’s legs were locked into a kneeling position, her hands were frozen solid and she was in the advanced stages of hypothermia when her distinctive orange jacket was spotted by a circling rescue helicopter sent from RAF Leuchars in Fife.
“We didn’t realise they were going so high up the mountain. We thought it was just a trip around Lagganlia and back.”
When the pilot picked her up he could make out only three words – “Feith Buidhe”, “buried” and “burn”.
The mountain rescue teams who fought their way through waist-deep snow to the area were met with a truly harrowing scene: six dead bodies partially or wholly buried in the snow.
One child was covered by a drift that was four feet deep.
However, the seventh and final body they uncovered, Raymond Leslie, 15, showed signs of life. They kept him warm as he was whisked to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness by helicopter, where he miraculously made a full recovery. Tragically, teenagers Carol Bertram, Susan Byrne, Lorraine Dick, William Kerr, and Diane Dudgeon were not so lucky. Sheelagh Sunderland, 18, a trainee instructor, also died on the mountain.
By that point it was going dark again, so the bodies of the children had to be left on the mountain until they could be brought down the next day.
”I decided to leave them in situ overnight,” explained Braemar Mountain Rescue Team leader John Duff, ”because to carry them to the nearest road end in the conditions and in darkness would have been a task well beyond our capabilities.
“We carried them a few yards to a small rise where there was less chance of them being buried deeply, covered them as best we could, marked the site with avalanche probes and made our way off the hill.”
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Remembering the incident, the father of one of the victims – Diane Dudgeon- said: “We let her go. She was 15 but she had some experience of climbing. Of course we didn’t realise they were going so high up the mountain. We thought it was just a trip around Lagganlia and back.
“We didn’t know that plan was to spend a weekend on a hilltop in the middle of winter.”
After the horrific accident, an inquiry was held in Banff. It uncovered many troubling details, including that the consent form issued to parents didn’t say that winter mountaineering was involved.
After the horrific accident, an inquiry was held in Banff. It uncovered many troubling details, including that the consent form issued to parents didn’t say that winter mountaineering was involved.
The inquiry stopped short of assigning blame for the disaster, but still, the mountain rescue teams could see that there had been serious misjudgements.
”To be honest they were virtually dead before they set off,” said Duff. ”It was simply a badly planned expedition.
“I’ve spent my life picking up bodies out the mountains, but with children it’s different. They were such needless deaths. It was such a terrible, terrible waste of young lives.”
