gaffr wrote:Hello...Image I would have thought relevant to the question posed by the person asking....image taken looking back to the descent from SDM from the gap between it and Sgurr Dubh na Da Bheinn.
Ta. Steeper than I remember it!
I don't really much care if folks want to spent their earnings on hiring a guide....it is their cash to spend as they wish.
Me neither, overall - folk will do what they do - and good luck to the guides (of whom there are now quite a lot) for making a steady living from a niche market. My slight disheartenedness comes from a combination of seeing people very often rush Skye, and also - perhaps more to the point - hiring help for even the easier Munros there when they almost certainly wouldn't do so in say Glen Coe or Torridon, and thus arguably losing some of the sense of adventure. I don't say that as any kind of expert or as anyone with any great competence - I've never been a climber and I'm not a very good or competent scrambler. But over the course of almost 20 years, and plenty of visits, I got round the Skye Munros and did so only having a rope on twice - for the In Pinn unsurprisingly and also for Sgurr Mhic Choinnich in the rain. I was lucky in various respects - eg getting up Am Basteir in 1986 before various bits started falling off the Bad Step and making it harder - but in retrospect I'm quite pleased to have done it in what might be termed the old-fashioned way, waiting for the right conditions, the right mood in terms of confidence, and the right companions for various of the harder things. For the two days that involved a rope I did something that sounds similar to your own approach: went with a friend who was better than me, which was much more the method employed by timid would-be Munroists in the days before the increased number of guides. A lot of people in clubs still adopt this approach, but generally it seems less common than before.
Incidentally, as some people on here will know, I've done a lot of research into where people complete rounds of Munros, and over the past 15-20 years the number of people finishing on the In Pinn has declined markedly - it used to be jostling for third/fourth place along with Beinn na Lap (behind Ben More on Mull and Ben Lomond), but it's now in fifth and (in terms of what's known) appears about to slip behind Ben Hope into sixth. I'm pretty sure this is at least in part because of the partial commercialisation of the Cuillin, with a lot of folk now "clearing out" Skye mid-round - whereas in earlier days far more people left the awkward ones until last and then either finished on the In Pinn with the help of a climbing friend, or simply left it undone and retired on M-1.
