Walkhighlands

my club the lomond mountaineering club was having a meet in the kintail outdoor centre this weekend , so i decided to get up to kintail on the thursday evening with the plan on doing some munros. the forcast was poor with strong winds and rain snow showers, i set off from the outdoor centre at 9am and cycled up to glenlicht house, as i arrived at 9 30 the first of the showers blew in, i took refuge in the shelter at the side of the hut, the snow was blowing horizontal and i contemplated doing the walk at all. 5 minute later the weather lifted and i set off for saileag.
it was a steep pull up the west slopes of meall a charra and the wind was bearable as i finally got to the summit of saileag.the views were mixed with the south shiel ridge looking splendent yet anything north enclosed in mist. i didnt wait about and continued along the ridge towards sgurr a bhealaich dhearg, the snow showers were coming and going but they were not thick enough to hamper my visability too much, i cut of from the main ridge to access the summit of sgurr a bhealaich dheig, quite tricky on the fresh snow and quickly back to gain the ridge while the visability allowed.

i stopped at the next bhealach to get some soup and a sandwich before assending the third munro aonach meadhoin, my legs were getting tired as the fresh snow was really hard to walk on, ankle and knee deep it ferr takes it out of you. once at the top of aonach meadhoin i got a good view of the final munro ciste dhubh, it look ages away and really steep, the legs were really tired now and i contemplated heading down to the clunie inn from sgurr an fhuarail but hat would have meant having to go back up to glenlicht house to get the bike. so i set up the south ridge of ciste dhubh i was really feeling it on the soft snow and i was chasing a little weather window as i got to the top, quick picture, then found the path that takes you down the north west ridge to the allt cam ban.
i got to the river at 4 30 and had a drink and something to eat, thinking i only had an hour or so walk back to glenlicht house ! argh this walk was horrendous soft snow, inclines it just took forever, got back to the bike at 6 20 and was taking cramp on the ride back down to the outdoor centre. the centre is first class and i had a good long shower before settling down to dinner and fell asleep at the fire. one of the hardest rounds ive done, the soft snow high winds and rain, snow, mist took it toll but it was worth it for the views when weather allowed.

Did this in reverse last month, started with a Corbett then onto Ciste Dubh. Our logic was that the hard work was out of the way 1st.

Good effort in the deep snow - a long day out there.

there must be a quicker way, but added some pictures of the route

We started at Cluanie Inn taking in Am Bathach first. We had cars at the finish, this made it shorter.

I have a tr on here with the route.

Some good pics mgmt!... if they took ages to upload, it would be loads quicker for you if you could resize them to 640 pixels across before uploading, that way you won't have to wait to upload huge files. Something like Picasa can resize a whole folder of photos to the appropriate size in one go.

Good to see some more of Kintail, having been there last month.

Like I replied to dooterbang, that's quite a round you did, especially in those conditions, great job and super photos! Like your Beinn Fhada weather conditions too.

A simple way I've found for the resizing for uploading if you don't want to use another program, is to download from Microsoft (if you use Windows) and install the Image Resize powertoy. This is a tiny file. With this installed you then just right click on the original photo in your folder (or right click when you're viewing it in Windows Picture Viewer), choose Resize Picture and click on Large. This creates a separate photo. It is still a bit larger than the file that WH ends up showing but the file size is only around 100-200 kb so the upload is fast.

thanks for the advice yokehead will take on board, the way i do it is simple enough its just i seem to only be able to upload about 4 photos then need to submit them or my time seems to run out, thats maybe because im editing them, anyway i dont tend to take to many photos or post much it was the fact i was home early sunday ( foul weather ) and not many people made it out over the weekend.

Nice report mgmt,
Thats looks like a big walk in the conditions. Great pictures of the ridges. Looks a bit overcast all the way though.

cheers monty, got a bit of everything that day including some sunshine, main thing was no heavy clag or whiteout, that would have hampered navigating, not like beinn fhada the next day !

Long day out this, but looks good
Might try and give some of these hills another whirl before the snow goes, as they are quite close by for me.

Your Beinn Fhada report showed some rather familiar conditions...like we had on Cairngorm on Saturday