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Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked.

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Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the

Scotland Outdoors podcast. I'm Mark Stephen. He's you and McElroy. Thank you very much for downloading

us. It didn't hurt us in the slightest. A big news in Scotland this week was the changing fortunes

of the Kerrngorn Mountain Ski Company. We'll lead you through this. It's a fascinating history and things are getting quite exciting here.

If you're living in other parts of the world, skiing was really built on Karengorms

in the kind of 60s, 70s, 80s, it's in a bit of a crisis at the moment and more. We'll take you through that.

Well, let's just begin, to be honest.

In October this year, the Kearn Gorm Finicular Railway closed due to problems with the structures that support the tracks.

Now, as we're speaking, an engineering assessment is being carried out with a report due mid-late December.

It's no secret that the Mountain Railway has been plagued with problems since its inception in 2001. And with the latest closure happening in the run-up to the skiing season, I went up to the Avimord area last week to find out what was happening. My first stop was to meet up with Jamie Williamson at Alvia State. Just to set the scene, I asked him

if you would give me a potted history of the early days of skiing back in the 50s. Oh, I was 7 to 10.

We used to drive up to Glenmore Lodge, get out the car, clamber over a deer fence, and then

we'd walk up and the skis would get heavier and heavier and there's a big stone

halfway up and that's when I started greeting and I had to give my dad the skis and we'd walk all the way up

to Jeans Hut. We'd then get rested, have our jammie piece and then we'd walk up Corrie Kast and ski

down. There was quite a lot of people going there

then and it was sort of after the war. My father was dead keen because he'd gone out to the States

and was skiing out there. And then a whole lot people got together and it was in 1957. They formed

...