Leisure
A skiing and winter sports industry is concentrated in the Cairngoms, with three of Scotland's five resorts situated here. They are the Cairn Gorm Ski Centre, Glenshee Ski Centre and The Lecht Ski Centre.
A funicular railway opened here in late 2001, running from a base station at 637 metres up to the Ptarmigan Centre, situated at 1097 metres, 150 metres from the summit of Cairn Gorm. It was built amidst some controversy, with supporters of the scheme claiming that it would bring valuable tourist income into the area, whilst opponents argued that such a development was unsuitable for a supposedly protected area.
The mountains are also very popular for hill-walking, winter sports, birdwatching, climbing, deer stalking, gliding and fly fishing. However, the area can be very hazardous at times, with dangerous and unpredictable weather conditions. Because of this, all safety precautions must be taken whilst out in the mountains.
The area has long attracted ice climbers, especially to the northern corries. It boasts what was reputedly the world's hardest ice climb "The Hurting" grade XI.
In 1964, physicist Peter Higgs of Edinburgh was walking in the Cairngorms when he had his famous idea about symmetry-breaking in the electroweak theory, now a key element of the standard model of particle physics. The eponymous Higgs boson was eventually detected by experiment in 2012.
Read more about this topic: Cairngorms
Famous quotes containing the word leisure:
“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)