Estimated net time	3½-4 hours
Difficulty	No difficulties, but the final slope is fairly steep and if there's still snow one might consider bringing an ice axe.
Drinking water	Several sources of running water, but the quality is unknown.
GSM coverage	Coverage throughout the route, but very patch most places (April 2012).
Parking	Room for many cars along the road around trail head.
Start height	100 metres
Vertical metres	885 metres for the roundtrip.
Trip distance	9.8 km
GPS-file	X
Map		Google Interactive Map
Route photo	Start of route to Ben Vorlich from Ardvorlich.

From Crieff drive west on road A85, approximately 18.5 km to St. Fillans. Turn left as you enter the village, where signed for south side of the loch, and drive 7.3 km to Ardvorlich. Find parking along the road, on the left hand side. Note that there is likely to be many cars here during summer week-ends.

Start your hike by heading up towards Ardvorlich House, and follow signs saying "Hill walkers". Follow the wide path on the right (west) side of the stream, and at approximately 600 metres make sure you fork left in order to gain the north slopes of Ben Vorlich. Follow this path to the summit, which is marked by a concrete cairn.

Descend by reversing your ascent route.

28. April 2012

Saturday, and as usual the day after during our annual trips to Scotland, but I still managed to convince both Halvard and Håvard to join me for a hike. We hit the road not long after breakfast, and after a longish pit stop in order to buy some sandwiches and water, we started our hike a little before noon.

When we got to the trail head we got a little concerned about the amounts of snow we could see above 700 metres, but on a nice and sunny day like this there was no way we wouldn't have a go. The fact that there were a lot of other hikers aiming for Ben Vorlich also helped convince us that the snow wasn't likely to cause any problems. The snow turned out to be rock hard, but there were very good steps which made hiking the steep section easy.

I got to the summit a little before the others, and decided to continue across the summit ridge to the point one metre lower than the summit. The obvious reason for doing this was to avoid the busy summit point, which would allow me some more freedom for taking photos. And it was well worth taking photos since the views were exceptionally nice, both in terms of what we saw and also because of the sun shining on the snow capped summits.

When descending we were a bit surprised to see how difficult some of the other hikers had in descending the steep snow; one hiker was descending by very carefully sliding down sitting down. We, however, descended in fine style and were soon down below the snow. From here it was easy walking back to the car, and then the drive back to Crieff to meet the other four in the bar at Crieff Hydro hotel.
Photos 28.04.2012